All spring, summer and fall, it's been the same: Charlie's refrigerated formula does 33 seconds in the microwave for four ounces, 44 for six, and a minute for eight.
Until last week. Julie put eight ounces in the bottle, microwaved it for a minute, and brought it up to me. I gave it to Charlie, who, after a few sips, indicated, "No, thanks, that's really a bit too warm, AND I'M STILL VERY THIRSTY WHERE'S MY MILK!" (Testing with a finger proved the first half of his commentary correct; the second was of course true by definition.)
I thought it must have just been one of those mistakes you make with not-completely-chilled bottle of formula, but then the other day I nuked Charlie's milk just the same way, and darned if it wasn't too hot again.
The only thing I can think of is that with the coming of winter, the ambient air has gotten drier and stopped absorbing quite so many microwaves as it cycles through the nuke. We're talking a difference of something like 10-20 grams of water vapor per cubic meter (the oven itself it nowhere near that size, but I think the fan runs air through it), which could be just enough to tip the balance from comfortably warm to too darn hot. If so, it would be a remarkable example of physics in action.
Just to prove that water vapor and not just liquid water does absorb microwaves, I invoke my physics and public policy professor's story about the first US-designed magnetron radar tube during the early days of Word War II. The damn thing didn't work and didn't work and didn't work, but in an odd way: they could measure the power going in, and it was what they expected, and they could measure the power coming out, as expected too. But it just didn't produce any radar returns for targets more than a few hundred yards away.
The problem, he explained, was that someone (perhaps subconsciously using one of the few microwave frequency numbers they knew) had designed the tube to radiate dead in the middle of the primary absorption band for water vapor. It was a drizzly cold fall in the northeast, and QED.
No, I'm not talking about stars in the night sky and Olbers' Paradox, or even the streetlight up near the end of the driveway.
In Charlie's room, the LED of the baby monitor casts a green glow on the dresser. The one that indicates the CD-player speakers are turned on throws a circle about two feet wide on the ceiling. The space heater has an orange light that he watches when he doesn't want to sleep. And the humidifier has three LEDs, orange to say that it's on, red for when the water runs out, and cool blue for when it's reached the level of humidity set on its dial.
In our room, another couple of humidifiers and the clock, and in our bathroom the green charging light of the toothbrush (and for as long as they last the glow of the devil duck and the phosphorescent frog perched on the ilght fixtures). In the hallway and the hall bathroom, a couple of electroluminescent night lights.
And by the time you get to the den you might as well be in Vegas, what with cable box, tivo, CD player and yet another humidifier declaring themselve ready for action.
You could strike the sun, the moon and all the stars, even the background glow of the town and the occasional flash of a meteor overhead, and our house would still be almost bright enough to read in at night. I wonder if Charlie will ever find himself in a truly dark room.
Skillet weighs 22 pounds.
That's 88 sticks of butter, three-quarters of a Charlie, and about twice the mass of an ordinary cat. But he looks perfectly normal to us. It's Thermos who looks small. And our neighbor's cat Tiny, who weighs maybe 8 or 9 pounds covered in dew, looks, well, tiny.
And if our notions of proper size have been screwed up, what about Charlie? If he grows up with the idea that a pet cat should be roughly his size, things could get way too interesting.