istock Photo
One Christmas, in a moment of perfect parental insight, my mother got me a Madame Alexander doll, a copy of The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and a microscope. I know—it sounds like one of those standardized test questions: Which of these three is not the same—but there you go. It was a perfect Christmas. And while I ended up becoming both a mother and an avid reader (and writer!) I did not follow the trail of the microscope into the science field.
I blame it on the microscope itself, frankly. It was hard to use. Especially for seven year old hands. You had to get the light just right, and tilt the mirror at precisely the correct angle. Then there was the slide preparation! Holy cow! The super thin slide covers broke so easily. Okay, so part of it may have been my fault in that I’m not the most manually dexterous of people, but still…
So imagine my surprise—and delight—when passing my husband’s desk a few weeks ago and seeing a huge picture of some metal scoring on his computer screen—and it was moving! Lo and behold, he was looking at it through an instrument he held in his hand: a digital microscope. Dear Reader, I was hooked. And my husband, being the saint that he is, gave it over to me for the next few weeks.
[Head over to GeekMom to read the rest of R. L. LaFevers’s microscope experimentation.]
