Trustees, donors, alums, excited students and professors, Northfield residents, president Stevie P. - all people you'd expect to show up for the dedication ceremony of Carleton's second wind turbine.

Schiller though? That was a bit of a surprise. Aside from the fact that he's been dead two hundred-some odd years, I was unaware he was into renewable energy!

But came he did - with a band of three masked men.

Of course, my housemates chased him - they were in hot pursuit! But sadly, Schiller was just too elusive. Next time.

Aside from the the Schiller debacle, the ceremony was exciting and elegant and and so, so Midwestern (what with the corn fields and all).

The new turbine is a little different than the first; while the energy produced by the first is sold to an energy company, the energy from the second one will go directly towards powering Carleton. Apparently, one third of Carleton's energy usage will now be offset by the power generated by the new wind turbine. That's pretty cool!

Who knew that the inside of a wind turbine is hollow?  And oh - that ladder is so tempting to climb.

Stevie P., don't run with scissors!

The problem with taking organic chemistry is now I see everything as a molecule. The arms on the wind turbine? Definitely bonds. The central element only holds a sextet though... now it's positively charged and unstable. Are the wind turbines enantiomers? Are they racemic? Which arm holds the dominant substituent? Is there a mirror plane of symmetry?

No. They're just windmills.

Don Quixote, they're not sheep.

Marley, they're not molecules.

They're just windmills.

Schiller would agree.

(The band stops playing and the blog post ends).

Until next week!

Marlena