Thanksgiving Adventures

We had a good holiday weekend.  I stayed home on Wednesday so that I could cook for our Thanksgiving dinner.  I went grocery shopping and made an apple pie and cranberry sauce that day.

Then on Thursday morning I put the turkey plus some carrots, parsnips, and the appropriate herbs and spices in our super-deluxe oven on the slow-cook setting before we left for a Thanksgiving-day race.  The entire family participated in a fun run, and Vinny got a medal upon completion of the race.  We headed back home and we continued cooking: rolls (made from my favorite leftover oatmeal bread recipe), corn pudding, fresh beets and greens, macaroni and cheese for Vinny, and Jeff's broccoli casserole.

The turkey was delicious -- very moist and falling off the bone.  I'd never tried parsnips before but I liked them.  I ate all the beets because I am the only family member who actually likes them, but Jeff tried some of the beet greens and thought they were good.  Vinny feasted on macaroni and cheese, rolls, and cranberry sauce.  We all enjoyed the pie for dessert, but especially Vinny, because it was an "X" pie (lattice top).

My dad and bonus mom arrived on Friday and we enjoyed some of their leftovers and ours, plus Italian roasted pork loin, for dinner.  They came so that we could go to a football game together on Saturday -- the annual Kentucky vs. Tennessee game, which is always held on Thanksgiving and which Kentucky has consistently lost for 26 years in a row now.

On Saturday morning we got decked out in layers of clothing (blue of course!) and headed to the game.  We had a pretty good view of the field despite being near the top of the stadium.  The stadium was filled with a surprisingly high proportion of people wearing blue.  It wasn't half, but it was more than a third.  We had a good time even though our team lost.

Dad and Marvis left after we had dinner.  On Sunday we went to the same Christmas tree farm that we went to last year, and cut down a tree.  We are slowly decorating it -- I got the ornaments and lights down from the attic last night, and we have put a few strands of lights on it as a reward for good behavior in everybody's favorite four-year-old.  Tonight I plan to make a 25-link paper chain like I did last year for him, to illustrate the countdown to Christmas.

My Little Nerd in Training

So, while Vinny was staying with his grandparents, my dad was walking with him through a parking lot, where Vinny proceeded to rattle off the make and model of every single car.  If he could identify cars, Dad thought, then surely he could learn to identify trees too.  So that week, Dad helped Vinny to create a leaf collection and learn all the leaves.

There are a couple dozen different leaves in that book, and Vinny knows them all.  He can flip through the book and rattle them all off, but also he can identify them out of order or even outside of the book.  He took the leaf collection book to school and showed it during show and tell.  His teacher was amazed by his leaf knowledge, and so am I.  I think that at this point, he can identify more leaves than I can.  The mind of a four-year-old is like a sponge!

Travel and Home Again

We took Vinny to his Grandparents' house on the Wednesday before we left for the conference, because we wanted to take a CPR/First Aid class on Thursday.  We did, and are now both certified in CPR and First Aid, at least for the next year.

We left on Saturday, driving to New Orleans.  We spent one night in a beautiful new hotel for a bargain price (the gubmint rate, since I was on business travel!) before arriving mid-afternoon.

Jeff had a great time in New Orleans -- he explored the French Quarter and went on a cemetery tour.  I spent the majority of my waking hours in the convention center, although I did get a chance for an evening beignet excursion to Cafe du Monde, and to go out to dinner one night with my boss and his wife (and Jeff too), and another night with Jeff alone.  I tried a lot of new foods, including rabbit, which tastes like a cross between chicken and pork.

Finally the conference was over, and before leaving New Orleans, we went on a swamp tour.  We saw lots of alligators and other creatures, and we got to hold a baby alligator.  Then we started driving.

We stayed in that same hotel at the same gubmint rate -- unfortunately I suffered a migraine when we got out of the car for dinner, so Jeff made the executive decision to stop.  We arrived home on Saturday evening -- only to get up early the next morning to go pick up Vinny.

We spent the afternoon with Jeff's sister and brother-in-law, allowing Vinny to play with his cousins.  It was a lot of fun, especially for Vinny, but we had to leave earlier than we would have liked, to make it home at a decent hour.  I was terrified that the migraine would make a reappearance, but luckily I remained migraine-free.  This morning marked the return to our regular schedule -- Vinny to school and me to work.

Prepping for the Conference

Remember last November, when I was the signage chair for a major conference in my field, and how exhausted and burned out I was, and how I said I wasn't going to do anything for the conference this year?

Yeah.  Uh, so, I didn't exactly keep my promise to myself there.  I'm not doing anything as hard or involved as that, but I am one of the judges for a student competition, a speaker for the part of the program aimed at attracting minorities to the field, and I am presenting a session (along with two of my colleagues) at the conference.  Also, I was asked to help some students who won a prestigious fellowship find their way around the conference.  (I was also told I should use this as an opportunity to recruit shamelessly for my employer, so I have them all set to meet some Important People from my workplace.)

The conference is in New Orleans, which is just close enough to drive to (although far enough that it is still a big trip).  Jeff is going with me, and we are once again leaving Vinny with Grandma and Grandpa, who were kind enough to look after him once again.  Unfortunately, their house is in the opposite direction that we need to go, making the trip about six hours longer each way (since we have to go there and back once each way).  But I think Vinny will have a good time, and so will Jeff, exploring the city.

Electric Car Update

A few weeks ago I got an in-home inspection to determine whether I was eligible for a free charging dock for my Nissan Leaf.  And it turns out, I am!  So, that's $1500 that I don't have to spend to install a charger.

The charger is at the same high voltage level as the plug that connects to your range or your dryer, and it takes about 8 hours to charge the car from 0% to a full battery.  Using a regular wall plug, it would take 18 hours.  Using a fast 400-Volt charger, it takes about 30 minutes to charge from empty to about 80%, but that's not what they install at your house.

It'll cost me a dollar at most to fully charge my battery.  My employer is installing special charging stations at work, so I may charge even less than that at home.

And I am now able to order my Nissan Leaf!  I am really excited about it.  I talked to the dealership last week.  The good news is, they are not tacking anything onto the price above the MSRP.  The bad news is, I'm not sure when the car is arriving.  Depending on when I get it, I have to make different financing plans.  I'll be eligible for a $7500 tax rebate, but if it comes after January 1, then I'll have to wait a while before I get my money back, and the car payment for a (roughly) $35K car is not cheap.

So, I have to talk to the salesman and find out when it arrives.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will be December 31 or earlier.

The Solution for Sweet Potatoes

So, our CSA is over, but we still had a bunch of sweet potatoes left from it.  I was trying to figure out what to do with all those sweet potatoes, so I turned to my trusty cookbook, The Joy of Cooking.  Imagine my delight when I saw a recipe called "Sweet Potato and Peanut Stew."  And it got bonus points because it called for zucchini too!

In addition to using ingredients I had too much of, it sounded like an interesting combination of flavors.  It calls for bell peppers, jalapenos, ginger, and garlic, sauteed in peanut oil (I substituted sunflower oil).  Then you add chili powder, cumin, and red pepper flakes to that, before stirring in the sweet potatoes, some tomato paste, and enough water to cover the veggies.  You let it simmer for 45 minutes while you cook up some ground beef or turkey, which you add after the simmering, along with the cut-up zucchini.  The final step is to combine some of the stew liquid with some peanut butter, and then stir that into the stew and simmer.  You can eat it plain, or over couscous or rice.

I made it last weekend, and boy, was it ever delicious!  It was kind of spicy but not too bad for me, especially with the couscous.  We liked it so much that I'm making a double recipe of it right now, and we're going to freeze some of it for later. Thank you, Joy of Cooking, for this recipe!

New Shoes!

This past weekend, I got some new running shoes.  I realized, when I was stretching before the night race early last month, that the bottoms of my shoes were so worn out that they were slick!  So I went on Saturday and bought a new pair of shoes.

My old ones were okay, but they rubbed a little too much on my little toes, so I got a new pair that was wider in the foot.  The problem is that they are also wider in the heel which makes me feel a little like my foot is going to come out of the shoe, unless I tie them in a special way, the runner's tie.  (By the way, can I just say, that website is cool and there is some awesome math behind shoelaces and tying knots/bows!  Also, there are some really interesting ways to lace up your shoes there.)

Anyhow, I'll let you know how they work out for me.

Sequels

So, I recently signed up for a free month's trial of Netflix, with streaming video that we can get on our Wii or on our computers.  So far I am enjoying it a lot, but it has prompted us to discuss movies a lot.

One thing we were thinking about is sequels, how they are pretty much never as good as the first movie, with a few notable exceptions.  The sequel has to be substantially different from the original in order to be any good -- it can't just be a rehash of the same plot, as so many sequels inevitably are.  It's like trying to repeat the same experience again, and it just can't be done.

It's kind of the same way in life, too -- the novelty of an experience is part of the experience, and a repeat performance lacks that novelty.  Sequel-makers can't be blamed for trying, I guess, but at the same time they should know it will never work.

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

EcoGeoFemme is hosting the November Scientiae carnival, and asked us to write about the best and worst parts of our lives as scientists.  Generally I love my job and my life, but there are definitely superlative aspects of all of it.

The best thing about my job is that I enjoy what I'm doing, it intellectually stimulates me, and it allows me to live a lifestyle that is (mostly) conducive to my happiness.  The big fat paycheck, flexible schedule, and cushy benefits are the top three benefits that I enjoy outside of the workplace.

The worst thing about my job is that it can take over my life.  You may recall me grousing starting in June and going through September about how much I needed a vacation.  This past summer, I bit off way more than I could chew, and then somehow had to swallow it all down anyway.  I was having trouble keeping it together every day, because of the stress, and because I was unable to get away from it all, even for a day.  Lesson learned.  Don't do that again!

Anyhow, I have taken on a new role at work, as I indicated a few months ago, which is postdoc supervisor.  It is (mostly) a lot of fun, but just for some added hilarity, I will tell you about some of the best and worst moments of that!

We are trying to fill a couple more slots (Anybody wanna be a computational science postdoc?  Lemme know!) and I have been doing some recruiting, interviewing, and hiring, and there have been some... interesting times.  Let me tell you about one of the most special of all snowflakes that we interviewed.

I had the privilege (?) of hosting him, and got him all to myself for an hour first thing in the morning.  We were engaged in some small talk, because we had already run out of technical things to talk about, when he asked me what the weather was like in the winter.  I told him that the winters were mild, and he breathed a sigh of relief, because he'd had to quit his postdoc in a Cold Northern State because he couldn't stand the weather and he hated all the deadlines.

At this point, the interview was already over, because a) he had not put this postdoc on his CV and b) we have lots of deadlines.  Unfortunately it was not yet 10:00 am.  But I am polite, and instead of sending him on his way to the airport, let him complete the day.

He sent me a thank-you email talking about how awesome he was and what a
perfect fit he was for the position (fair enough, everybody does that).  But then he sent me more emails... and more emails... culminating in one that literally asked if he could have the job.

At this point, I sent him a message that anyone with at least one-tenth of a social skill would recognize as being of the "Dear John" variety.  I even wished him well on his career!  Evidently he lacked that fraction of a social skill, because he did not get the message.  Upon advice from other colleagues with more experience in hiring people, I had the recruiter send him a rejection letter.

Then things started getting ugly.  He sent me a personal nastygram, and then another nastygram about the mean hiring manager who had made this decision (which he evidently did not realize was me), but I was expecting this blowback and did not reply.  (I'm not sure in what universe insulting or badmouthing the person you want to give you a job is a good idea.)  I thought all had calmed down until a month later when he sent an email to a colleague of mine in a completely different division who did not know him but who shared the same alma mater, asking him to persuade me to hire him.  My colleague said he could not do that, and told the guy to give up, which I believe he has.

Anyhow, that was an interesting time, and then when we interviewed the next candidate, that person was like a breath of fresh air.  We made him an offer but sadly he turned us down.  Ah well, it's all part of the job!

My Poor Sad Head

Last Sunday, we decided to go on a hike with my dad and bonus mom.  It was all great until about five minutes in, when I realized that I was beginning to see the signs of a migraine.  Sure enough, my vision went bad and when it returned, the pain began.  We were still hiking at that point, because I didn't want a little headache to ruin everyone's fun (including my own).  The trail was beautiful and the weather was perfect; the company was great too.  I went home afterwards and slept a bit, but and it got a little better for a while, but the next day, I just felt miserable.  I went to work but only survived a half day, and came home and slept most of the rest of the day away.  I felt better on Tuesday but I did not begin to feel like myself until Wednesday.

I'm glad to be feeling better, but I am getting concerned because I have had several migraines over the past month, which is unusual for me.  I wish I knew what exactly triggered it and I'd quit doing that!

Partying and Partying

At the beginning of the month, we held a family party for Vinny's birthday, just the three of us.  Then, when my dad and bonus mom came last weekend, we celebrated again.  Then yesterday, we had Vinny's big birthday party to which we invited his class from school and many other friends.  And then in the evening, we celebrated his birthday again with Jeff's parents, who drove down for the weekend.

That's four parties for one little boy!  I joked that it was one party per year old, but that is not a scalable tradition to keep up.

Humor

I came up with a pretty funny joke on Friday, and I was actually fairly proud of myself.  Vinny and I had been talking about his shoes, and how he has to pull the tongue of his shoes up before he straps the velcro straps.  I pointed out how silly it was that shoes have a tongue and people have tongues too.  Then I asked him,
"Vinny, do you have a tongue?"
"Yes, I have a tongue.  It's in my mouth."
"That's silly!" I said.  "I thought only shoes have tongues!"

This led to some more similarly structured jokes:
"Vinny, do you have any ears?"
"Yes, I have two ears, here and here."
"That's silly!  I thought only corn has ears!"

and punchlines
"I thought only tables have legs!"
"I thought only potatoes have eyes!"
etc.

Others I thought of include:

• Bread has heels
• Roads have shoulders
• Cows have calves
• Macaroni has elbows
• Roses have hips

I'm sure there are more out there.  Anybody?

Oh, Hi!

I've been a little bit busy lately!  So busy that I failed to commemorate the anniversary of the birth of my beloved son (that was October 5), or discuss the family party that we held for him, or talk about the student who started working with me at the beginning of the month, or the vacation I've taken for the past week.  I'll try to remedy that right now:

• I can hardly believe that Vinny is 4.  He is such an amazing little boy and I am so glad he came into my life four years ago.  Every day I love him more and more, as if that is even possible.
• Since his birthday was on a Tuesday, we held a family celebration the Sunday before, just the three of us.  Vinny's aunt and cousin had a little online video chat with him for his birthday.  We ate homemade pizza and a Dora the Explorer cake for his birthday dinner (more on that cake later).  He got lots of great presents, including a remote controlled car; Lego Rock Band plus a guitar, drum set, and microphone for the game; and a fun set of gears that you can put together on interlocking backing.  He was positively thrilled with the whole thing.
• He had requested a Dora cake for his birthday.  I said okay, I would make him a Dora cake.  Jeff bought a Dora cake pan and I baked the cake.  That was the easy part.  The hard part was decorating it.  You need 10 different colors for decorating Dora.  For example, she has light brown eyes, but dark brown hair.  Furthermore, she has the whites of her eyes, the light brown iris, the black pupil, and a little dot of white in her eyes.  She also has a bracelet that has light blue, dark blue, and yellow beads in it.  Luckily I bought some sort of frosting mix that was probably actually some amalgam of petrochemicals.  I mixed up all the ten different colors of frosting in ten different bowls, but I was having a lot of trouble with doing everything I had to do to follow the directions.  I had to change out frosting colors, which was an arduous process, especially because I had only one tip of each kind that was required.  A lot of times I just had to do one or two little tiny things and then I had to move on to the next color (for example, red was used only for Map's mouth and nothing else!).  By the end I was going so nuts that Dora's eyes and hair were the same color, and furthermore, she did not have a pupil, not to mention that glimmer in her eyes.  And she evidently forgot to put her bracelet on, because even though I had mixed the blue colors, I did not use them because if I had, I would have completely lost any shred of sanity I had at that point.  I had allowed myself two hours to decorate Dora; it ended up taking five!
• I have a student working with me who worked with me the summer before last.  He has a prestigious fellowship and worked with me the other summer on something completely unrelated to his research.  He asked me if he could come back and I could help him with something that he's doing for his research.  I said "of course" and the rest is history.  He's a really smart dude and easy to work with.  He is close to graduation, so he asked me to write him some letters of recommendation for jobs.  I'm trying to figure out if there's a way we can hire him at my workplace.
• Last weekend, we went to Memphis.  We saw the children's museum, which Vinny loved.  They had this wind tunnel with a model airplane in it, and you could turn the fans on to create the wind, then operate some levers which would operate the flaps on the airplane and lift it into the air.  He absolutely loved that wind tunnel because it had fans!  He was talking about the "fan tunnel" for days.  We also went to a place called Incredible Pizza, which was a pizza buffet plus arcade games and also larger games such as miniature bowling and go-karts.  Vinny rode with me in a go-kart, and we were winning the race until somebody hit my go-kart in the back left corner and spun me out, which caused the race to stop until they cleared it up.  Some of the other go-karts had passed me before they had to stop for the cleanup, and they ended up winning.  Anyhow, the food was pretty good and the games were fun too.  The next day we went to Graceland, and that was a lot of fun to the adults in the party but not so fun for the four-year-old.  On Monday we headed back home but we stopped at Shiloh National Battlefield Park, where a major Civil War battle was fought.
• Then, I stayed home for the rest of the week.  I went in to work for a half day on Wednesday, but otherwise I just spent the week at home.  I did some cleaning up around the house, and I did some shopping, and Jeff and I went out to lunch together once, but I basically took it easy all week, which was really nice.  I really needed to get away from work for a while, and I feel really refreshed after this time away.
• Today, Dad and Marvis are coming to celebrate Vinny's birthday.  It should be a lot of fun!

Night Race!

Last night, I participated in my first-ever night race.  A friend of mine is involved in a community organization that held a 5K race that began at 9:00 pm.  I did the race, and while I didn't win any prizes or anything this time, I felt like it was a huge success for me.

I talked Jeff and Vinny into doing it too.  Vinny was lured into it by the promise of a flashlight.  Jeff graciously agreed to supervise Vinny and participate in the race instead of just cheering me on at the sidelines.

All my other races have been in the morning, so I would just wake up, eat something like a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast at least an hour before the race, and then go race.  I wasn't quite sure what to do for an evening race, because I could have really worn myself out during the day and been too tired to do the race in the evening.  I tried to just take it easy for most of the day, and then I ate an omelet for dinner at about 6:00, and then did not eat anything else for the rest of the evening.  This worked out well, and I was just at the right stomach fullness to be able to race.  Eating any later I would have still been sloshing at 9:00.

We got to the race at about 8:00, because Jeff and Vinny were participating in the 5K walk, which started at 8:30.  They started off on their walk and I stretched and talked to some friends while I waited for the run to start.  The race started at an old Revolutionary War-era fort, and they used a canon as the starting gun for the race.

I knew that I would be the slowest runner in the race, so I started at the very back of the pack.  I ran really slowly and in fact enjoyed a personal police escort right behind me during most of the race.  There were some people who faded and I passed, but I was definitely one of the final people across the finish line.

That being said, I was really proud of myself because I ran for 90% of the race.  I just started running and kept running at my extremely slow pace.  The only times I walked was when I got the water (because I didn't want to choke on it like I did in the last race I was in), and again for about 30 seconds up a hill, but after I got my breath back I started running again.

During this race, I realized that for me, breathing is the trick to running: as long as my breathing was not out of control, I could run.  When I had to coordinate breathing and drinking, I couldn't run.  And when I was going up that hill, I got out of breath and had to slow down until my breathing could get under control.

I counted my breaths as I ran.  This helped me to focus, and I was able to talk myself into running further by saying "Okay, I'm gonna run until I get to 600" and then "Okay, you're at 600, let's make it to 650," etc.  As I was nearing the halfway mark, I saw Vinny and Jeff on their walk, and Vinny waved and shouted "Go, Mama!" which was also an inspiration to keep running.  Also I would tell myself that I wouldn't want my police escort to be disappointed by me slowing down and walking.

When I saw I was near the finish line, I tried to run a little faster, and as I neared the finish I looked for Jeff and Vinny, hoping they were there to cheer me on.  As it turned out, they were not yet there; we all finished our races at about the same time.

Like I said, I did not win any awards or prizes, my mile pace was just over 13 minutes, and in fact my total time was longer than it was in the previous race I was in, but I am just so proud that I ran almost the entire race.

I was also really proud of Vinny for completing the 5K walk (with some help from Daddy).  We have a stash of gold metals and when we got home, we gave him one.  I think this really encouraged him to do more races.  And in fact, I saw that there is another race on the same route in November -- the flyer was in the packet they gave us -- and it says they are giving prizes to walkers.  So I think maybe he and I will walk that one and if we are lucky they will give him a prize (and if not, I will take along another gold medal and ask them to present it to him).

Happy New Year!

What, you didn't hold a party last night and stay up until midnight?!?!  Okay, neither did I.  But it is a new year -- a new government fiscal year.  My project that was due at the end of the fiscal year is done, so I'm feeling free!  Hopefully this new year will be as much fun or (better yet) even more fun than last year.

Adventures in Little Things Making a Big Difference

So, at work I work with some scientists in a field that rhymes with shmooclear shmisics.  These people are very smart application scientists, but definitely not computer scientists.  I love them because as long as they exist, I will always have a job.  They write pretty miserable code, because that's really not their thing.  They just want to do the science.

Half of my job with them is improving their code, but more importantly (if I want my efforts to not be wasted), I spend a lot of time developing a working relationship with them.  You see, they are a kind of insular community, and don't generally trust some "hot shot" outsider who doesn't know the science.  But I have been able to do a few simple things that have drastically improved the performance of their codes, so I think we are getting somewhere.

Most recently, I was profiling one of their codes, and discovered that it spent more than 50% of its time sorting.  I looked at their sorting algorithm and saw that it was some homebrew sorting algorithm that was kind of like bubble sort (with computational complexity order N², or the worst possible performance without doing something completely stupid).  My guess is, they didn't know that some smart computer scientists had thought a lot about sorting algorithms and developed smart ways to sort; they probably just thought of how they would sort things and implemented that.  So I replaced their Frankenstein sort with a heapsort algorithm (worst-case complexity N log N) and the sorting became an insignificant portion of the total runtime.  Then, I showed my primary collaborator what I had done, and they discussed it in a meeting the next week.  As it turned out, nobody knew why it was sorting; it was some legacy of an abandoned algorithm.  I removed the sorting altogether and am in the process of doing a little benchmarking study.

It was pretty amazing, though, that this piece of code that nobody realized was being executed was taking up more than 50% of the test problem runtime, and more than 20% of the benchmark problem runtime!

The next bottleneck in their code is the I/O.  They are reading the input in a very unintelligent way (all the processors opening the same file and reading it), so I plan to fix that for them when I get the chance.

Vacation in My Future

I am pleased to report that there is a vacation in my near future.  I have a student coming to work with me beginning next month, but there are times when he will be gone to some conferences, so I will be able to take some time off then.

This is really good because I have kind of a short fuse these days from not being able to be away from work.  I still have quite a bit of work to do this month, but after that, I am looking forward to a vacation!!!

Judge Not, and Don't Feel Judged

I grew up in a very judgmental family environment.  We were a liberal/progressive family, so the judgment didn't manifest in disapproval of others' life choices; it manifested in the conclusion that everyone should think just like us.

After my parents' divorce, I was forced to rethink everything -- to reexamine the structures in my mind.  It was hard -- but it was also freeing.  I railed against this idea nine years ago, but as some of the people in my adult children of divorce mailing list said (the ones who were further past the traumatic events), the divorce was truly one of the best things that ever happened to me.

I left no stone unturned.  I felt, for the first time, free to do what I concluded was right, rather than what others told me was right.  I grew up.

Many things I reconsidered and came to the same conclusion, e.g., washing your hands after you use the potty is a good idea.  Other things I reconsidered and came to a deeper conclusion, e.g., respecting other people's autonomy extends to their freedom to think and draw (possibly erroneous) conclusions, in addition to their life choices.

And still other things I reconsidered and came to a different conclusion.  One of those things is about judging others and taking offense.  I used to look at everyone and make judgments about their intrinsic worth.  I was taught to take the tiniest thing, and analyze it to a conclusion about that person's character.  For example, a woman touching her hair while she's talking to you is vain.  After that, it was hard for them to change in my eyes, except perhaps for the worse.  In return, I always felt judged by other people, and took the conclusions to which I believed they had arrived quite personally.

Then I learned that there are entirely different ways of thinking about other people.  You don't have to categorize and judge people; furthermore, people don't fit well into the boxes we put them in.  For example, I had a professor who had once done something to offend me who I had to work for shortly after my parents announced their intentions to divorce.  I was very angry and apprehensive about working for him, because I thought he was really unkind and judgmental.  As it turned out, we ended up getting along very well, and he was highly supportive of me both personally and professionally.  He was a little eccentric and socially unskilled, yes, but had the best of intentions.

I also learned that I don't always have to think the worst of others when they do "bad" things.  I've talked about this before in terms of people doing mean things to me, but this also extends to people who make life choices I would not make or draw erroneous conclusions due to what I perceive as poor judgment.  So, instead of automatically assuming that a poor person who eats a lot of fast food is lazy or gluttonous, I can examine all the factors that have led to those in poverty eating such unbalanced diets,* and actually come to a more positive conclusion.

Today, I tend to suspend judgment of other people.  This is not to say that I just let somebody who did something hurtful to me do it again; I just don't take their bad behavior and subtract from their intrinsic worth as a human being.  As much as I dislike some people, they are human beings and deserve at a minimum a basic level of respect and dignity.

This also means that I deserve a basic level of respect and dignity, something I didn't realize before.  By being less judgmental of others, I am also able to feel less judged myself.  And that is a huge weight off my shoulders.


* Fast food is cheaper (per calorie or per ounce) than nutritious food, so a person with little money would choose fast food to maximize the fullness of their belly, under constraint of their small budget.  Furthermore, there is a paucity of fresh and nutritious food in poor, urban neighborhoods (which are often referred to as "food deserts"), making it even more difficult to get nutritious foods.  Given all the constraints on time and budgetary limits, I would probably make the same choice in the same situation.

Happy Birthday to Me!

Today is my birthday!  I am 35, which is the product of two odd prime numbers (5 and 7).  I haven't been the product of two odd primes since a decade ago (25), and won't be again for 14 more years (49) 4 more years (39).* which is the product of twin prime numbers (5 and 7).  I was last the product of twin primes two decades ago (3 and 5), and I will never again be the product of twin primes unless I live to be 143 (11 and 13).

The next time my age will be the product of two prime numbers that are adjacent in the sequence of primes is when I am 77.

Just as something cool to think about, 5 and 7 are one less than and one more than 6, respectively.  Remember in algebra the product of x-1 and x+1?  It's x²-1.  Plugging in six for x, we have an alternate way of computing 5 times 7. Six squared is 36, and 36-1=35.  Cool, huh?

This formula is actually more handy for computing the squares of numbers without resorting to a calculator or long hand calculations, in my experience.  For example, what is 21 squared?  It's 20 times 22 plus 1: 440+1 = 441.  You can change the 1 to any integer a, and get a formula (x-a)(x+a) = x²-a².  So what is 43 squared?  It's 40 times 46 plus 9: 1840+9 = 1849.


* Math is hard.  Also, I need a vacation.

Projection

Me: Vinny, I have a question for you.  Daddy's birthday is on Friday.  What do you think we should give him?
Vinny: Hmm.  Maybe a remote-controlled car.*
Me: ...



* Apparently Jeff got the same answer when he asked Vinny what they should give me.