Coming at you a little later than usual with this entry. I meant to put something up this weekend, but I ran out of time. S is away, so I have the kids to myself, which usually means less free time, but that actually wasn't the reason I didn't post. I wasn't too busy with familiar responsibilities; I was too busy with math. Every so often, in this online trivia league I do, they put up a just-for-fun "One-Day Special" called "Pen and Paper Math," in which there are 12 pretty challenging math questions that you must solve using only pen and paper (hence the name). I've never done it before, because once I started one, and the first problem took me 15 minutes, and I decided that I didn't want to devote three hours to an online trivia quiz.
But recently I've been lamenting the fact that I don't really do math anymore (aside from checking the boys' homework). It's somehow been over 15 years since I last took a class and did pure math. I was a pretty good math student back in the day, but like with anything, your skills atrophy if you don't work them. So, I've been kinda looking for ways to work that math muscle (correcting long division mistakes just doesn't cut it), and this quiz seemed liked a good way to do that. It went up on Friday and it wasn't due until Monday, so I thought to myself: S is gone. The boys have some activities out of the house this weekend, so you'll have at least a few hours alone. Just have a look. This is a good opportunity to see if you still got it.
I can report, I still got it -- kinda. I figure out eight of them, but I only correctly answered seven, because I didn't heed the first rule of trivia: RTFQ.* One of them I just got wrong (that's the rust), and three of them I didn't have time to deeply dig into (I didn't have that much free time). So, I didn't ace it or anything, but I didn't do too shabbily, all things considered.
*Read the Fucking Question! The problem was to find the sum of the reciprocals of the divisors of a perfect number N, including N itself. I missed that last part, so I put that the answer was (2N - 1) / N. Had I seen it, I would have added an additional 1 / N, which would have immediately given me the correct answer 2.
Anyway, I did some other things this weekend too. I'll hit some of them in bullet-point form.
- The boys have gotten into Settlers of Catan, so we played that a few times. It's fun. It's something we can do together, and it's so much better than everybody staring at their own device. The boys aren't bad either. I mean, I won both games, but they understand how to play and make reasonable moves. A funny thing they do is they both announce their strategies: I'm gonna try to build a settlement on the wood port because I get double wood every time an 8 is rolled. At one point Lil' S1 was laying out his entire master plan, and I said to him, "If you tell us what you're doing, then we're gonna know how to stop you." And he replied, "Yeah, you're right," and then proceeded to tell us anyway.
- Lil' S2 went over to a friend's house on Saturday night, so Lil' S1 and I watched a movie together. We were trying unsuccessfully to find something we both agree on, and then he said, "Hey, what about that movie you told me about once where these teenagers have go back in time to pass their history class." So, we watched Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Still holds up! Well, except for the requisite '80s-comedy gay slur. The thing is, they are kinda the butt of the joke there. They're dumb-asses -- that's their whole thing. Laughing at people for being ignorant is not the same thing as laughing at people they are being ignorant toward. I feel like that's an important distinction that a lot of people don't make anymore. With that said, I probably would've fast-forwarded past that joke if I remembered it was there.
- I ran nearly five miles on the treadmill in S's sister's building. Two of those miles I did in under 15 minutes. That's not, like, blazing fast, but it's pretty good for me. I forgot my earbuds, which made the experience so much more painful. Nobody else was in there for much of my run, so I just listened to music through my iPhone speaker. It was better than nothing, but not by much. Once you get used to that immersive sound, it's so hard to enjoy music without it.
- Lil' S2's soccer team, of which I am the coach, lost again this weekend -- I mean, nobody is supposed to keep score, but it's often obvious who won. After crushing our opponent in the first game, we haven't won since then. It's all just for fun, of course -- they're seven, after all -- and I shouldn't even be talking about wins and losses, but some of the teams have been together already for a few years, and they are all really good now. And it's like Great, I got the kids who read comic books on the sideline and act like they're robots on the field. Our game this weekend is at 9am too. That's a double-whammy -- not only do I have to wake up early (for me), I have to help set up the goals since we're the first game on the field for the day.
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