November is coming...

Man, you know! I just blinked and August was gone. In fact, most of September is also gone. Yikes!

It's been busy and wet around here, as the entrance of my house one early school morning testifies...

But there have been unexpected moments of peace and sunshine...

And as usual, a liberal sprinkling of blessings...

So I can't complain on the whole! But it's definitely time for something seriously constructive...

NANOWRIMO!

Yes, I know that's only in November, but I have been mulling over my plans for a while now. Needless to say I am definitely attempting the challenge again and super keen for it. More details soon, but I am trying to choose between writing a golden age detective novel, or a zombie apocalypse...

Join me?

Yours productively,

jjr

Pictures from a Sleepy Week

...someone still thinks he's enough of a baby to sleep in dad's marking box..

(it's a bit more crowded than he remembers!)

...Valentine's Day, and a somewhat revamped kitchen...

(plus our special weekend otees!)

...magic on Rondebosch Common...

(remember last time I posted about the Common? quite a contrast!)

The Life Cycle of a Box

We are busy moving house and have lots of fun with cardboard boxes. There is an entire world of interest behind the common cardboard box!

We got a whole bunch of boxes (like 20 or so) second hand from the Pick 'n Pay up the road. Turns out they have a whole container out the back, next to the loading area where trucks come and go, wholly dedicated to the sorting, distributing and recycling of cardboard boxes.


Once the omo, chips, whiskey, apples and cooldrinks have been removed from the boxes, they are ferried in elderly reject shopping trolleys through to this gentleman who rules over the box container...

He works from 8am to 7pm in the small, dark container, which makes loud farting noises if you tread on the floor in the wrong place. Anyway, you tell him what kinds of boxes you'd like (he's got lots - all the way from teeny tiny to enormous) and then he helps you to pull them out of the heap. He's really good at divining what size a box is just by looking at the flap that's sticking out of the pile.

After all that, it seems quite ungrateful just to take the boxes off, put them back together with packing tape and stuff a whole lot of books, crockery, clothes and kittens in them.

But of course once the kitten is tired of sitting in the box...

 

...he can always eat it!

  

"Look mom, I killed it!"

I'm not sure if this is a fitting end to such a noble creature as the cardboard box. On the whole I think it might be. 

Mathecaticians

This is not a misspelling (though my spelling has always been a little bit suspect). It's a profound thought.

Gauss and Pascal are our kittens. They behave much as I imagine the original famous old mathematicians would have done. In other words:

They poke their noses into everything!

My favourite story about Herr Gauss (original) is probably entirely urban legend. I have not verified it, and if you know it to be false please keep that to yourself. It's a wonderful story.

So when he's about 8 or 9 (maybe 10, let's stretch a point) Gauss is sitting in his Maths class. As usual, he's completed all his work. And his homework. And the next day's homework. And his poor teacher is going crazy, probably partially because Gauss is pulling Heidi's hair and throwing thumbtacks at Kurt.

Finally, the teacher tells Gauss that his next assignment (I expect he was told to complete it before he went out to break) was calculate the sum of the first 100 natural numbers.

So, being eager to get to his bratwurst sandwich before Kurt stole it, Gauss does just that. Except, as he's a lazy little brat who doesn't feel like taking the long way round, he invents and proves a formula for calculating the sum of any arithmetic series.

No, I don't think you were paying sufficient attention: he proved the formula for calculating the sum of any arithmetic series.


The same elegant, easy-peasy-once-you-see-how-to-do-it proof that we use today...

Long live curiosity!