500 and change
More pictures for Waffles!!!!111!!!1!! This post has a little bit of everything, heck, it is 4am, what else have I got to do?
Keeping track of post numbers is a bit frivolous, seeing how I have numerous blogs, and blogs that have been transferred between Livejournal, WordPress and Blogger. That aside, this is number 500, baby! There have been some mundane happenings this week for me, and knowing that the next post would be #500 kept me from posting. Funny that I finally get inspiration to post the big #500 at 2:36am on Friday morning... I'm fresh off a big downswing in poker and a break up, and I'm ready to make some changes.
Erin and I talked by the river and half-heartedly agreed to end things. I went into the afternoon discussion with full intentions of breaking things off, but I think the consensus we came to is that Erin leaves for Jordan at the end of September, and we'll go our separate ways then. I feel a bit weird about the whole thing. Right after the "break up", I actually felt a lot more attracted to her than the past month or so, and I'm not really sure why. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we can have fun, but I don't feel responsible for all of the "bad" things about having a relationship (i.e. loss of freedom, having to do things, blah blah). With a few days since our talk, I've been feeling very lonely, and that isn't a feeling I was expecting. It feels amazing to be loved, and I now realize how much I love the security of being in a relationship, but this new realization makes me think I was more interested in a relationship than in a relationship with specifically Erin, and although it sucks to admit, it seems like a good thing to admit now than later.
In a possibly related note, I've become hip to Blues Traveler again, fresh off a 15 year hiatus from listening to the band:
I've downloaded four of their songs, and this band is amazing... anyways, back to the juicy stuff.
The "break up" is a catalyst for some other changes in my life. I will be moving out of my parents' basement in a couple of weeks, and there is definitely some anxiety along with the move. I'm moving in with a friend from the teaching program, who I don't know terribly well, but the living situation is hard to beat. His parents moved to Dominica, a small island SE of Cuba, and he is staying at their house near Mill Creek. The house is huge, and it is just us two sharing the 4br 3ba house, my rent being $450+util, which is equivalent to sharing a house with five others and having 1/5 of a bathroom in Seattle.
I've spent the last month pretty much being a worthless slob. I've gotten out and taken a few pictures, and I will continue to get out, but I've spent way too many hours sitting in front of my computer with gmail and facebook open, waiting for something to happen. I've made a few goals for August involving spending my time more productively (specifically on the job front). Another goal involves normalizing my sleep schedule. The heat wave Seattle has been in for the past few days has encouraged me to stay up late and sleep in until past noon, when the room warms up and makes it impossible to sleep. Last night I went to bed at 5am and woke up at 2pm today, mostly because I didn't have anything to do. I don't really like not having anything to do.
Speaking of the heat wave, two crazy things of note. First, I went down to Magnuson Park last night with my mom's cousin's foreign exchange student Peter, who was passing through on his journey of the US. Seattle hit 103 degrees, and Magnuson Park had cars parked all the way up to Sand Point Way. I've never seen so many cars parked there, there were literally five times as many cars as I think I've ever seen there before.
The second crazy heat happening occurred this afternoon right before softball. I rode my motorcycle to the UW Bookstore to possibly purchase a few middle school math books that could help my first year of teaching, or substitute teaching. I ended up finding a good book by none other than Danica Mckeller, or Winnie from The Wonder Years!
The reason I purchased this book is that her experience with math up until the 8th grade is the complete opposite of mine. I was amazing at math, and it came very easily to me. Most of my students won't have that same experience with math, and Danica's book expresses very real ideas of fear and frustration with middle school math. It is mostly focused for girls, but that works, because she gives plenty of examples on how to relate math concepts into terms that tween girls might understand, and I would never think to consider.
Flipping through the book, I came to a section on factoring, and Danica uses friendship bracelets and beading to explain factors. Say you are making a friendship bracelet and you have 16 onyx beads and 10 sapphire beads. In order to make a design or pattern for the necklace, you need to see how the beads can be divided. How many different groups can you make with the 16 onyx beads? Well, you could make 16 groups of 1 bead each, or you could make 8 groups of 2 beads each, or 4 groups of 4 beads each. How can we split up the 10 sapphire beads? Now which groups should we use to make the bracelet (this is up to you!) Guess what, you just factored!
Something feels a bit weird about a book written by a former child star, who graduated with a mathematics degree from UCLA, and is focusing on spreading the word to girls that being smart is sexy. I mean, the message is great, but also looking like this is sexy:
The fact that she relates the fear of a middle school math test to getting a bikini wax scares me a bit. If I have this book in my math class library, I'd like to place a bet on whether the girls or the guys will look through the book more (and no, she does not have scantily clad pictures of herself in the book, well... besides the cover's low V-cut).
OK, I got way off on a tangent there (not a co-tangent, mind you). What I was initially going to say is about the Seattle heat wave. When I left the book store and made it out to the parking lot where I left my motorcycle, which had been in the shade, I noticed that the Honda Ruckus parked next to me had its center stand melted into the blacktop of the parking lot. It was crazy! I thought maybe the Ruckus had been there a long time and nobody actually used it, because it was parked there when I arrived two hours earlier. Then I looked at my bike, and my side stand had punched through (melted through?) the black top. There was a hole about an inch deep in the black top, and I was scared that I wouldn't be able to get my side stand up out of the hole. I was actually pretty lucky, because I parked on a slight decline, and if the bike had tipped over a few more inches, it would have crashed down on top of the Ruckus. I was able to lift the bike's side stand back up through the hole in the black top. I never thought it would get hot enough in Seattle to have my steel side stand melt a hole through blacktop.
Keeping track of post numbers is a bit frivolous, seeing how I have numerous blogs, and blogs that have been transferred between Livejournal, WordPress and Blogger. That aside, this is number 500, baby! There have been some mundane happenings this week for me, and knowing that the next post would be #500 kept me from posting. Funny that I finally get inspiration to post the big #500 at 2:36am on Friday morning... I'm fresh off a big downswing in poker and a break up, and I'm ready to make some changes.
Erin and I talked by the river and half-heartedly agreed to end things. I went into the afternoon discussion with full intentions of breaking things off, but I think the consensus we came to is that Erin leaves for Jordan at the end of September, and we'll go our separate ways then. I feel a bit weird about the whole thing. Right after the "break up", I actually felt a lot more attracted to her than the past month or so, and I'm not really sure why. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we can have fun, but I don't feel responsible for all of the "bad" things about having a relationship (i.e. loss of freedom, having to do things, blah blah). With a few days since our talk, I've been feeling very lonely, and that isn't a feeling I was expecting. It feels amazing to be loved, and I now realize how much I love the security of being in a relationship, but this new realization makes me think I was more interested in a relationship than in a relationship with specifically Erin, and although it sucks to admit, it seems like a good thing to admit now than later.
In a possibly related note, I've become hip to Blues Traveler again, fresh off a 15 year hiatus from listening to the band:
I've downloaded four of their songs, and this band is amazing... anyways, back to the juicy stuff.
The "break up" is a catalyst for some other changes in my life. I will be moving out of my parents' basement in a couple of weeks, and there is definitely some anxiety along with the move. I'm moving in with a friend from the teaching program, who I don't know terribly well, but the living situation is hard to beat. His parents moved to Dominica, a small island SE of Cuba, and he is staying at their house near Mill Creek. The house is huge, and it is just us two sharing the 4br 3ba house, my rent being $450+util, which is equivalent to sharing a house with five others and having 1/5 of a bathroom in Seattle.
I've spent the last month pretty much being a worthless slob. I've gotten out and taken a few pictures, and I will continue to get out, but I've spent way too many hours sitting in front of my computer with gmail and facebook open, waiting for something to happen. I've made a few goals for August involving spending my time more productively (specifically on the job front). Another goal involves normalizing my sleep schedule. The heat wave Seattle has been in for the past few days has encouraged me to stay up late and sleep in until past noon, when the room warms up and makes it impossible to sleep. Last night I went to bed at 5am and woke up at 2pm today, mostly because I didn't have anything to do. I don't really like not having anything to do.
Speaking of the heat wave, two crazy things of note. First, I went down to Magnuson Park last night with my mom's cousin's foreign exchange student Peter, who was passing through on his journey of the US. Seattle hit 103 degrees, and Magnuson Park had cars parked all the way up to Sand Point Way. I've never seen so many cars parked there, there were literally five times as many cars as I think I've ever seen there before.
The second crazy heat happening occurred this afternoon right before softball. I rode my motorcycle to the UW Bookstore to possibly purchase a few middle school math books that could help my first year of teaching, or substitute teaching. I ended up finding a good book by none other than Danica Mckeller, or Winnie from The Wonder Years!
The reason I purchased this book is that her experience with math up until the 8th grade is the complete opposite of mine. I was amazing at math, and it came very easily to me. Most of my students won't have that same experience with math, and Danica's book expresses very real ideas of fear and frustration with middle school math. It is mostly focused for girls, but that works, because she gives plenty of examples on how to relate math concepts into terms that tween girls might understand, and I would never think to consider.
Flipping through the book, I came to a section on factoring, and Danica uses friendship bracelets and beading to explain factors. Say you are making a friendship bracelet and you have 16 onyx beads and 10 sapphire beads. In order to make a design or pattern for the necklace, you need to see how the beads can be divided. How many different groups can you make with the 16 onyx beads? Well, you could make 16 groups of 1 bead each, or you could make 8 groups of 2 beads each, or 4 groups of 4 beads each. How can we split up the 10 sapphire beads? Now which groups should we use to make the bracelet (this is up to you!) Guess what, you just factored!
Something feels a bit weird about a book written by a former child star, who graduated with a mathematics degree from UCLA, and is focusing on spreading the word to girls that being smart is sexy. I mean, the message is great, but also looking like this is sexy:
The fact that she relates the fear of a middle school math test to getting a bikini wax scares me a bit. If I have this book in my math class library, I'd like to place a bet on whether the girls or the guys will look through the book more (and no, she does not have scantily clad pictures of herself in the book, well... besides the cover's low V-cut).
OK, I got way off on a tangent there (not a co-tangent, mind you). What I was initially going to say is about the Seattle heat wave. When I left the book store and made it out to the parking lot where I left my motorcycle, which had been in the shade, I noticed that the Honda Ruckus parked next to me had its center stand melted into the blacktop of the parking lot. It was crazy! I thought maybe the Ruckus had been there a long time and nobody actually used it, because it was parked there when I arrived two hours earlier. Then I looked at my bike, and my side stand had punched through (melted through?) the black top. There was a hole about an inch deep in the black top, and I was scared that I wouldn't be able to get my side stand up out of the hole. I was actually pretty lucky, because I parked on a slight decline, and if the bike had tipped over a few more inches, it would have crashed down on top of the Ruckus. I was able to lift the bike's side stand back up through the hole in the black top. I never thought it would get hot enough in Seattle to have my steel side stand melt a hole through blacktop.
Labels: Math, Pictures, Relationship
posted by MHG at
7/31/2009 02:35:00 AM
2 Comments:
Congratz on the new place. You were of the 40% of lame ass men that live in mommies basement. Now you are a grown up.
The plus side is that now we'll get more pics of that cute chick's butt.
As you know, I'll be living the life of a bachelor after next weekend. I forsee racquetball, hiking and other shenanigans in our future.
-DrC
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