Jiffy Pop

Thirty or forty years ago, I used to see TV ads for Jiffy Pop popcorn, but my family never actually bought the stuff.  

John and I ran across some in a store the other day, and decided it would help fight the winter doldrums.

Jiffy Pop, Jiffy Pop, the magic treat. As much fun to make as it is to eat!

Rachel's afraid it's going to blow, so she protects Audrey's eyes.

Parents, if you see this on your grocer's shelf, you really ought to buy it and pop it with your kids, at least once in your lifetime. It IS as much fun to make as it is to eat! Really.

Snowmaha, Early Morning

Piper

This is Piper, our Golden Retriever pup.  She's eight months old.

My father-in-law calls her Hyper. 

Our yard is strewn with deer bones, dead moles, raccoon claws, chewed up shoes, shredded rugs, and a variety of other choice items brought to us by Piper.

Photo by Erica

If you did yesterday's algebra, you found out that the gift recipient in the song received a total of twenty-two pipers piping.  I'm glad I only have one Piper.

And I'll be glad when I don't hear that song again for a while.

Christmas Algebra

For some reason, I'm seeing the twelve days of Christmas everywhere I look.  And I don't even like that song! 

Yesterday I woke up thinking about all those turtle doves, French hens, calling birds, lords-a-leaping and et cetera.  While still half asleep I wondered this:  if the recipient got a partridge in a pear tree the first day; then two turtle doves and another partridge and on the second; three French hens, two more turtle doves and yet another partridge on the third, etc., etc., etc...can I figure out an algebraic equation that would allow me to plug in any one of those gifts and quickly figure out how many were given in total, over the twelve days of rampant gift-giving?

I do love puzzles, and I was happy to have stumbled across one to wrap my brain around before my feet even hit the ground. 

Try it, Puzzleheads!  Or try it with your algebra students.  It's definitely doable, and not too hard. The answer is in the comment section following this post. 

If you want to work it out on your own, stop here.  If you want some help, read on.  If you think the whole thing is totally nuts, go bake some cookies and bring me some.  I'll put the coffee on.

*********************************************

How to solve:

Let T be the total number of any certain thing.....laying geese, golden rings, whatever.  T is the total number of that particular gift in hand after the twelve days expire. 

Let D stand for the day on which that gift was first introduced, or, to phrase it a little differently, D can stand for how many of that particular gift were given at a time.  They are the same number.  So, for maids-a-milking, D = 8, because eight maids-a-milking first show up on the 8th day of Christmas, and then eight are given each day through the 12th..

Now comes the thinking part.  Obviously, how many swans-a-swimming you get will be the number of swans you receive per day, times the number of days you receive them.  Think about how many days you get turtle doves, and how many days you get French hens, etc., and see if you can find a pattern that relates the quantity of how many you get at a time to the number of times, total, that you receive that quantity.  If you can make that pattern into an equation, you're home free.  Try out your formula on a couple of different gifts and see if it works.  If it does, you've solved the puzzle! 

Congratulations.  And don't forget to send me the cookies!

....four girls a-laughing

....three kinds of cookies

...two runners running

John said to be sure and put the photo of the cookies right before the photo of the running, the second showing atonement for the first.

It's been a long time since I had to run the dishwasher two or three times a day

I don't mind a bit.  Nice to have you home, girls.

Bald Eagles

Baldy found a deer carcass for breakfast.  I'm happy for him, and happy that he is thinking more about his belly than about the strangers who brought their car to a stop on the road nearby.  The last time I tried to get a photo of a bald eagle--just last week--he flew off before my tires had even quit rolling.   

Seeing this bird feasting on breakfast reminded me of a time last year when John spotted a different bald eagle from his combine seat. 

Some punk had shot this one off of a power pole, and it fell in our fencerow. John didn't see the crime, just the evidence.

He called the game warden, who confirmed Audrey's ID of an immature bald eagle. Bald eagles live in the wild for twenty or thirty years, but they don't get their white heads until they are around five years old.  This

is a young one.

I'm sad that some people feel big if they can put down something smaller than themselves.

Lunar Eclipse or Lunacy?

The word "lunacy" comes from "luna", a Latin root that refers to the moon.  A thirteenth century definition of "lunacy" reads:   periodic insanity, dependent on the changes of the moon.

This may look like periodic insanity, dependent on changes in the moon.  But let me assure you, these are  perfectly sane people, even if they did spend a while outside in the twenty degee darkness between 1 and 2 a.m. this morning.

Lunar eclipses happen at least twice each year, although the last total lunar eclipse was in 2008.

Things that look like lunacy can happen any time.



Grey

This photo has not been edited, nor changed to black-and-white.
God sometimes paints in shades of grey.

Leaving the Big City after a Big Day

Cap and Gown

Homeschooling carries with it a multitude of benefits, tempered by a few losses.

If you teach your children at home through high school, you might miss the chance to see them beam from beneath a cap, gown, and tassle as they walk across a stage and hear their names read aloud. 

Or then again, you might get the opportunity.

We are proud of Rachel.

What do farmers do in winter?

Sometimes they work cattle.

This little guy, along with thirty of his buddies and thirty mama cows,

has to go down a long alleyway into the squeeze chute. The vet pulls the lever to tighten the sides of the chute, so that the immobilized animal can't hurt himself or anyone else.

Then Merrill and the vet and the vet tech pour on lice protection, administer vaccinations, and check to see which cows are pregnant and which aren't.

Merrill writes it all down,

while Shane keeps the cattle moving to and through the alleyway.

John hauls the treated cattle back to the field.  Alice tries to look helpful and important, but is really there because she wants to take pictures.

The heavens declare the glory of God

Too Many Roosters

Four roosters are too many for our little laying flock.  Two roosters, a prize-winning Black Australorp and a Barred Plymouth Rock, are really too many, but we like variety, so two roosters still live. But the other two had to go. "Had to go" is a euphemism. Using euphemisms, and not putting too many photos of the "going" keeps the blog clean and family friendly.

Once before, when roosters had to go, Audrey and I decided not to heat the scalding water and set up the electric plucker and all the butchering equipment just for a couple of roosters. It all has to be hauled out of the shed and cleaned up before use. Then, it all has to be cleaned again before you put it away. That's a lot of work. We thought it would be easier just to pluck or skin the birds by hand, but, thirty minutes into the project, we thought it would have been easier to just throw their carcasses into the trees for the coyotes.

As with so many things in life, when you get discouraged and want to quit, that's when you're just about over the hump. We pressed on, and then were glad that we did, as there was homemade chicken soup waiting to warm chilly fingers and hearts when the snow flew.

But almost all of my butchering help has flown the coop, so to speak, and other things besides chicken noodle soup crowded my calendar last week.   So this rooster fed the circle of life in the form of coyotes, not people.

There is a time coming, when something doesn't have to die in order for something else can live. I'm looking forward to it.

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. Isaiah 11:6

Welcome, Tuesday

Sunrise out my back door

This Makes Me Smile

Grey Farm Morning

Cowboys

ish

Have you noticed that "ish" has become all the rage?

We used to be home around seven-ish, or maybe her eyes were bluish-grey.  But the new vernacular seems to allow the attachment of "ish" onto any word or phrase, in order to mean "sort of, but not quite all the way."

"Did it work?"   "Yes...ish."
"How was the film?"   "It was good, ish."
"The exam went well, ish."

I can either roll my eyes or roll with this, and I've decided to just roll.  I'm not saying I like it, since my nature leans me toward grammar stickler.  But I can flex, and I no longer cringe every time someone adds "ish" onto the end of her sentence.

But yesterday I had to draw the line.  The answer to "What is the slope of this line?" on an algebra paper was written as "3.5 - ish."

Because my student is a visual learner, I used a Venn diagram to make my point.  You remember Venn diagrams, don't you?  Circles or ovals that represent sets, with the items that belong to both sets written where the ovals overlap?  I first illustrated with "people genetically related to your dad" and "people genetically related to your mom," each represented by a separate oval.  And then there you are, right in the middle where the two ovals overlap.

Then I made a Venn diagram for algebra and ish.

There is no ish

in algebra.

Missing Those Curls

Photo by Merrill

Can You Blame Him?

Good Times

 Same old boots and blue jeans,

 same old husband fencing the same old cows

 

same old cornfield, same old horse. 

Good times  before winter.

A Short History of Baseball

My dad has been rooting for the Rangers for the better part of four decades. 

Before that, he was an Astros fan from our Houston home.  He took his kids to the old Astrodome every once in a while, where he taught me about singles, steals, and strikeouts--the basics of baseball. 

Then we moved to Dallas, where you could buy a seat overlooking the Rangers' outfield for three bucks.   We sat on those bleachers a few times every summer, where Dad passed out peanuts in the shell, washed them down with Dr. Pepper, and illuminated the finer points of the game:  come-backers and pitchouts, small ball and the suicide squeeze.  I didn't date much in high school, nor did I party much.  But I learned baseball, falling asleep each summer night to the soothing rhythm of the play-by-play drifting out of my bedside radio.  Another pitch, another 'tink' of numbers on the clock radio, another game in the record books.  Night after night, summer after hot Texas summer, the Rangers had my ear as they predictably dropped through the standings like a Fergie Jenkins sinker ball.

I don't know that I ever even hoped to see them in the post-season.  I simply understood that they wouldn't last much past July's All-Star break.  I was right.

Childhood disappeared.  I married and left Texas, and the clear-channel radio station that brought the nightly Ranger game to my home in Nebraska sadly quit its coverage.  I shifted to the Kansas City Royals, whose daily broadcasts I could pick up.  I joined my husband in rooting for the Red Sox, and used the back of a napkin at our local sports bar to teach my kids how to score a baseball game, pitch by pitch.  And, like most stadium relics from the era before ballparks were named for orange juice or beer, the Rangers' Arlington Stadium literally bit the dust, and the old Astrodome crumbled into dilapidated disrepair.   

Over the years, lots of things changed, but my dad still cheered for the Rangers.  We still took in games together when we could, and the Rangers---no matter how far ahead they got in the spring and early summer standings---still died their annual deaths. 

And in his nearly forty years of Ranger fandom, I never sat at a playoff game with my dad.  I never had the chance.

Until this year. 

Go Rangers!  Thanks for the memories.

Headed for Home

We're still shadow

and not the very image,

 laboring to enter rest;

 a house not made with hands

whose builder and maker is God.

Whose house are we, if we hold fast the confidence

and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end.

Heb 10:1, 1 John 3:2, Heb 4:11, 2 Cor 5:1, Heb 11:10, 3:6

What's Missing From this Picture?

And this one?

You got it.........

The Lord is filling Erica's sails at college in Michigan.  We miss her a lot around here.  But she is where she is supposed to be, learning lots about chemistry and Homer, God's grace and how to get along with people who are different from herself.

It is a joy to watch her laying hold of big things.  It will also be a joy to see her face smiling in my doorway again.