Thursday: what was I going to talk about?

I thought that I had figured out a topic for tonight's post, but I don't remember what it was. I shoveled the driveway this morning. We only had a dusting of new snow, but I wanted to get the snow that we had missed yesterday. I got some of it. The frozen layer on top was super thick and so I had to step on it before shoveling to break it up. That's what I was going to talk about. How weird it was to step on snow before shoveling...usually I try to avoid stepping on snow before shoveling. And the mound at the end of the driveway is pure ice. The car has to roller coaster over it to get in and out.

I also took a walk around the house to make sure some of the places we don't normally see were looking ok. They are. I was sinking down to the tops of my boots, so we do still have a lot of snow even though the last storm didn't give us much.

Wednesday: our non-blizzard

Today's blizzard petered out on us. Boo. I was all prepared, and even looking forward to, working from home today. In my pjs. With a cat on my lap. But then when I looked outside and looked at the forecast there really wasn't any good reason for me to stay home.

I probably could have, but it was good that I was at work too. Some things got taken care of in a more timely manner.

And it's supposed to snow again tonight, but when I checked an hour ago it was just melting.

Tuesday: today's happenings

Today is a post about some of the things that happened today.

1. I made my sandwich this morning, which is a normal occurrence. However, I only had one green pepper slice and so I only put one slice on my sandwich. It looked so lonely.

2. I bought a bag of carrots and a small broccoli and have been having them in my lunch instead of baby carrots. I cut the bigger carrots into bite size pieces and so don't mind eating them as much.

3. We were finishing shoveling the driveway as the plow went by the other side of the road. We had two choices A) wait for the plow and shovel the end of the driveway or B) hurry up and beat the plow. We beat the plow, and safely, but if we had been 10 seconds later it would not have been safe any more.

4. Someone tried out a new wire twister at work and loved it. So hopefully we'll be able to buy two. It is fun to be excited about equipment that works like it is supposed to.

5. We canceled Bible Study tonight. The roads probably would have been ok, but ... we didn't want anyone to get hurt. There is a chance of ice and all the cars in the parking lot had icicles on them.

6. I'm tired. I'm thinking about going to bed a little bit early. Maybe I'll get up a little early too and start working. I brought work home in case I can't get into work tomorrow (or want to go in late). We'll see how the weather is.

7. I took a very nice warm shower. My toes were freezing.

8. I got a papercut today.

Monday: Flurry on the lap

Flurry is still sitting on my lap on a regular basis. Tonight she started out like this:

and then ended up like this:

She was a little bit more to the left than normal, so she kept trying to head-butt my arm out of the way.

Sunday: dimes or quarters?

The pregnancy center in our area has an interesting fundraiser. Every year they give a bunch of baby bottles to churches and then members take them home and fill them will change (or dollars). It's a nice way to get rid of the spare change that we've accumulated during the year and help out the organization.

While I was putting coins in, I noticed that the dimes felt so much smaller than the quarters. It made me wonder: would it be better to put only dimes in the baby bottles or only quarters? My guess is quarters. But what if weight is a factor? Then would it be better to do dimes or quarters?

So off to do some math. But I started out at the US Mint, where they give handy facts about the coins. (If you don't care about the math, you can go to the end for the tl;dr) (Too long; didn't read)

A dime has a volume of 340.0964 mm^3.

So lets see what a quarter's volume would be if it were equal to that of a dime:

340.0964 mm^3/dime * 2.5 dimes/quarters = 850.241 mm^3

A quarter has an actual volume of 808.9035 mm^3, so if space were perfectly utilized, quarters would be better to put in the baby bottle.

But you can't fill up the baby bottle perfectly, so this becomes a packing problem. I think the baby bottle was about 2" in diameter. We'll estimate that you can get three quarters per row (you can't quite get three flat quarters, but if you put some in vertically it is probably close). We will estimate that you can get seven dimes per layer. If the baby bottle was 35mm (7" tall), we would get 331 dimes or 184 quarters in the bottle. Oh, quarters won again with $46 to $33 for dimes.

However, the bottle of quarters would be about 25% heavier than the one of dimes.

tl;dr

If people want you to fill up a baby bottle with coins, putting only quarters in the bottle would be better than putting in only dimes. My hypothesis was correct.

Saturday: 1000!

Happy 1000th post! How exciting!

Since no one gave me any ideas on what to do for a 1000th post earlier, I came up with an idea on my own. It's rather geeky.

I did a word analysis. I'm not guaranteeing that it is perfect, but I think it is close enough to be accurate.

First: the words I used most often were "the" (1378), "I" (1212), and "a"(1014). Below is a pie chart showing how often words were used. I was surprised that I had only written so many words only once. It seems like I often write about the same things, so I would have thought that the 1x would have been much smaller.
Ben got mentioned 129 times, Flurry 77 times, and Dad 28 time. I thought Flurry would have been written more often.

Here is the number of words per post.

The highest one is 848 words. I average 96 words per post. Per a linear trendline, I am slightly increasing in words per day.

Here's to another 1000 posts!

Saturday: yuck

I haven't been feeling great this last week. Well, I guess I've only been feeling about 98%...not enough to normally complain about it, but enough to be annoyed. My stomach is off. While I can hope it's because I'm pregnant, it's more likely my body getting itself straightened out or stress. Especailly because it started I think before my body would even know I'm pregnant.

I remember not having happy periods before I went on the Pill (although I don't remember it starting this early in the cycle either). I am not looking forward to dealing with a few months of them.