stubbed toes and mud pies

ninnymary said:

I have no frogs. Darn city living. Lol

Mary

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there aren't as many frogs (and toads) around here any more either since the mosquito control people have been draining standing water of any kind that they can find plus the sprays and other poisons they use to kill mosquito larva.

stayed up way too late last night, then woke up at 3am because i was so excited at the idea of taking out the trash. i came in from getting that done and put some music on that i've not listened to in a long time and there were a few songs from yesterday that were going to play first. well, i fell asleep so quick that i never heard a single note of the music i wanted to really hear. so now i'm playing it again...

the sun is out and it is bright in here, but wow do i just want to go right back to sleep again...

as for why i stayed up so late i was very happy to have finished mosty editing a file of almost 3000 transactions and wanted to see how they would integrate with my other stuff i've already got entered... a huge puzzle of many parts now coming together some more and i have to go back and find all the stuff i put in that now has to come out. and then scanning the results and noticing all the details i missed and some mistakes made and needed to be tracked down, which means i got to do yet more editing and then... it's very exciting stuff, well at least to me, because part of it is the history of it all and so as i'm going along i'm seeing parts of my past and thinking about it all as i'm editing. this file though only goes back to the mid-80s so a few years into the college degree adventures and working and then it comes to the future almost 20 years later so there's the beginning of the Library job plus the short stint at another company (working two jobs at once, that was nuts and i got rather burned out by it but that wasn't why i quit the one job and that's another story i'm not gonna tell here now...)...

hot chocolate would be nice. i don't think i have enough gumption to get up and do that...

some people like to do visual puzzles. i'm not much into sitting, but i can sprawl with the best of them.

i'm closing in on fixing the worst of this recent round of stitching 3000 ancient transactions together with the rest of my transactions i've already balanced - but there's still big gaps i have to plug in yet - i have the rest to do... 20 more years of this one account and then 40 years of another and chunks of others too, but i'm closing in on finally having as much of it in as i can get, and then the more nitpicky stuff can happen later as i comb through some old papers for whatever details i can add - a likely next winter project.

it's a math puzzle really and the nice thing about doing it right is that you know it is as correct as you can make it when things balance as they should. there's zero rounding errors. the FUDGE is clearly labled (i call it SLUSH ), but for a while i was calling it COCOA. and then there is Equity:Opening-Balances... as time goes on and i get further along this amount keeps changing and it's interesting. what it really means is that these are the numbers that must be used to get about 100,000 transactions to perfectly balance. that is they are assumptions about the degree of COCOA or SLUSH in the puzzle. they are 100% correct assumptions which makes them rather golden in terms of proofs or mathematics.

perhaps you didn't think that accounting could be philosophical? at heart math and logic really are philosophical because it can bring clarity about what you assume you know and the degree of how much you don't really know, but at least you can spell it out and put up signs "THERE BE DRAGONS!" or in my case COCOA or SLUSH.

yesterday Mom actually got outside and did some gardening. i had an appointment or i would have been out there with her. removing some daffodils from a spot where i don't want them and she doesn't either. i was surprised she even did it, but plenty more to go.

today is supposed to be nice enough that i will be out to help and perhaps we can get most of it done along that one edge. the urgency is that we're due for rains tonight (and a few days after) and that edge is part of flow control for water draining from the front so it needs to be back in place and i can do some transplants of the thyme too (which is used to keep the garden soil from washing away too quickly)...

gardening season begins!

flowerbug said:

... math ... can bring clarity about what you assume you know and the degree of how much you don't really know

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NO, NO!!!
Say it ain't so!!!!

we have our very own Stonehenge (we call it Igor) many years ago Mom built a pedestal, it had a ceramic frog on it for a few years but eventually we did something that involved cement and the left-over cement became a blob and then she attached various things including small mirrors.

around every spring and fall equinox there are some days when the sun beam will line up on this basket.



you can see a snow covered Igor in the back of this picture (behind the boy).



oh, here is a less snow covered Igor.

flowerbug said:

we have our very own Stonehenge (we call it Igor) many years ago Mom built a pedestal, it had a ceramic frog on it for a few years but eventually we did something that involved cement and the left-over cement became a blob and then she attached various things including small mirrors.

Click to expand...

i had to update the creation story of Igor. as i'd written it first you'd get the impression it was all done in one shot, but that's rarely how much gets done here - instead it iterates and evolves and so to that decoration.

the decorations with things attached to them often have things falling off, bluejays and crows seem to like the shiny bits. also pieces of glass of various shapes and kinds can wander off even if the marbles wander a bit. the other day i found a part of a piece of a glass decoration in the middle of the driveway. yes, birdie moved that one...

i'm worried that if that mirror ever falls off i'll never be able to get it back on just as it is...

So, the mirror in the garden ..

. reflects sunlight at the equinox through the window ..

. onto the wall of the house hitting the basket. Have I got that right? Sun/Mirror/Window/Basket ... Have you thought of replacing the basket with a second mirror?

digitS' said:

So, the mirror in the garden ..

. reflects sunlight at the equinox through the window ..

. onto the wall of the house hitting the basket. Have I got that right? Sun/Mirror/Window/Basket ...

Click to expand...

almost right. it is not lined up exactly on the equinox but the number of days before and after (the picture has the date and time in the file name (which may be off by an hour and some other fudge factor due to the camera not being connected to the internet for time synching)).

the wild thing to me is that it manages to go through the entire house to the opposite wall (past the central stone fireplace). none of this was planned directly with the equinox in mind.

there are some more recent ideas about how Stonehenge itself may have come about and become what it is today. based upon the geology of that area and a specific feature of the landscape which was noticed and then built upon and then...

i like to think that what we've done is something similar in a more insignificant way.

digitS' said:

Have you thought of replacing the basket with a second mirror?

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no, we'd have no use for a mirror over the refridgerator. despite the birdbrain i'm not birdkin directly even if i think that is really the only way to fly.