Yesterday, I ran the lawn mower over my yard just to pick up leaves. Today, I shoveled maybe two tons of wet snow off my driveway and walk. To every neighbor who approached for small talk, I'd say, "Apparently raking season is over." They'd laugh, which gave me courage to repeat the line to the next one. A dog walker observed that if you don't like the weather in Minnesota, wait an hour. He was in Garrison Keillor's demographic group, age and race, but it wasn't him.
Just for shits and giggles, here is a math problem I helped the seventh grader with today. I don't think I had to work on problems like this till I was in at least eighth grade, maybe ninth or even tenth—too long ago to remember for sure.
Easy mistake: forgetting to change the direction of the inequality when multiplying both sides by a negative number. Gave her the tip of checking her work with an easy point, like (0, 0), to make sure she had identified the correct side of her graph. She said the teacher had already suggested that. I asked why in that case she hadn't done it. She said, "There's twelve more problems!"
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