Wow, I can't believe I've ignored doing this for almost a year! I suppose the biggest news is that I got married four weeks ago yesterday. My wife's name is Erin and she is a first year graduate student at U of L in the Women's and Gender Studies Masters Program. I finished my first year as a Math grad student and got to teach my very own course this summer (it was a lot of work, but a great experience). Erin and I both start class tomorrow--we are excited and nervous.
Those are the biggest pieces of news...now onto some math: I wanted to include at least a little math, since this is a math blog, but since I've been running around getting married and moving to a new apartment (its very nice), there hasn't been much math of note. So, I'll share this interesting occurrence that happens to involve numbers.
Yesterday, Erin and I went to Bed Bath and Beyond for two reasons: we had to return some pots and pans that we got duplicates of from our wedding registry, and we had to pick up a bridal shower gift for Erin's friend whose wedding is in October. The cashier told us to leave the pots at the desk and do our shopping, and then she'd do the return and the sale at the same time.
We picked out the items we wanted to give Erin's friend, and we estimated it to be about $43-$45 (about how much we wanted to spend.) I didn't know how much the pots and pans were, but Erin wanted to get a Yankee Candle (awesome things!) for ourselves as well. We picked out a nice fragrance, then took all of our stuff up to the counter and the cashier rang us up and announced the total we owed: $0.98! Maybe not the most amazing thing in the world, but I thought it was pretty cool that we had just happened to buy a candle that brought our total to almost exactly one dollar more that what we returned.
A funny postscript to the rather mediocre story: The cashier wrapped our glass Yankee Candle in paper, then dropped it in a bag for us. We were all surprised to hear a crash from the floor--yes, the candle had broken, but it was because the bag had a giant slash through both sides of it. The cashier almost let a string of curses fly, telling us that whoever opened the box of plastic bags was going to get punched in the mouth. Apparently someone was a little overexcited with the Exacto knife and had sliced through quite a few bags when opening the box. We got a new candle, a new bag, and left the store only $0.98 poorer. Yay!
Well, I'm off to get a good night sleep before the first day of school tomorrow!
Happy mathing!
