It is Our Smiley Lady, Ruth’s Blog: When You’re Kind of a Number Nut

When You’re Kind of a Number Nut
When you’re kind of a number nut, you enjoy things like when your odometer hits landmark combinations or when the day’s date is a good poker hand. I remember back in Dec. 1987 thinking women getting pregnant this month have a shot at giving birth 8/8/88. Then go figure, who gets born on 8/8/88? Princess Fergie’s daughter. A princess and she gets the coolest birth date. Hope she feels gratitude for being such a lucky duck! So in Feb of ’11 were people shooting for a baby on 11/11/11? Last month were there couples hoping to conceive a baby for the upcoming 12/12/12? I’m betting there were!
In my family we’re all number nuts. My brother once bought a frozen turkey not because he wanted a turkey but because its weight was 12.34 lbs.. He figured how could he pass that by.
This obsession with noticing numbers was taught to us early. Our dad would calculate the distance a trip would take, then divide the mileage so that as we drove he could announce, “Just passing 1/6 of the trip done.”
Years later, as an adult, I asked my dad to figure out the odds for various poker hands if one played with m&m’s. Of course you can’t make all the hands since all you have to work with is colors. But you can imagine a full house, say 3 red and 2 green. It ends up that the worst hand in regular poker is one of the best in m&m’s poker. The “nothing” hand, that is no pairs just 5 m&m’s all of a different color, actually beats the m&m’s full house!
m&m’s Smiley
Noticing numbers, enjoying the light, hearing puns in normal conversation, closing your eyes to enhance the flavor of something delicious, hovering over the toaster to enjoy the heat and the smells, really getting into scratching a mosquito bite, lingering over the sensual feeling of the bar of soap on your face, getting a good laugh at the comical freeze frame when you pause the VCR, brushing your teeth because it really does feel awfully good if you bother to pay attention and notice . . .
Decide to notice! Life is really pretty darned great.
Smile. Be Happy.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.
