Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Smiley Learns About Riddles

Smiley has been introduced to riddles by the delightful library book Clever Rachel by Debby Waldman.

One of the book's riddles is: "Impossible to touch but easy to feel, it's sweet as honey and hard to conceal.  What is it?"  The answer is love.

Smiley wanted to answer the riddles as soon as they were stated in the book.
Me: What do we call things you feel?

Smiley: Feelings.

Me: Are feelings something you can touch?

Smiley: No.

Me: What is a feeling?

Smiley: Being scared.

Me: Is being scared sweet like honey?

Smiley: No.

Me: What is a nice feeling that is sweet like honey?

Smiley: The kissing feeling.
So he does not fully have the word love in his vocabulary, but I think he solved the riddle.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Gallant Teething Again

Saturday morning Gallant got his eleventh tooth.

For many months he had four top incisors, two bottom incisors, and four molars: nicely balanced.

Now he has his lower left lateral incisor.  He let me play with his gums.  No sign of anything other imminent developments.

Election Telephone Silliness

I have received three amusing phone calls about the upcoming elections.

Two were simply routine phone calls from Democratic supporters.  These were amusing because they focused on re-electing President Obama instead of other Democratic candidates or issues.  I find it almost unfathomable that Oregon's electoral college votes will not go to the Democratic presidential candidate.  But apparently the polls show that outcome is no longer certain: currently President Obama leads Mitt Romney at 47% to 41%, but eight percent of the voters are undecided and the poll margin of error is five percent.

The other was a call from Kate Brown herself, who after some small talk asked for a campaign contribution of ten thousand dollars.  I told her thank you for the compliment, but I certainly do not have that kind of money floating around.  From what list did she get my name?  She did not know.  Since most political donations are public record and I have never made any donations more than twenty-five dollars it seems that someone earned a few bucks selling our incumbent Secretary of State a bogus list of likely donors to call.


Someone asked me to share this infographic about sugar on my blog.  I might as well as an excuse to archive some statistics, which can always be useful on future Math 25 tests.

(Be careful trusting statistics.  That infographic claims Americans get most of their sugar from soft drinks, but a recent Wellness Letter stated it was from grains.  Americans simply eat so much cereal, bread, baked goods, and so forth that the total sugar from that category exceeds soft drinks.)

Talking about sugar also provides an excuse to link to Nathen's blog post about chocolate bars and sugar content, and the Wellness Letter writeup.  My preferred low-sugar chocolate bar is the Dagoba Eclipse with 87% cocoa.