Kill Blog #3

This rat was whole when I went to the bathroom. When I came out a few minutes later...it wasn't. At least I have definitively solved the mystery of what happens to the missing rodent parts: He eats them. When I moved him away from the guts so I could clean them up, he just moved to the body and started (gag) crunching bones.

Kill Blog #2

They produce a lot less blood and gore than your typical rodent, but dead birds are still lame because their little downy feathers get everywhere.  I think this little birdy just had his little birdy heart ripped out.

Damn it. I just swept and mopped that floor yesterday, psycho!

I should have suspected the kill would be waiting for me in the hall when I woke up to a pile of lovey pets on the bed. Homicidal kitty cats get really affectionate when they have death on the breath.

Kill Blog #1

A friend suggested that I start a kill blog for my sweet sociopath pets. Since I definitely get more death in my house than dates, it seems like a reasonably entertaining way to stave off writers' block. If you have a weak stomach or can't handle witnessing the circle of life in suburbia, you might just want to skip any Kill Blog posts, including this one. 

As I've mentioned before, I am blessed to have three very distinct funny, furry personalities in my home: one dog and two cats who take protecting the house from rodent infestation very seriously. The cats have access to come and go as they please, which means they sometimes often bring their "work" indoors. Tonight when I came home from a night out with my friend L, my dog was super excited to show me this dead mole in the bathroom. 

I'm not sure what the deal is with moles. I think the cats bring them in, kill them, decide they are too small to deal with, and stash them just under the dryer to torment the dog. This is the third one Lola has alerted me to in the past week. At least moles are teeny and rarely mutilated when I find them in the house. Birds and rodents on the other hand are usually a bit, um...messier.

I won't rehash all the former kills. There will be plenty more in the future, I'm sure. However, allow me to tell you about one particularly bloody weekend. It is kind of gross, but you have to be just a little impressed with the sheer volume and creativity.

Friday (The Trifecta)

• 6:30: Lola starts freaking out and begging to be let down off the bed. I’m pretty sure that means one of the cats has brought a gift and I don’t want to deal with it, so I let the dog down and pull the blanket over my head and pretend to sleep.
• 7:00: Whimpering and running around on the hardwood floors hasn’t stopped, so I get up to investigate.
• 7:02: Clean up rat head, rat tail, and random rat innards from the hallway. Let the dog outside. (#1) 
• 7:15: Dog won’t come back in, is trying frantically to get at something in/on/around the lawnmower. Cats are also lurking in the vicinity. I move the lawnmower all around to prove there is nothing there, but dog is not convinced.
• 7:25: Dog is losing her mind trying to dig under the lawnmower, so I turn it over to, once again, prove there is nothing there. Only there is. A freaking rat is clinging to the bottom. I run and grab a bag and broom.
• 7:26: As I try to gently extract the rat to relocate it to a safer home, the dog swoops in, plucks the rat up by the tail, starts shaking it like a squeaky toy, and runs triumphantly off to her hiding place under the porch swing. By the time I get across the yard, the rat is dead. Despite the fact that the cats make me deal with death almost daily, I am somehow totally traumatized to see my sweet fluffy lover dog take such glee in killing something right in front of me. (#2)
• Sometime that evening: Black kitty is playing with two halves of a rat in the hallway. (#3)

Saturday/Sunday (The Lesson)

My friend T called me on Saturday night and asked if I wanted to meet her and some friends for a drink. Since I hadn't yet changed into my sweats (you know I love them!), I decided that it would be just as easy to say yes as it would be to say no. I left the house around 9:00 and headed down to Ballard. I had a great time and for the first time in probably over a decade, I ended up staying out all night. 

When I arrived home at 8am, I noticed something seemed amiss. Nothing major, just a few papers strewn about, like the cats had gotten a little rambunctious. I let the dog out to pee and then started to head off to bed. However, I was stopped by the sight of my slippers where I'd left them in the middle of the living room. Only now, one of them was decorated with a rat foot, a rat tail, and a neat little package of rat organs. Do you understand what I am telling you? There was a little rodent still life artfully arranged on my slipper. I grabbed a paper towel and a grocery bag and leaned in to start the cleanup. It was then that I noticed the rat head, eye wide open, staring at me from INSIDE MY SLIPPER. (#4)

I get it, kitties. You are cute, furry, little four-legged mobsters. You leave me disgusting little messages to teach me not to spontaneously stay out all night. I'm just going to clean this up and go to bed...What the hell is that bird doing on top of the bookshelf?

In my exhaustion and shock over the slipper, I had failed to notice that the cats were both keenly focused on a little bird sitting on top of the bookshelf. I opened the door and the bird started to fly towards it, but the little black kitty jumped from the back of the couch, grabbed the bird in her mouth and carried it off under the bed. 

Luckily, the bird made its way to a corner behind the nightstand where I was able to retrieve it and release it outside. (#4.5) Later that evening, I caught black kitty once again playing with two halves of a rat in the hallway (#5.5). 

My garbage collectors must hate me. 

Root Ramblings

Have you ever noticed how many different uses there are for the word, "roots"? Yeah, me neither. Today, though, my mind started wandering, and that's where it landed. How many ways can you think of to use "roots" in a sentence? I'll give you a minute.... cue Jeopardy music...

Once you got started, you may have noticed that root definitions are kind of like roots themselves - branching, intertwining, going a lot deeper than you initially thought. I'm not going to bore you with a list of all the different definitions. I'm just going to bore you with a couple that jump out to me personally. If you want to abandon ship, now would be the time. Still here? Let's start rooting around with roots!

I'm pretty sure that when making a list, only my math teacher friends may have included a math definition. For the rest of you, bear with me; I'll make this as painless as possible. In math, "root" is used in a couple different ways. The root of a number is this radical value (pun fully intended) that when multiplied by itself a certain number of times creates another number: the square of a square root, the cube of a cube root, and so on. The roots of a polynomial (also called "solutions" or "zeros") are the values that make the function evaluate to zero. Visually, you can picture roots as the spots where the graph of a function crosses the x-axis.

Since not all functions cross the x-axis, not all roots are real. In fact, lots of numbers and polynomials have imaginary roots. That means there are a lot of imaginary zeros that are really solutions, even though they aren't real solutions. Confused yet? It might start getting complex (another pun!) here, so I'm just going to let you ponder this: The number of complex (including imaginary) roots is infinitely greater than the infinite amount of real ones.

This whole roots thing started as I was in the umpteenth hour of pulling grass and weeds from my flower beds. The grass had really taken root during the course of a particularly wet winter and spring, so I had plenty of time to ponder grass roots as I tried to eradicate them (quite unsuccessfully, I'm sure). Here's the thing about grass roots: they form incredibly strong networks. Spend a few hours trying to infiltrate the network and you will have a new appreciation for the concept of a "grassroots" organization. The roots may not run terribly deep, but they spread and interweave in a way that makes every individual blade a vital, seemingly invincible part of the entire system. (GeekMercy here for you less garden-y and more Star Trek-y folks: I imagine grass roots are something like the Borg collective.)

http://www.ck12.org/book/CK-12-Biology-Concepts/r26/section/9.14/

Taproots are much more solitary creatures than grass roots, and probably even more frustrating. If you have ever tried to remove a dandelion root from your lawn or garden, you know taproots. Taproots are super deep and strong, and virtually impossible to remove completely. I am pretty sure that every dandelion and starchy rumex root that I've left mangled in the soil sprouts three new plants, purely out of spite. Taproots can bite me.

Is there anyone that you keep in your life simply because you have a long history (i.e. deep roots) together? It might be a childhood friend or a significant other, but it's someone with whom you no longer share anything other than tradition. That person is your taproot. You know that the garden of your life would be a lot less messy without that person, but experience has proven that it's a lot harder to get rid of them than you thought. You can't just cut them off because they keep coming back. I think if you really want to get rid of that person, you have to treat them like a taproot. Get your hands dirty and dig really deep to sever the root, making sure to get all the little secondary roots too. It's hard. I mean really really hard. After digging for a while, you start to think that it would just be easier to tolerate the dandelion. It is familiar and not so bad really, so you decide to just leave it alone. Next thing you know, you are overrun with dandelions. Not me. I'm on an emotional taproot eradication campaign, clearing the weeds out again so the lovely things that I've planted have room to grow.

I could go on with more examples of roots. I'm pretty satisfied with my metaphor, though, so I'm going to stop while I'm ahead. Besides, I just spotted a rogue dandelion in my hosta that must be dispatched. Until next time, happy weeding!

Real-World Problems

One of my jobs, the one for which I am certified and the one that is my calling, is Math Teacher. When I was offered a full-time position as a professional Data Jockey, I accepted for the salary (after doing the math, it was virtually impossible to say "no'), but I kept a part-time position as an online math teacher so I could still feel like I was performing my math mitzvah. Teacher discounts at office supply stores, craft stores (Michaels!), and J. Crew are just an added perk. Teachers: Here's a list of all the other teacher discounts that you didn't know existed: http://www.giftcardgranny.com/blog/the-complete-list-of-66-teacher-discounts/.

This year, I switched my Algebra 2 and Geometry classes to a Common Core curriculum. Much of the CC content is the same as our previous curriculum, but one major improvement is the quality of the written assignments. Our old curriculum had a single written assignment at the end of each unit, consisting of 20 five-point problems that were basically just straight computation tasks. The new CC problems, though, are far more interesting and teach valuable life lessons. Here are a few of my favorites: How to locate keys accidentally dropped off leaning towers in Pisa, Montreal, or Abu Dhabi; securing a sponsor and entering a sailboat race in San Francisco or Australia; how to make a 3-D printer profitable; calculating the largest TV that you can buy based on your car's trunk size; and being a crime scene investigator. Regarding that last one: No worries. The cow wasn't injured and the driver who swerved to miss her on Highway 2 passed a field sobriety test. Even if you aren't a math geek, you have to admit that these Real-World Problems are kind of fun, right? Right? At the very least, you must agree that they are more interesting and teach more relevant skills than "calculate the volume of a sphere with a circumference of 50π."

Written tasks can be a great way for students to demonstrate a plethora of skills and conceptual understanding...provided that the problems are well-written, engaging, and complex enough to justify a student's written explanation. I know my math teacher friends can attest to how difficult it is to actually create a good problem, so here are a couple of my own to help you out. Feel free to adapt and use them in your own classrooms/lives. Have fun!


1) MathMercy's firewood guy called her out of the blue to ask her out on a date. (Perhaps he felt guilty for delivering the firewood that she was carrying when she tripped and landed on her face back in December.) MathMercy remembered that he was a nice guy and she didn't have anything else going on that afternoon, so she agreed to coffee and a chat in the park. During their conversation, Firewood Guy mentioned that he came from a very tall family, and that at 6 feet 8 inches tall, he wasn't even the tallest. MathMercy comes from considerably shorter stock, and just happens to be the shortest in her short family, at only 5 feet 2 inches tall. Although she is used to being the shortest person in a group, she is pretty sure she has never met anyone quite that tall. She wonders what it would be like to always be looking down at people instead of looking up at them. a) How does MathMercy's height compare to Firewood Guy's height? b) How tall is someone who is proportionally shorter than MathMercy? c) MathMercy's neck is getting sore from looking up all the time, and she realizes that if she places a mirror in just the right spot between herself and Firewood Guy, they can hold a conversation by looking down at each other's reflection in the mirror. If the mirror is 5 feet 2 inches away from Firewood Guy, what must be the distance from the mirror to MathMercy? 

2) MathMercy has observed that the more of something she wants, the less she gets, and the less she wants, the more she gets. Identify the type of variation and sketch a graph demonstrating the relation.

I have created a different sort of problem for myself that I am, unfortunately, unable to convert to an equation and solve. Probably shouldn't say anything, but if I don't it will feel like I am harboring some sneaky activity that I shouldn't be messing with. I agreed to let my ex take my dog and me out to the park a couple of times. I thought it would be harmless if I stood my ground and gently but firmly kept it at a purely platonic, non-romantic level. Maybe we can just be friends, right? Wrong. He isn't ready and I'm not equipped to keep shutting him down. It's too much...I don't know...feeling about something I simply don't feel.

Just to complicate (or perhaps simplify?) things: I have been quite honestly telling the ex that I really just like first dates and that I have no desire to date anyone consistently. Then, I end up meeting someone that I am really looking forward to seeing again. Stupid universe! And that's enough about that.