How my mind works, or what I think about in the shower

When I was a kid I had a small paper route. Now I liked the money and the exercise, but the monotony of it got to me sometimes. Everyday when I went out I would calculate as I went along how much I had left. It would go something like this, "I've delivered 3/21 papers. That reduces down to 1/7. I am 1/7th of the way done. I have 6/7th of the way to go." Each paper I would figure out the fraction of what I had done, and the fraction of what I had left. It kept me entertained while I did the route. But you can imagine that doing that almost every day of the year for almost 5 years made me really good at reducing fractions and finding common multiples and stuff like that.

So a couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in the shower thinking, "I wonder how old John will be this year on his birthday... oh yeah, 32. Let's see. 32 isn't a prime number. It reduces down to 2^5. It would be great if we had someone that was 2. Oh yeah, Ruth is turning 2. This is great! John is 2^5 and Ruth is 2^1. We've got to have an exponents party. John will love this. I'll throw a surprise party." I was actually laughing out loud. I know, I'm weird. But John loves me.

Well, after further considering, I decided I could never pull off a surprise party without John finding out so I told him my idea. He did love it. He's probably the only husband around who would think that was great. But that's why I love him. He loves math and I love math (to a point).

Anyway so we sent out these invitations and had a grand old time. We saw lots of people we hadn't seen in a long time and the girls got to play for a long time.

And that's an insight into my thinking patterns that you probably didn't need but there you are.