Category Archives: Just For Fun

That’s my (youngest) boy!

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Jeff is a biostatistician on the faculty at Columbia. I try to understand what he does, and sometimes I sort of get it, but I can’t exactly explain it.

He goes to conferences to present papers often. I’ve never seen him speak until now. He gave a talk in Banff at the Frontiers in Functional Data Analysis Conference a few days ago and it was recorded. He said I could share the link with you!

Click here to watch Jeff’s talk. I find it interesting that it is the norm for a speaker to speak fast at these things—they have a time limit and a lot to fit in. I’m proud of the fact that Jeff is clear, even when he’s talking fast. I don’t think I could do it.

Here Jeff is, younger. It’s fun to show him in front of a quilt-in-progress on my design wall. I’m lucky that my boys (and my DIL) all love my quilts. And it’s interesting to me that they like different quilts so everyone get to be happy.

jeff-2

FYI: That quilt went to American Patchwork & Quilting. They patterned it, and they own the quilt.

This and that…

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First, let me say thank you to all of you who sent kind thoughts my way over the loss of Emma (our cat, in case you missed my last post). We miss her, but life does go on.

I am leaving today to visit the Parker County Quilt Guild in Weatherford, TX. It’s close enough to drive which is nice. Before leaving I thought I ‘d leave you with this. I ran across it on facebook the other day and it made me laugh out loud. It’s not a new video so you may have seen it before. Either way, it is definitely grin-inducing…

National pi day!

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When did you last think of pi? Not this kind of pie…

Pies

Pi Day is coming on Saturday, March 14.It is celebrated on March 14th (3/14) every year, around the world. Who knew?

Pi (Greek letter “π”) is the symbol used in mathematics to represent a constant — the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — which is approximately 3.14159. (Remember pi-r-square?)

This year, Pi Day is an “Epic Pi Day”. On Saturday morning, 3.14.15 at 9:26:53 AM, the date/time corresponds to the first 10 digits of pi (π = 3.141592653). This happens only once per century – truly a “once-in-a-lifetime event” for most people. I’ve set my phone alarm so that I can see it happen.
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I am away from home, teaching at the Gulf States Quilting Association Seminar in Metairie, LA. Steve will be home with friends celebrating a Pi Day breakfast of pancakes and sausage (both round, in honor of pi), with eggs and champagne. I will think of them fondly when my alarm goes off in class :-).

My friend, Elizabeth, a fellow pi(e) enthusiast, has found a few fun pi facts that she said I could share with you:

  • A circular room in the Palais de la Découverte science museum in Paris is called the pi room. The room has 707 digits of pi inscribed on its wall (though there is an error beginning at the 528th digit, thanks to William Shanks’ erroneous calculations).
  • In an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, Spock commands an evil computer to compute pi to the last digit—which it cannot do, of course, because, as Spock explains, “the value of pi is a transcendental figure without resolution.” I remember this episode!
  • Givenchy’s PI cologne for men is advertised as a scent that “embodies the confidence of genius.”
  • Both MIT and the Georgia Institute of Technology have cheers that include “3.14159.”

If I was going to be home, I’d make one of these. It’s probably good I’m not home.

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So what if the parents-to-be live someplace else!

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Our friends, Karen and Hunt, are about to be grandparents. Nan, a friend, and I wanted to host a baby shower but the parents-to-be live on the coast and could not come back. What to do?

If you can let go of the idea that the parents-to-be have to be in attendance at the baby shower, you can have a shower for the grandparents who are, after all, your actual friends. And, since we are all grown-ups and kids are nowhere in site, it can be a grown-up party! I decorated with toys. Cars, blocks, etc. were all over the place…

CoraDee-Blocks

Since the actual baby was not in attendance, and since we thought Karen and Hunt might need some baby-holding practice, we gave them a baby doll to hold during the shower. They had fun with the ‘baby’ and even shared her!

Karen-Hunt-Doll

Notice the hats? Hunt made them from tissue paper from the gifts :-).

We didn’t play baby shower games because no one we know likes baby shower games and we didn’t want to inflict them our friends. I did make up some pages for attendees to write parental advice on that were later spiral bound for the parents along with blank pages for them to write on if they want to. Here are some of the pages…

ParentingTips

There was food and drink! Did I take photos of it all? No, I did not. I did take a pic of the coconut cupcakes…

CoconutCupcakes

All in all, it was a terrific baby shower!

Put foil in your wallet…

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Millions of us now have new credit cards. In fact, I seem to be get one at least every 3 months because somewhere I have used my card has been hacked. It’s gotten to the point that it is no longer unusual. My newest VISA came with the chip and I thought that that was a step in the right direction, security-wise.

I learned something last night from ABC World News tonight and that is that those chips can be hacked by someone with a cellphone loaded with a credit-card-hacking app. The cell phone has to be close, but it happens. You can get a fancy wallet that blocks the cellphone or you can cover your card with foil!

FoilInWallet

I put a folded sleeve of foil in the pocket with my chip-enhanced credit card. I did the same for Steve. I had foil left over so I made myself a foil-dollar-bill and that will live in my wallet, on the outer edge. Can’t hurt, right?

So, in case you missed this news and in case you want a cheap fix, there you go. You can think of me when you look at the foil in your wallet :-).