USMB Coffee Shop IV

[Kat]

Y'all keep your fingers crossed! I got "the call" today. Yes, a unit will be available within the next month..maybe sometime late July. It depends on a few factors.

But..it looks like...we get to go home! Soon!

Yayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Kat]

Today was mostly a day of rest for both of us, both too worn out to do much of anything except veg. I even took a 2 hour nap but still feel like I could sleep for a couple of days straight.

I sure know that feeling.

 

[Kat]

Has it really been 2 weeks?
Wow!
Anyhow, hopefully I'll catch up a bit at a time. I'll try to catch y'all up a bit first.
I've graduated from 99% wheel chair to 90% crutches and then to 75% cane and 25% can't find the damned thing so I walk un-aided.
The leg still swells up if I'm upright more than a few hours but the bone pain is gone. The gabapentin for the neuropathy is losing it's affectiveness but I have found CBD oil that I take orally and in a vape. I am 99% pain free if I keep my load where it needs to be. It ain't cheap, but it does work for me.

A TV commercial that warned patients to notify their doctor if they've received an organ transplant got me thinking about 2 women who have been very important to me; one a donor and one a recipient of a liver transplant.
I wrote this, obviously, to the woman who has rebuilt her life after selling everything she had built to pay for a new liver. It's a tale of two remarkable women. Forgive me if I omit identifiers.

Jamie
I was just laying here, thinking about getting dressed and doing something productive and at essentially the same time, you and Maryanne came to mind.
Maryanne was a hippy/flower child until around 30 when she was abducted and raped, tied up and thrown in a pond. She was able to somehow kick herself to shore. (much like Jamie gave everything to survive)
Her whole focus changed. She no longer was the shy demure stay at home mother. In 2 years, she had a black belt in Tai Quando and packed a .44 magnum. Hell she even bought a couple of bras and got a job
I met her just after the rape and she and her husband and my wife and I became very close friends.
As Maryanne became emotionally stronger, her physical and inner beauty and new found confidence caused me to fall in love with her. The problem was we were all best friends and she and I were in love with our spouses.
We spoke of it once, kissed once and vowed to never go any farther.
Fast forward 5 years Her marriage was stressed by a severely handicapped son and her confidence. Her husband Frank would have preferred she had stayed the easily controlled flower child
Maryanne filed for divorce and she and the kids moved out. Frank was livid. The Italian macho shit would not allow him to accept failure at anything, much less lose his family.
At this point, Their 2 children are 16 (daughter) and 13 (son) The boy could not walk or stand speak, feed himself. He basically sat in a wheel chair and made sounds. He did respond and would laugh at childish jokes... think a 3 year old.
Maryanne brought the kids to the house once a week and stayed while they visited with their father. The visits mostly became an argument between the parents.
Well, one Wednesday, Maryanne got to the house just before Frank got in from work. Always cautious, Maryanne brought Adrian inside and asked Lisa to move her car to the end of the drive so she could leave if Frank went off the deep end.
Well, he did. While the only witness able to communicate was outside moving cars in the drive, there was a single gunshot. My love, my soulmate was shot in her left temple.
She was declared brain dead and kept on life support while transplant teams were assembled and recipients readied. I was actually the last person to say goodbye before she was taken to surgery.
My wife and I were broken. We left the hospital and went straight to our pastor. She was the associate pastor and a very compassionate woman roughly our age. Anyway, we were maybe 1/2 hour into our visit, when her husband, a pastor in another church came running into her office shouting "Jerry got a heart!" Yes the congregant of one pastor received the gift of life from the woman mourned by the congregants of another.
Just like Maryanne. She was always in the right place at the right time; for others, but not herself.
35 years later, I still mourn.

How heartbreaking.

 

[Montrovant]

I think a big part of my problem with this algebra class is that I haven't done any algebra in a quarter century or more. I don't have the base to work off of, I'd long since forgotten all of my HS algebra.

There are some things I'm still having the damnedest time trying to remember. However, I just got done running through our practice exam, and I ended up getting 36/44, which works out to a B. A couple of my wrong answers were actually just typos, but I have to expect that will happen on the exam tomorrow.

Hopefully the actual exam will go similarly to the practice test. I'll try to go over some of the parts that give me problems before the test tomorrow. It's frustrating when I get to a question and completely draw a blank as to the process of solving, but if that only happens for a few as it did on the practice test, I should be good.

Even if you tried today to pass algebra, calculus -- the genius at Ed schools have abstracted those things so far, they are unrecognizable today. Equations are "Number Sentences". Because well --- the word Equation was too threatening. And they never teach the fundamental ONE WAY to solve anything that ALWAYS works. They confuse kids with 8 ways to do long division or 3 ways to find the roots of a polynomial. The emphasis on "estimation" blows their minds. Especially on tests when they get marked down if their "estimate" is more accurate than the teacher wanted.

Wife and I have been asked to tutor several children of friends. We can straighten them out in literally 2 or 3 weeks by showing them the BEST way first. They are so hopelessly frustrated by all the attempts to make math "friendlier" that they just give up.. .

My teacher has given a couple of examples of the way he prefers doing things, such as using the bottoms-up method for a quadratic equation rather than the quadratic formula, but there hasn't really been much of that sort of confusing mish-mash of methods. It's just been trying to remember all of the different situations and the associated methods that trips me up; I remember the quadratic formula, for example, but sometimes forget that when you have an equation like x^4 + 5x^2 +20 = 0, you first need to solve u = x^2, then x^2 = that solution set. Further, in one of the practice questions like that, when my answers were the square root of fractions, I forgot to simplify the answer so that the denominator is no longer a square root. I understand how it works, but forget how it is done or that it needs to be done.

I don't know what it's like in HS, of course. It's been way too long since I was in HS to remember what it was like then, and I don't know how much it might have changed now.

 

[gallantwarrior]

Y'all keep your fingers crossed! I got "the call" today. Yes, a unit will be available within the next month..maybe sometime late July. It depends on a few factors.

But..it looks like...we get to go home! Soon!

Crossing my fingers for you

 

[Foxfyre]

I think a big part of my problem with this algebra class is that I haven't done any algebra in a quarter century or more. I don't have the base to work off of, I'd long since forgotten all of my HS algebra.

There are some things I'm still having the damnedest time trying to remember. However, I just got done running through our practice exam, and I ended up getting 36/44, which works out to a B. A couple of my wrong answers were actually just typos, but I have to expect that will happen on the exam tomorrow.

Hopefully the actual exam will go similarly to the practice test. I'll try to go over some of the parts that give me problems before the test tomorrow. It's frustrating when I get to a question and completely draw a blank as to the process of solving, but if that only happens for a few as it did on the practice test, I should be good.

Even if you tried today to pass algebra, calculus -- the genius at Ed schools have abstracted those things so far, they are unrecognizable today. Equations are "Number Sentences". Because well --- the word Equation was too threatening. And they never teach the fundamental ONE WAY to solve anything that ALWAYS works. They confuse kids with 8 ways to do long division or 3 ways to find the roots of a polynomial. The emphasis on "estimation" blows their minds. Especially on tests when they get marked down if their "estimate" is more accurate than the teacher wanted.

Wife and I have been asked to tutor several children of friends. We can straighten them out in literally 2 or 3 weeks by showing them the BEST way first. They are so hopelessly frustrated by all the attempts to make math "friendlier" that they just give up.. .

I do tutoring too though primarily in reading, writing, and subjects that require those skills--literature, history, etc. If we are into basic math though, I warn the teacher or parent that I am old school and I'll teach them how to get the answer. But if they want the problem worked in the new math way, they'll have to get another teacher.

"New math" was still very new when our kids started school. When I enrolled our oldest in first grade, we attended the parent/teacher orientation and had 'new math' described to us. I asked if I could buy a textbook to learn it and she held up a massive tomb approximating War and Peace plus Les Miserables combined. I asked if that would take the kids all the way through school and she said, "Oh no, this is just First Grade."

Thank God both the kids had strong aptitude in math and I didn't need to tutor.

 

[Foxfyre]

Our daughter had no problem with highschool math and the requisite college math, but didn't need any advanced math for her major. Our son, however, did have to have advanced math for an engineering degree. And his primary complaint was trying to understand the math teachers, brilliant and competent but almost all from Asia and English was definitely their second language.

At least there wouldn't be that problem with an on line course.

 

[Dajjal]

Our daughter had no problem with highschool math and the requisite college math, but didn't need any advanced math for her major. Our son, however, did have to have advanced math for an engineering degree. And his primary complaint was trying to understand the math teachers, brilliant and competent but almost all from Asia and English was definitely their second language.

At least there wouldn't be that problem with an on line course.

I tried to study electronics in the 1960s at night school, but I could not do the math's so I dropped out.
It took another ten years for me to get back into electronics, and I had to go to night school for two years studying math's before I passed the entrance exams for a full time government course in electronics. I did one year of training and got my city and guilds in radio television and electronics. I went to work as an engineer and worked in the trade for ten years. In all that time of repairing equipment, I don't recall ever having to use a single equation.

 

[Foxfyre]

Our daughter had no problem with highschool math and the requisite college math, but didn't need any advanced math for her major. Our son, however, did have to have advanced math for an engineering degree. And his primary complaint was trying to understand the math teachers, brilliant and competent but almost all from Asia and English was definitely their second language.

At least there wouldn't be that problem with an on line course.

I tried to study electronics in the 1960s at night school, but I could not do the math's so I dropped out.
It took another ten years for me to get back into electronics, and I had to go to night school for two years studying math's before I passed the entrance exams for a full time government course in electronics. I did one year of training and got my city and guilds in radio television and electronics. I went to work as an engineer and worked in the trade for ten years. In all that time of repairing equipment, I don't recall ever having to use a single equation.

Yes there are so many things that we learn that we never have reason to use. I have never once been asked to recite a passage from Colerige's "The Ancient Mariner" or Scene 1 of Act IV of "MacBeth" (the famous witches scene) or Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" or translate a passage of Beowolf, but I had to memorize or accomplish all. But I am not sorry that I am familiar with those things. They have come up on Trivial Pursuit questions and such at times.

And I honestly have never had to come up with the square root of the national debt or anything like that, but I know what a square root is.

So yes, some knowledge we will never use in any necessary or practical way, but somehow having or being exposed to that knowledge enriches or expands us as humans. And perhaps expands our intuitive powers as well.

 

[Dajjal]

I have recently taken to trying to remember the names of actors, when I see their faces on TV. Sometimes I know their name must be in my brain somewhere, because I know that as soon as I hear the name I will recognize it. But I cannot for the life of me, remember the name. Then, suddenly, it sometimes pops into my mind.

I figure my brain has a lot stored in it that I simply can't immediately remember, and I am trying to practice accessing it.

 

[Ernie S.]

Has it really been 2 weeks?
Wow!
Anyhow, hopefully I'll catch up a bit at a time. I'll try to catch y'all up a bit first.
I've graduated from 99% wheel chair to 90% crutches and then to 75% cane and 25% can't find the damned thing so I walk un-aided.
The leg still swells up if I'm upright more than a few hours but the bone pain is gone. The gabapentin for the neuropathy is losing it's affectiveness but I have found CBD oil that I take orally and in a vape. I am 99% pain free if I keep my load where it needs to be. It ain't cheap, but it does work for me.

A TV commercial that warned patients to notify their doctor if they've received an organ transplant got me thinking about 2 women who have been very important to me; one a donor and one a recipient of a liver transplant.
I wrote this, obviously, to the woman who has rebuilt her life after selling everything she had built to pay for a new liver. It's a tale of two remarkable women. Forgive me if I omit identifiers.

Jamie
I was just laying here, thinking about getting dressed and doing something productive and at essentially the same time, you and Maryanne came to mind.
Maryanne was a hippy/flower child until around 30 when she was abducted and raped, tied up and thrown in a pond. She was able to somehow kick herself to shore. (much like Jamie gave everything to survive)
Her whole focus changed. She no longer was the shy demure stay at home mother. In 2 years, she had a black belt in Tai Quando and packed a .44 magnum. Hell she even bought a couple of bras and got a job
I met her just after the rape and she and her husband and my wife and I became very close friends.
As Maryanne became emotionally stronger, her physical and inner beauty and new found confidence caused me to fall in love with her. The problem was we were all best friends and she and I were in love with our spouses.
We spoke of it once, kissed once and vowed to never go any farther.
Fast forward 5 years Her marriage was stressed by a severely handicapped son and her confidence. Her husband Frank would have preferred she had stayed the easily controlled flower child
Maryanne filed for divorce and she and the kids moved out. Frank was livid. The Italian macho shit would not allow him to accept failure at anything, much less lose his family.
At this point, Their 2 children are 16 (daughter) and 13 (son) The boy could not walk or stand speak, feed himself. He basically sat in a wheel chair and made sounds. He did respond and would laugh at childish jokes... think a 3 year old.
Maryanne brought the kids to the house once a week and stayed while they visited with their father. The visits mostly became an argument between the parents.
Well, one Wednesday, Maryanne got to the house just before Frank got in from work. Always cautious, Maryanne brought Adrian inside and asked Lisa to move her car to the end of the drive so she could leave if Frank went off the deep end.
Well, he did. While the only witness able to communicate was outside moving cars in the drive, there was a single gunshot. My love, my soulmate was shot in her left temple.
She was declared brain dead and kept on life support while transplant teams were assembled and recipients readied. I was actually the last person to say goodbye before she was taken to surgery.
My wife and I were broken. We left the hospital and went straight to our pastor. She was the associate pastor and a very compassionate woman roughly our age. Anyway, we were maybe 1/2 hour into our visit, when her husband, a pastor in another church came running into her office shouting "Jerry got a heart!" Yes the congregant of one pastor received the gift of life from the woman mourned by the congregants of another.
Just like Maryanne. She was always in the right place at the right time; for others, but not herself.
35 years later, I still mourn.

Who is Jamie?

Jamie is a dear friend who I respect and admire. She is flat out beautiful and has a genius level IQ. She's also almost 30 years my junior, so she will remain just a dear friend. (Dammit)

Don't sell yourself short. Age is just a number.

I could have a, let's say, more physical relationship with Jamie and I have captured a piece of her heart, but I could never have her to myself. She's just not built that way.

Why not? She likes to "spread the love?"

Spread the love seems a bit harsh, LOL. Think of her like a wild horse that will let you close but you cannot capture.

 

[flacaltenn]

I think a big part of my problem with this algebra class is that I haven't done any algebra in a quarter century or more. I don't have the base to work off of, I'd long since forgotten all of my HS algebra.

There are some things I'm still having the damnedest time trying to remember. However, I just got done running through our practice exam, and I ended up getting 36/44, which works out to a B. A couple of my wrong answers were actually just typos, but I have to expect that will happen on the exam tomorrow.

Hopefully the actual exam will go similarly to the practice test. I'll try to go over some of the parts that give me problems before the test tomorrow. It's frustrating when I get to a question and completely draw a blank as to the process of solving, but if that only happens for a few as it did on the practice test, I should be good.

Even if you tried today to pass algebra, calculus -- the genius at Ed schools have abstracted those things so far, they are unrecognizable today. Equations are "Number Sentences". Because well --- the word Equation was too threatening. And they never teach the fundamental ONE WAY to solve anything that ALWAYS works. They confuse kids with 8 ways to do long division or 3 ways to find the roots of a polynomial. The emphasis on "estimation" blows their minds. Especially on tests when they get marked down if their "estimate" is more accurate than the teacher wanted.

Wife and I have been asked to tutor several children of friends. We can straighten them out in literally 2 or 3 weeks by showing them the BEST way first. They are so hopelessly frustrated by all the attempts to make math "friendlier" that they just give up.. .

My teacher has given a couple of examples of the way he prefers doing things, such as using the bottoms-up method for a quadratic equation rather than the quadratic formula, but there hasn't really been much of that sort of confusing mish-mash of methods. It's just been trying to remember all of the different situations and the associated methods that trips me up; I remember the quadratic formula, for example, but sometimes forget that when you have an equation like x^4 + 5x^2 +20 = 0, you first need to solve u = x^2, then x^2 = that solution set. Further, in one of the practice questions like that, when my answers were the square root of fractions, I forgot to simplify the answer so that the denominator is no longer a square root. I understand how it works, but forget how it is done or that it needs to be done.

I don't know what it's like in HS, of course. It's been way too long since I was in HS to remember what it was like then, and I don't know how much it might have changed now.

It's really a matter of how big "your math toolbox" is. Handymen/women can work out of a reasonable size toolbox and get most jobs done. It's knowing when you NEED to go fetch a different tool, that makes them efficient.

Right now -- kids are being shown the entire Tool Store -- before they learn how to "repair" anything. Then the are confused by appoximating "good enough" solutions.. "Good Enough" is an expert judgement that SHOULD be left to Masters of the craft. Not to amateurs..

That's just intimidating and uninviting. Never thought the "ed experts" could make mathematics MORE intimidating and confusing -- but they have..

 

[Montrovant]

Our daughter had no problem with highschool math and the requisite college math, but didn't need any advanced math for her major. Our son, however, did have to have advanced math for an engineering degree. And his primary complaint was trying to understand the math teachers, brilliant and competent but almost all from Asia and English was definitely their second language.

At least there wouldn't be that problem with an on line course.

You'd be surprised. I tried to do some Java coding online classes through a free educational site called EdX. It's actually a very good site, providing free online classes from universities. However, those universities are not necessarily in the US. I had a foreign university, I think it was Italian, trying to teach Java coding to English speakers. It was basically trying to learn a foreign language from someone who speaks English as a second language.

Online courses often have video or audio lectures, so instructors that are hard to understand can still be hard to understand in an online course.

 

[Foxfyre]

Y'all keep your fingers crossed! I got "the call" today. Yes, a unit will be available within the next month..maybe sometime late July. It depends on a few factors.

But..it looks like...we get to go home! Soon!

Woo hoo!!!!

 

[Foxfyre]

I play computer games like Zuma that require skill development and rapid problem solving as well as hand, eye coordination and also do some memorization drills for the same reason. I have read that exercising the brain that way does improve cognizance and memory and slows and maybe reverses early demntia, etc.

Of course the fact that I LIKE playing games like Zuma doesn't hurt.

 

[Ernie S.]

Our daughter had no problem with highschool math and the requisite college math, but didn't need any advanced math for her major. Our son, however, did have to have advanced math for an engineering degree. And his primary complaint was trying to understand the math teachers, brilliant and competent but almost all from Asia and English was definitely their second language.

At least there wouldn't be that problem with an on line course.

I tried to study electronics in the 1960s at night school, but I could not do the math's so I dropped out.
It took another ten years for me to get back into electronics, and I had to go to night school for two years studying math's before I passed the entrance exams for a full time government course in electronics. I did one year of training and got my city and guilds in radio television and electronics. I went to work as an engineer and worked in the trade for ten years. In all that time of repairing equipment, I don't recall ever having to use a single equation.

Yes there are so many things that we learn that we never have reason to use. I have never once been asked to recite a passage from Colerige's "The Ancient Mariner" or Scene 1 of Act IV of "MacBeth" (the famous witches scene) or Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" or translate a passage of Beowolf, but I had to memorize or accomplish all. But I am not sorry that I am familiar with those things. They have come up on Trivial Pursuit questions and such at times.

And I honestly have never had to come up with the square root of the national debt or anything like that, but I know what a square root is.

So yes, some knowledge we will never use in any necessary or practical way, but somehow having or being exposed to that knowledge enriches or expands us as humans. And perhaps expands our intuitive powers as well.

I took and passed (barely) calculus. I never used it in 25 years of mechanical engineering. A lot of algebra and advanced geometry but no calc beyond basic physics problems solvable with algebra

 

[Montrovant]

Apparently my algebra teacher believes in providing practice which is more difficult than the exams. I got 36/44 on the practice exam when I did it last night, which equates to about an 81, or a B. I went over some of the things I had issues with this morning. The actual exam turned out to be only 20 questions, none of which required factoring or equations which I could not remember. I struggled over the last question, because I came up with a solution set of 2 numbers, but one of them did not work out when I checked them. I spent 15 minutes or so resolving the equation, rechecking the answers, solving the equation with a different method, rechecking the answers, but I kept coming up with the same numbers.

It's very uncommon in the work we've done so far to have one number of a two number solution set work, and the other not. I didn't like entering just that single answer, but since the other answer did not correctly fit into the equation, I finally did. I was right to do so, and I ended up with a 100 for the exam.

I'm happy I didn't get any questions for which I drew a blank. There were a couple of answers I almost got wrong, but with so much extra time because of the small number of questions, I did a lot of answer checking and I caught a couple of mistakes, like forgetting to put a negative sign in front of a solution.

If the practice tests continue to be harder than the actual exams, I should do well as the class goes on.

On a side note, it's funny that my instructors in two classes unrelated to my field of study are the ones who have said things about me working in those fields. In my English Comp II class, the professor wondered if I would be working towards an English-related career, some sort of writing or journalism, because I did so well in the class, particularly in comparison to other students. I've been asking some questions of my algebra professor, wondering why things are done a certain way, and I've also noticed a mistake he made in a video lecture. He mentioned me continuing in higher math in one of his email replies.

I've done well in my medical-related courses, but haven't had any teachers say anything about how I should look into a medical career.

 

[Montrovant]

I just saw that Adam West died.

Hollywood Reacts to Adam West's Death: "A Sweet, Nutty Guy"

 

[Foxfyre]

Our daughter had no problem with highschool math and the requisite college math, but didn't need any advanced math for her major. Our son, however, did have to have advanced math for an engineering degree. And his primary complaint was trying to understand the math teachers, brilliant and competent but almost all from Asia and English was definitely their second language.

At least there wouldn't be that problem with an on line course.

I tried to study electronics in the 1960s at night school, but I could not do the math's so I dropped out.
It took another ten years for me to get back into electronics, and I had to go to night school for two years studying math's before I passed the entrance exams for a full time government course in electronics. I did one year of training and got my city and guilds in radio television and electronics. I went to work as an engineer and worked in the trade for ten years. In all that time of repairing equipment, I don't recall ever having to use a single equation.

Yes there are so many things that we learn that we never have reason to use. I have never once been asked to recite a passage from Colerige's "The Ancient Mariner" or Scene 1 of Act IV of "MacBeth" (the famous witches scene) or Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" or translate a passage of Beowolf, but I had to memorize or accomplish all. But I am not sorry that I am familiar with those things. They have come up on Trivial Pursuit questions and such at times.

And I honestly have never had to come up with the square root of the national debt or anything like that, but I know what a square root is.

So yes, some knowledge we will never use in any necessary or practical way, but somehow having or being exposed to that knowledge enriches or expands us as humans. And perhaps expands our intuitive powers as well.

I took and passed (barely) calculus. I never used it in 25 years of mechanical engineering. A lot of algebra and advanced geometry but no calc beyond basic physics problems solvable with algebra

Yes, our son would probably agree with you. His primary discipline is mechanical engineering and he doesn't use calculus either though the guys developing software do.

But. . .as was explained to me once:

Calculus does change the way you look at the world. Something about helping understand the relationships between velocity and acceleration for example. Once you know calculus, you instinctively understand that without having to go to the book to find a formula for it or whatever. You see the world and what is around you differently than those without that training.

Those not doing engineering don't need that particular aptitude.

I think that's the gist of it.

 

[Gracie]

Hey peach174 ...how are you and Mr Peach doing? I got a phone call from a distant relative that lives in Pearce and she said there was a big fire in Benson? Are you guys in a safe place where there is no danger?