2024 Week 13: Status and Photos

2024-04-01

---

The end of March was no less busy than the rest of the month. We undertook many projects that had fallen by the wayside, from simply cleaning the house and catching up on laundry to buying supplies for a raised-bed garden. We re-potted plants, cleaned and rearranged out ferrets' playroom, hosted a family dinner, and even attended a play together.

I received a soroban, a type of Japanese abacus, in the post yesterday. The soroban has 17 split rods representing decimal places, with four beads (representing units) on one side of the split and a single bead (representing fives) on the other side. The beads use five's-complement arithmetic to perform calculations quickly, and less mental math is required to produce values on the board than to calculate with paper and pencil. The soroban can utilize addition and subtraction tricks to perform multiplication, division, and even square and cube roots.

My renewed efforts to lose weight again are finally showing some results. Two weeks ago I weighed in at 224.4 pounds, having lost 2.4 pounds over the previous week, and I resolved to reach 223.0 that week. When I fell short and only reached 223.6, I decided to only aim for under 223 this week. Instead, I stepped on the scale this morning to discover that my weight plummeted to 220.4: a drop of over three pounds! In total, I lost 7 pounds in March.

---

Photo of the week:

Dyeing Easter Eggs

(PNG, 450x600, 149 KB)

I used to dye hard-boiled eggs as a kid, when my family visited my grandparents. The tradition died out by the time I was about 11 years old, and I had never dyed eggs since. My grandmother passed away not long ago, and this year we all had the independent thought to dye eggs as a fun way to remember her. My mother bought a food-safe dye kit, and we went to town on Saturday. Strangely, only the red and blue dye stuck to the egg shell, and only the green was absorbed inside.

---

Up One Level

Home

[Last updated: 2024-04-01]