Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.
The wife really enjoys jigsaw puzzles. The kids enjoy them too as long as they are 100 pieces or less but if we are working on a puzzle as a family (meaning that the wife does the bulk of the work and the rest of us find a piece or two here or there) we usually stick to those that are 1,000 pieces in size. My father did many jigsaw puzzles when I was a kid but he leaned toward the huge ones (2,000 or 2,500 pieces). Anyway, I was considering the concept of 1,000 pieces and trying to do the math. Since AREA = LENGTH x WIDTH it follows that number of pieces on the left (or right) side of the puzzle times the number of pieces on the bottom (or top) of the puzzle should equal 1,000 exactly. 1,000 only has the following factors...
1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 20, 25, 40, 50, 100, 125, 200, 250, 500, and 1000
This means that the only possible combinations are as follows...
1 x 1000 - 2 x 500 - 4 x 250 - 5 x 200 - 8 x 125 - 10 x 100 - 20 x 50- 25 x 40
To me the most logical choice is 25 (h) x 40 (w) but as I counted the pieces on the current puzzle there were only 37 pieces across the bottom. Also there were only 27 pieces up the sides. Now 37 x 27 = 999 so this (my friends) is false advertising. I am not suggesting that the puzzle box actually say "999 piece puzzle" but it could say "1000 piece puzzle*" and somewhere in the fine print elsewhere on the box it can say "* puzzle only contains 999 pieces**" and yet somewhere else "**get over it". I am fine with that.
Since the wife cannot drive right now (her shorter cast does not come off until June 9th), I have been both driving the son to school and picking him up from school. The one way trip is 9 miles making my daily mileage 36 miles. I get about 24 mpg in the Buick so I am blowing through 1.5 gallons of gas. We drive right by a gas station on the way so each morning I have him figure how much money we will save when school is out. Gas was $3.799 per gallon on Friday so our cost for the day was $3.80 x 1.5 = $5.70. Doing the math, in June we will have over $100 less gas expense. His last day of school is this Wednesday and they only have fun things planned for both Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. I thought about this a little and then made him the following offer. I offered to pay him $5 not to go to school. He wants to go on Tuesday as there is a field trip to a park but he is still considering my offer for Wednesday.
Today we have 2 things on our shopping list. The wife wants (the word she used was "needs" actually) a Tempur-Pedic pillow and (since I dropped the 10 year old tea maker this morning and broke it) we need a need iced tea brewer. I have racked my brain but I do not know of a store that sells both these items so it seems we will be traveling to at least 2 stores today. Maybe I can grab some interesting low quality pics with the cell phone.
Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.
Jon
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