2/2/07: February Factoids

January Factoids...

February Factoids:

February 27, 2007

Wow, where has February gone? I had 3 major tests all in the past week. Didn't do as well as I would've liked in Statistics :(. I had an 81%, but the class average was a 63, so I guess I didn't do too bad! (Hmmm...brings to mind the scripture that says "They that compare themselves among themselves are not wise.") Calculus was better with a 94.5, and I'll find out tomorrow how I did in Accounting.


February 23, 2007

NOTICE: The Factoid is taking a much-needed vacation through the weekend. Hopefully it will be well-rested and back to work come Monday. Please pray for its safe journey and soon return.

February 22, 2007

I took my first bike ride of the season yesterday! I actually just attempted to post a blog about it, but unfortunately I hit the back button and it all disappeared. :( I'll try to re-write it later on, but in the meantime, here's the stats of my first ride of 2007!

Wednesday, February 21: Distance: 25.74 miles. Time: 1 hour, 59 minutes. Average heart rate: 154 beats per minute. Average speed: 12.4 mph. Maximum speed: 33.3 mph.


February 21, 2007

I once mistakenly told a police officer that my height was 6 feet, 5 and a half inches. He just looked at me and said "you wanna run that by me again?". The bad thing is, it took me like 3 times before I realized that I was saying it backwards. I'm actually 5 feet 6 and a half inches! lol I'm sure the policeman went home and enjoyed telling that story to his wife and kids that night!


February 20, 2007

I can juggle! This isn't a skill that has earned me a lot of money over the years, but it is good for entertaining small children and easily amused adults! How do you learn? Spend a summer really bored with lots of oranges and plenty of free time. (Worked for me at least! I was too young to get a job!)


February 19, 2007

When I was a teenager I went through a phase where I slept out on my front porch one summer. It was kinda like camping out in that you get to sleep with the sound of the crickets and wake with the dawn, but all the modern conveniences are just inside!


February 18, 2007

Another Granny factoid for you: once when Granny lost her shoes, she looked all over the house and was having trouble finding them. She actually went to the freezer and looked inside just in case she might have put them in there for some reason! (Thank goodness they didn't end up in there! I don't know where they ended up for sure, but I'm assuming she did end up finding them eventually!)

February 17, 2007

When I was a teenager, I had a hamster named Myrtle who attempted to commit suicide. Well, at least she hung herself (by her teeth) from the top of her wire cage. When I came in and found her, presumably lifeless, hanging from the top of her cage, it was rather startling. I managed to free her and held her in my hand. To my astonishment, she started jerking! She was still alive! I tried to nurse her back to health over the next several days with advice from the vet by phone. Unfortunately, she didn't make it. I was never particularly attached to the little rodent, but during her convalescence I bonded with her, and I was actually pretty sad when she failed to pull through. RIP Myrtle.

February 16, 2007

I enjoy playing racquetball. I learned while I was in college; I took a racquetball course for my required "Activity PE" credit. If you are playing with an evenly matched partner, it can be a pretty fast-moving game and a great workout, not to mention a lot of fun!

I have learned though, that you can't walk onto a tennis court after playing racquetball if you've never learned how to play tennis beforehand. A buddy of mine, Jeremy, from Arkansas, and I tried to go out and play tennis after playing racquetball, and it didn't work so well! When we tried to hit the tennis ball, it sailed waaaaayy over the fence! lol The ball is quite different and the style of the swing to hit the ball is much different as well. We ended up going back in to the racquetball courts after about 5 minutes! :o)

February 15, 2007

My dad is building a new house, and he's acting as his own contractor. He's not exactly in a great hurry, though. I think he's been working on it for about 4 years now. lol It's actually still just a basement, but they're planning on moving in once they get the whole basement finished. (The basement alone is huge in itself.)

A couple of years ago, he was working on getting the roof put on the basement and installing a special rubber material to seal it from the weather until he gets the upper stories built. He was in a crunch for time and asked if I could come help. I was working at the apartment complex at the time, and there was a crew of about 20 guys, mostly Mexicans, working on the renovation project there. I asked if anyone would like to volunteer to help my dad with his roof. (I was careful to point out that it would be no pay, unless you count cookies and cokes!)

Well, needless to say, my dad's eyes got really big when I rolled up in his driveway with a crew of about 8 or 10 guys! We finished the roof that night in about 3 hours. He said it would have taken him and my stepbrother till the next morning to get it done otherwise, and there was a storm threatening! I was glad the guys were so generous to come and help!

February 14, 2007

Well, it's Valentine's Day, so here's a VDay factoid for ya: this is the first VDay in about 10 years that I haven't had a Valentine! :-( I'm not really sad though. I'm actually content at this point with where my life is! (Perhaps this will be my last VDay alone! Who knows? Not me! ;o) LOL)

February 13, 2007

Believe it or not, I actually understand the formulas below! These are some of the rules for differentiation of functions. Just thought I'd share some of what I've been learning in Calculus!:
d/dx c = 0
d/dx x^n = n[x^(n-1)]
d/dx (cf) = cf'
d/dx (f+g) = f'+ g'
d/dx (f-g) = f' - g'
d/dx (fg) = f'g + fg'
d/dx (f/g) = (gf' - g'f)/g^2
d/dx f(g(x)) = f'(g(x))(g'(x))
d/dx [g(x)]^n = n[g(x)^(n-1)]g'(x)
Enjoy! :-P

February 12, 2007


My mom is in Minnesota this week and next for work! Usually I sort of envy her being able to travel so much for her job, but not this week: they're supposed to have a low of 4 degrees BELOW ZERO Wednesday! Poor Mom!

February 11, 2007

My Granny Wanda used to have a yellow canary named, appropriately enough, Tweety Bird. Tweety Bird lived to be way older than most birds do. She was the only bird I've ever seen that had been trained to "kiss" people. She'd sit on your shoulder and if you turned your head toward her and cooed "Tweety's a pretty bird", she'd kind of peck all over your lips...kind of nasty now that I think about it.

February 10, 2007

I went shopping yesterday and bought myself 6 new shirts! That might not be a big deal for most of you, but I hadn't bought myself new clothes in ages. I had nice uniform shirts provided at my job for the last couple of years, so I was down to only 4 or 5 casual shirts that I wore regularly. My mom told me about some clearance-priced shirts at JC Penney's, so I went and checked them out. All six were only $3.97 each! So I got 6 nice new casual shirts for a total of like $25! Woo-hoo! (Indulge me; it's not often I get excited about shopping.)

February 9, 2007

My great-grandfather, Thomas Harry DeSpain, died before I was born, but his wife (Nana, as we called her) told me lots of stories about him before she passed away when I was 9. He didn't have much education, but he was highly intelligent and very mechanically inclined. He worked for a local textile company, and invented several machines to automate their manufacturing process. He was awarded 7 patents, but since the inventions were done as part of his work for Southern Textile, the company retained the rights.

The more interesting story is that he apparently invented the automatic transmission as well! He took his design to a contact that he had in the military to see if they might be interested in adapting it for use in military vehicles. The man told him that they weren't interested; there was no need for such a device. A year or two later, according to Nana's story, they found out that the man he'd shown his drawings to had gone to the patent office and claimed the invention for his own! Thus I lost my chance at being born with a silver spoon in my mouth and being independently wealthy for the rest of my life!

February 8, 2007

Ok, just so you know, I don't make a habit of reading bathroom stall graffiti, but I recently saw something in the bathroom on campus that actually made me think. Someone scrawled the sentence "We have all stopped living." No explanation--that was it. Wow.

February 7, 2007

I can't believe I'm actually about to say this...I'm actually kind of enjoying Calculus! I always did decently in math, but I never really enjoyed it, but this stuff is actually halfway interesting! I thought it was gonna be my worst class, but now it looks like it's not so bad after all! Who would have thunk it?

February 6, 2007

I have never interviewed for a job that I haven't been offered. I've filled out applications and never been called in for an interview, but every time I have actually gotten to the interview stage, they've ended up offering me the job. Once I thought I'd broken my streak when I was looking for a teaching job, but the school principal called me back weeks later (after I'd already signed a contract elsewhere) and asked if I still wanted the job. So my perfect record stands! I realize that's unlikely to continue indefinitely, but it's a pretty good track record to date!

February 5, 2007

I think college textbooks are a racket! I recently purchased a USED textbook for $120!!! I had to go to an off-campus bookstore to find the used copy. The campus store had only new copies left, and they were $170! How ridiculous is that? You can go to any "normal" bookstore and purchase a REALLY nice beautiful leather-bound classic work of literature for less than a college textbook, but since publishers know that students are required by instructors to purchase their books, they can get away with charging pretty much whatever they want! (And a guy at the bookstore said that instructors are in the publishers' pockets. Particularly at bigger schools, instructors get all kinds of free perks from the publishers when they agree to adopt their books.) Grrrrrr!

February 4, 2007

I haved a great-aunt Vitrude who moved to New York City back in the 1960s. She has one of the most unusual jobs that I've heard of: she's a freelance indexer. So basically she is hired by a publisher and given the task of reading a manuscript and creating an index for the book to be published! This was a dream job for Aunt Vitrude who loves to read constantly. Since her degree is in zoology, she started out indexing scientific texts, but has since done everything from encyclopedias to biographies. And to think...when she started there were no computers to help with this sort of thing; she had to do it all by hand! Though she does have a computer now, it is a bit out of date; it still operates out of DOS, no Windows to be seen. Somehow I doubt she'll be getting a blog anytime soon!

February 3, 2007

I try to do push-ups and crunches at least twice a day. Just started at the beginning of this year, but I'm keeping it up! I've been doing 35 pushups 2 or 3 times per day, plus 40 crunches each time I do pushups as well. I'm pretty much staying slightly sore all the time, but I do take a day or 2 off per week to let my muscles heal up before I get after it again. Ok, I know that was a lame factoid, but I'm running short on inspiration at the moment! lol

February 2, 2007

I have been staying up way too late! I can't seem to get to bed until 2am lately. This is not a good thing! I skipped my first class of my graduate career this past Wednesday! (I convinced myself that I can learn Accounting out of the book as well as from the lecture! :oP )I'm going to start doing better now...

February 1, 2007

I got a 95.5% on my first Calculus test! Woohoo! Unfortunately, it was just more of a review of algebra...now we're getting to the hard stuff! Wish me luck!