Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Algebra
I just finished taking an intense 5 week coarse of Algebra, no big deal, but to me; a big deal. I have always liked math, even as a kid but understanding the concepts have not been easy for me. I eventually would understand but at a much slower speed then most of my peers putting me in the D to failure, category. It was difficult for me to ask for help since I found it very humilitating that I did not "get it", when most seem to with out any difficulty. Either way I made it through life with minimal understanding of numbers and their meaning and importance in life, I mean, I have ten toes and ten fingers and they seem to come through quite nice; in a pinch. When I went to nursing school, yes I am a nurse and yes math is an important detail in my type of chosen profession, but somehow visualizing formulas and using cheat-sheets got me through that. I did have to take an algebra coarse to get into nursing school but I barely eked through it and thought that was the end of that torturous class. I then decided to pursue a higher education and found that I needed to take more math, this was something that I found so painful because I just knew that it was going to quelch my dreams; however it did not stop me. I failed the coarse twice and dropped it twice, each time panicking when I saw letters and numbers in the same problem, and lets not even talk about the dreaded "word problems". Since taking and passing this last Algebra class, I was astounded how, life is just one big fat word problem, and even more astounding to me, was to find that most of us muddle through this, big fat word problem called life, without even knowing it. I seriously want to know who came up with the, quadratic formula? I mean, it is obvious to me that whom ever came up with all these formulas, was obviously some type of abnormal prto-type. It is not a normal thing for most people to sit and come up with formulas mixing letters and numbers to figure out how far or how fast or how high something goes. I can appreciate, being one with a higher education, the ability to have a formula to find out these curious things, but why, I ask, why must I have to know this to graduate? I know that I will never feel the need to know how far the red ball goes when you throw it nor do I care to know at what point the blue ball and the red ball meet when you throw then at the same time, I just don't care. I normally throw one ball at a time, anyway and all I want from this activity is for the dog to go get it before it lands in the ocean and gets lost. I know there is probably several geniuses out there laughing at my simplicity and thinking, how sad for this woman to not understand the importance of those two colored balls having a point where they meet, how does she get through life?, ha! Well I did pass, finally. The word problems were a challange but my daughter happens to be one of these geniuses that cares when these balls meet, and better yet she knows how to figure out how and when they meet once you through them, so I picked her brain and with her help I managed to fuddle through. I got a B plus in the intense and condensed coarse, that came as a big surprise to me but I passed, so that is all that really matters. It is important for all to know that I do not get math, I actually like it very much because I like to have answers, that is until I met with the imaginary numbers; but that is another story.
Posted by seabreeze at 3:34 PM 0 comments
Friday, March 6, 2009

Sea breeze
My name is Marta and as the title suggest, I live by the sea. I live in Astoria Oregon, a beautiful little community by the sea. I am directly across from the Columbia River. I can see the Columbia River traffic from my living-room that is now my bedroom. The story is that I wanted a king size bed but it would not fit in any of my very tiny rooms and it would not fit up stairs due to the narrow stair area, so I thought, who is to say that a bed has to be in a bedroom? certainly if a bed is in any room then you can say that the room is a "bed-room", am I right? Well not important since that is what I decided was the situation. My husband and I now have an awesome king-size bed in our living-room with a view of the great Columbia River. You might be asking what happened to our living-room, and the answer to that is; it was moved to the dining-room. Eventually something has to give, it did, my dinning-room since it is just my husband and I and we do not need a dinning room to eat in. We tend to eat in front of the TV which now resides in our bed-room. It is a convoluted story but necessary to explain the reason for a huge bed located in the middle of my living-room. Having explained all that, I am a nurse and my husband, Tim, is a bar-tender. We love living in this town. We have 3 cats, 3 dogs, a frog and soon, a bird. We love taking long walks on the beach, looking for little treasures and we go on logging roads for short hikes with our dogs. We enjoy life, we are both ameture photographers and are always looking for a good image to capture so, smile!.