Yep…either that or Groundhog Day…it just seems like it’s the same old same old day after day. The title by the way…comes from a guy who had a lot of strange sayings…Yogi Berra.

Although…we did have a couple of newsworthy items…all it might depend on your definition of newsworthy. 

Last week…Connie’s choir rehearsal started up again for the season. She’s been sining alto for many years because she can actually read the music and sing the non melody line in the various 4 part harmony music the choir does…and altos are pretty rare in her choir…for a half dozen years or so there have really only been about 5 of them compared to 15 or so sopranos…but at least they’re not as minuscule a number as the men in the tenor and bass section, there might be 5 or so men total most of the time. And very few of them…men or women…can read music or sing anything but the melody line. In fact…most of the so called sopranos aren’t really sopranos at all but simply can’t do anything but sing the melody line.

Connie…on the other hand…is really sort of a mezzo soprano actually…she’s got a much better range than most singers do. So…the last time there was choir which was over a year ago…she was singing alto most of the time but came over and sang the soprano descant parts as well…that’s the part that goes really high and has the elaborate runs and such much like a coloratura soprano would sing…then back to the alto section for most hymns. Her director Marge decided that the soprano section really needed the help…so asked Connie to move over permanently and sing soprano and descant parts exclusively.

The good news is that she’s happy…the bad news is that now that choir is back in session Neil can’t sit with her when she’s cantoring unless it’s not at the choir mass…that means he will have to go back to what he and a couple of other husbands always called the choir groupie section of the congregation.

Neil’s got some sort of intestinal thing going on…not sure if it’s diverticulitis or a hernia or just old age at this point. He started hurting on his left side down low 3 or 4 weeks ago and is on his second round of “let’s try this drug before we do an office visit or more testing” this week with a double whammy of those scorched earth kill everything in your intestinal system antibiotics. Fortunately…they usually don’t tear up his stomach as bad as they do Connie’s…but it’s still uncomfortable and makes him feel crappy. The pain has subsided to just an ache/tender at this point rather than acute pain. We’re not sure why the doc didn’t have him come in before trying the drugs…maybe it’s the corona and minimizing office visits thing…or maybe it’s he fact that his PA is no longer there and he has to see all of his own patients…or maybe something else entirely. The bad news is that one of the antibiotics is Flagyl…which means no booze…which means no cocktail hour for him. Bummer.

He also had a crown prep last week and goes back on the 29th to get it installed…the filling there has been slowly deteriorating over the past couple of years and the dentist said it was time to replace it…and it was too large to put a new one in so it gets the crown instead. 

Things are pretty much same-o same-o outside of the above…so let’s see what else is going on.

As I said…it’s starting to be like fall with cooler weather and lower humidity…we’re able to open up for at least an hour or two about half the mornings now and are able to get out on the lanai and grill without being soaked through when we come back in although it’s not nice enough to actually eat out there yet…but we’re getting closer. 

In line with the cooler weather…the wildlife has started to return to our pond…and today’s missive includes the first 3 birds of the season…a Great Egret and a couple of different Great Blue Herons…photos below.

The Great Egret showed up first about 10 days back.

Then a week ago the Great Blue Heron

Then yesterday a different Great Blue showed up and he (Neil thinks it was a he anyway) seemed pretty acclimatized to humans as it let him walk up within about 30 feet and just ignored him. It was trying to eat an already dead fish…but his eyes were bigger than his beak and neck I guess as it never was able to get it down and finally gave up and moved on.

Hopefully the critters will continue to return so we’ll have more photos to share.

Interesting things found on the net.

You might remember from back in high school chemistry that things were measured in moles and that a mole of any chemical contained the same number of molecules…it is called Avogadro’s Number which is 6.023 times 10 to the 23 power. Anyway…you might have wondered just how big that number is. Well…if you had an Avogadro’s number of dollars and spent them at the rate of 1 billion dollars per second…it would still take you 19 million years to go broke.

Then there’s this…we’ve talked before about the Fibonacci sequence which is a sequence of numbers such that each one is the sum of the two before it…you know 1 then 1, then 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…and so on. Anyway…if you take the fraction 1 divided by 89 and then look at the result…here’s what you get.

Much like the Pythagorean theorem, the Golden ration, Pi, and many other numbers…this Fibonacci thing keeps showing up throughout nature and science. 

Do you play chess? Most people have at least some familiarity with the game…but have you ever wondered if every possible chess game has already been played. Me…I never wondered that but darn it all…those geeks in the math world have thought about it for us and figured out the answer. 

The modern version of chess has been around for about 500 years and if we assume that about 1% of all the people who have lived in the past 500 years played a game a day for 50 years…when you do the math that’s about 10 million million games played or 10 to the 13th power. However…each move in a chess game opens up about 38 additional legal moves and the total possible number of moves is about 10 to the 126th power assuming the average game takes 40 moves. That number is more than the number of particles in the visible universe…so the answer is no, every possible game hasn’t been played.

Jen…make sure you ‘splain that last one to Alex.

And finally…

Cyas.