Electric shopping carts and math

This post is all over the place. I don't have the inspiration to write on one specific topic, so I'll just free-associate for a while.

First of all, excessive numbers of people who can't make their way around a big box store without the assistance of an electric shopping cart. Is it a peculiarity of the state I live in (Commonwealth, if you're being picky), and the tendency toward obesity, and diseases caused by smoking that lead to poor circulation, or is this rampant everywhere?

The last time three times I've been in the big WM I've nearly been outnumbered by the herds of people driving those little electric carts around. I'm not exaggerating when I report to you that one morning last week, I encountered at least one person in each aisle (not the same person...a different person/cart per aisle) for the entire length of the grocery area. And in many cases they were traveling in pairs...husband and wife teams.

I'm truly not expressing an intolerance for the obvious need for these carts, but just am curious at what appears to be an epidemic of walking difficulties in people who are not elderly, and seemingly able to at least get themselves in the door of WM to begin with in order to gain access to the cart. What do they do at the mall? At church? At sporting events? Do they have these walking problems at stores without the carts? Do they sometimes take a wheelchair with them, just in case?

I am also concerned about the inability of many of these people to safely use the carts. I was getting some coffee and was nearly run over in a tragic backing up incident in which a woman in a cart five feet away from me hit the reverse with great dispatch, and in her unexpected trip backwards lost control, and nearly flattened me before I could jump out of her way. She bleated a horrified "sorry" and I assured her I wasn't hurt, but what if a child had been in her path?

On to my next subject...math. I'm not good at math. Let me clarify...I'm not good at math above the basics of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. I'm a whiz at those. But a kind professor at college saw my struggle in a "math for idiots" class, and recognized that I would surely never actually need to use math in my career since political science rarely requires a quick answer to an algebra problem. His solution in his pity for me was to pass me at an acceptable grade and end both his misery and mine. My inaptitude for math was the sorrow of my father, who while no math genius himself, at least "got it" enough to become an engineer, and actually had a useful purpose for it when brandishing his slide rule and jotting all sorts of interesting numbers and equations down in pencil on a legal pad in his office. I used to look at those scribblings and wonder what they meant. I still would have no idea. Math to me is just a foreign language that I have no hope of ever understanding. It is like trying to teach a cat to read.

So here comes my seven-year-old son who seems to have found some isolated math gene in his DNA, and is doing somewhat complicated multiplication problems in his head while we go for walks. He started asking me last week to give him some multiplication problems, and I started with 2 x 3. Too easy, he said...harder! 5 x 11. 55 he said without hesitation. How about 9 x 8? 72, he said. How about 4 x 32? He gave me the correct answer, but what was especially impressive to me was how he solved the problem. It is more complicated than I can write out, and it wasn't the way a teacher would have him do it, but it made perfect sense, and ultimately the correct answer. The next evening he did a problem for The Reenactor that left him stunned at the methodology T2 used to reach the answer. They have not been studying anything above basic addition problems in his class, yet he wrote out an entire page of addition, subtraction, and multiplication problems on his own, just because he wanted to. I admire the heck out of it, and while I know this is not entirely unusual for a child to be interested in and curious about working problems like this, I'm just amazed that MY child can do it! Granted, The Reenactor has way better skills at this than I do, so I guess I have to give him genetic credit, but just like watching my own father work a problem, I now get to watch my son work them as well.

Cool.

And finally, I took a one-day course last weekend at our church on the topic of understanding the Bible in its literary form. It was fascinating, and the instructor, a woman who has written a book on the subject, was very interesting, and kept us focused throughout a five-hour lecture and discussion. Even though I've understood this concept for a long time, it was still eye-opening to have a person who is an expert in literary form and style present some of the passages of the Scriptures as they were actually intended as written word, rather than through the religious goggles we usually wear when we read them. It doesn't challenge my beliefs, but rather made me curious to read, and re-read parts of the Bible with a whole new appreciation for truly understanding the context of the story, rather than pulling out individual chapters or verses and considering them complete stories. The Reenactor is reading the Bible, cover-to-cover, and has been on the OT for a while after finishing the NT. I kid him that he wanted to see how it ended, so he read the last chapters first. He just came out to inform me while I was writing this that the people Moses led out of Egypt were a bunch of whiners and complainers, and didn't pay a lick of attention to what God was telling them point-blank to do. His interpretation is always interesting.

That's it for now.