Happy September

The penguins of Madagascar just mentioned that the sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side. Interested, I googled it, and found that the scarecrow in the movie The Wizard of Oz delivered the line lo so many years ago. Sine then it's been used on the Simpsons, and now the Penguins as well. Of course, the only relationship between the twin legs of an isosceles triangle and the third leg is that the twins are each more than half as long as the third leg. In fact, the line is almost brilliantly wrong in each possible way (but there are, indeed, three sides of a triangle.).

I have had a nasty cough for a while. Otherwise, I feel okay, but when I have a coughing fit it's horrible. Earlier I was sicker, but now it's just the lingering cough.

We have explored around Houston some more. We went to the beach this weekend, but it was more like a driving tour than a beach excursion. We rode the ferry. While we were waiting for the ferry, our car battery discharged enough that we couldn't restart our van. Thankfully, a guy in a jeep nearby saved the day with some jumper cables. It all was resolved in such a quick manner that we did not slow down the line of embarking vehicles. But it wasn't completely resolved, of course, because as soon as we embarked, we had to turn off our vehicles' ignitions. And our Jeep friend was parked on a different part of the boat, too. I crossed my fingers and hoped that the van would start just fine. We watched dolphins and seagulls and waves, and at the end tried without success to restart the van. I quickly tried to get an attendant to see if they had a solution, but the attendants were all busy getting ready to unload the ferry. On the way back to our van I asked the guy in front of me (in a small car--I was sure the chance was slim) if he had jumper cables. When he said yes and jumped out of his car, I realized they'd have to be pretty long to be able to help out right away, since our cars were all arranged like a traffic jam. But, would you believe it, he was a mechanic, and his jumper cables were attached to a 12 volt jumpstarter, and it was all resolved in such a quick manner that we did not slow down the line of disembarking vehicles.

When we got to a convenience store, I poured some cola on the terminals to get rid of a bunch of corrosion that was helping to discharge our battery. Since then, we've been okay.

Life is good, but Annie just chewed off part of the cover of Bonnie's library book while I was typing up that story. So now I'll go and pay more attention to the young 'uns.