Monday, April 11, 2011 Lethbridge

7:00 am

I'm off to a slow start this morning. Maybe the coffee will help.

There are lots of household chores that require attention today. One of the activities involves checking with a supplier or two about cement blocks for a small retaining wall in our back yard. This would protect a fence along one of the property lines and would then be the first step in a re-landscaping of our back yard. We are still at the planning stage but need to pursue this if we hope to have it finished by the end of April.

Addendum: I visited a landscaping company early this afternoon and now have a much better idea of what is involved in preparing the ground as well as a few new ideas for the type of rock/brick that we might use.

8:00 am tag: Mathematics

I bogged down on the material in section 1.2 on the dot product of two vectors. The actual dot product was not the problem, nor was the relationship between the dot product and the length of the vector. I also see the relationship between these ideas and the trigonometric function cosine, but the connection to the Scharz inequality left me confused. This is a tight network of inter-relationships and I need to untangle this and make it mine.

5:30 PM tag: Literature

The wind in howling this afternoon so I sat back and spent a couple of hours reading "The Lacuna".

Addendum: (8:15 PM) "The Lacuna" has moved up a notch. Kingsolver has begun to fire a few well-aimed barbs. I love it. It has been a long time since I sat and read continuously for about 3 hours. I am learning much about both Mexican and American history as well as some Russian history about how Stalin came to power instead of Trotsky after Lenin's death. A neat novel.

She has mentioned Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" on two occasions. I have now added it to my list of Goals on the Literature activity web page. The timing is good as I downloaded it last week as one of the first e-books (free) on my iPad. I have seen many references to this novel over the years but have never read it. It is now explicitly on my list of "next to read". "Three Cups of Tea" is also on my list, but I have classified that as History.