This past Friday while at The Inn, Ernie asked Cathryn if she’d eat a pretzel that had been dropped on the floor.

Cathryn didn’t give a solid answer. The five second rule was just not enough for her to make a decision on the Pretzel. This clearly disappointed all of us.

Today, however, Cathryn e-mailed the group informing us that she dropped some pineapple on the floor over the weekend and then proceeded to pick it up, rinse it, and eat it. She included with this story a full equation for how to calculate edibleness of a food item dropped on the floor using a Likert scale.

Here’s the scale:

Emotional value of food + cleanliness of floor + ability to be rinsed (without compromising its integrity) - # of seconds on floor

Values of 5 or lower would indicate that the food should not be consumed.
Values of 6 to 8 would indicate that the food could be consumed if desired.
Values of 9 and above would indicate that the food should be consumed.

Using Cathryn’s real life example of the pineapple from the weekend, here is her equation:

5 + 4 + 5 - 4 = 10 (the pineapple should have, and was, consumed)

This works pretty well. Though it doesn’t quite explain why Sander would happily eat a pile of Lemon Jello that was dropped into mud and sat for three weeks in the rain. Perhaps there needs to be a Sander amendment.

If Name = Sander Add 8 points to result.

I need a haircut badly.

This was a fantastic weekend.

Friday, post class I spent some time with Ernie, Cathryn, and Keller. We hit up a few Enfield favorites and then returned to Ernie’s. Keller picked up a guitar and he and I started going back and forth on playing some tunes. It was a lot of fun. Keller had a great rendition of ‘The Weight’ complete with “And” harmonies from Ernie, Cathryn, and I. Keller is a solid guitarist.

Saturday brought with it 4 hours of kung fu, some climbing with Pete, and work on a tensegrity tower. A tensegrity tower is a collection of compression and tension members that can be arranged into a tower. What’s neat is that none of the compression members touch one another. So the tower has a mystical floating awesomeness about it.

Ernie and I were using some thin 6mm dowels and some slick nylon coated steel cables as our materials. We actually crimped small eyehooks onto the ends of each cable so that they could be strung between the compression members. Our internet instructions were bogus so we did not have complete success. But we’ll keep working on it. Once it’s complete I will write up a ‘how-to’

Sunday was a little more laid back. I did some studying for Fluids and then finished my taxes and spent about 3 hours practicing guitar. It was nice to sit back and relax.

Also this weekend, Kurt sent me an e-mail pointing out an error that I made in my CALF DEATH MSpaint drawing from last week.

Kurt pointed out:

I think your forgetting the most important person in this stretching exercise. The Yellow Friend taunting you while he eats a triple stack cone of chocolate chip icecream.