education, Family, Food, gardening, home, Nature, Uncategorized

84 Pounds of Pickles

46 Comments

I have never been able to do math in my head. Husband is far better at it, but last week he failed at basic math hilariously while using a calculator.

Husband found some lovely vegetables at an Adventist farm  stand.  (Adventists are supposed to be vegetarian,  but I find it humorous that some of our most prominent local  Adventists are big time cattle ranchers.) We decided to make German  refrigerator pickles with them.  The recipe called for four quarts of brine and one cauliflower,  one carrot, twelve pearl onions, two cucumbers, and two bell peppers. It all had to sit in the brine in a steel pot in the refrigerator for a week.

We have a refrigerator in the basement just for this purpose,  but we are always concerned about the weight on the shelves. Husband calculated the weight of everything and worriedly told me that we couldn’t possibly put the brine pot in the fridge because it weighed 84 pounds.

Well, that just didn’t make sense to me, and after some sturm und drang, Husband recalculated and determined it all weighed 8 pounds. The veggies are brining  away in the pot in the fridge.  Now I can finally tease him about his math skills.

How are your Math skills?  What kinds of Math are easiest for you? When have you miscalculated?

46 thoughts on “84 Pounds of Pickles”

    1. Well, I didn’t say that his final number was correct. The veggies didn’t weigh more than a couple pounds, and it sure didn’t add up to 84.

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        1. Give the poor man a break. There was nothing wrong with his numbers. It was placing that damned decimal in the right place that caused a slight confusion. 🙂

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        5. I resemble that aspersion. But really, where a ballpark estimate would have been sufficient, use of a calculator suggests a desire for precision. If one of the items you enter into the calculator is the weight of four quarts of water, at 8.34 pounds per gallon, and you still have the salt the vegetables and the pot to consider, how do you end up with 8 or 84, even allowing for the misplaced decimal?

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        6. Ha! That’s not an aspersion, it’s my opinion. Resemble on!

          Personally, I would, no doubt, have opted for a rough estimate, and I’m not going to try to come up with a rational explanation for why Chris opted for the calculator. I just think that it’s hilarious that, in his quest for accuracy, he ended up so far off base. I’m reasonably sure he’s shaking his head as well – in retrospect.

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        7. What I found interesting is that the visual facts didn’t match up with the numbers on the calculator screen, yet he believed the screen, not the veggies in front of him.

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  3. I loved math in elementary school. Then we got the NEW MATH in junior high. Spent six weeks in the sixth level of hell trying to learn the Babylonian system based on 6. The damage was done. Bad grades there, lowered my GPA enough to freeze me out of language classes (only two choices: Latin or German). Freshman algebra. D- The only “D-” I ever got but probably should have been an “F—-“. I went to the teacher and got tutoring help from him. Landed a B but avoided all math classes thereafter. Later I schooled myself in Geometry. A squared plus B squared equals C squared is now my favorite formula.

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  5. I finally found a purpose for Math when I was in grad school and had to take four statistics classes. I avoided Math in high school, and only took Algebra I and Geometry. I hated Geometry.

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  6. I got in over my head and seventh grade when I missed a week of school due to breaking a finger. (Yes a week- nasty break). And that was all it took. I got behind and never really caught up again. The set the stage for a lot of other math issues in school. My senior year I took calculus for some strange reason and was pretty much failing it. But then the teacher got a little behind and for our semester test, instead of doing the whole semester he gave that chapter as the semester test and that chapter just happened to be the geometry section. I always understood geometry and I actually studied quite a bit and got a perfect score on the test. That actually brought my semester grade up to an A. And then I promptly dropped the class.

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    1. I guess it us more accurate to say we have a n old fridge in the basement dedicated to things that don’t fit in the fridge upstairs or that need refrigeration but that we don’t use often, like whole grains and graham flour. It isn’t just for pickles.

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  8. I did pretty well up till 2nd year Algebra – we had a semester of that and a semester of Trig in senior year… I did fine with the trig, but if memory served I dropped the Algebra II, and then was sorry during the year of college I had to take. And I wouldn’t touch Calculus with a ten foot pole.

    What I liked was in 4th grade, Miss Malcolm taught us how to make geometric designs with compass and protractor (and straight edge) – I loved how many combinations there were, and we could color them in – designing was the fun part.

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  10. Several years ago here at the college I had a young lady laying out a pattern for a bit of a set. She kept telling me “I DON’T DO MATH!” I kept saying it wasn’t math, it was just measuring. Didn’t matter, she didn’t want to do it.

    I’ve talked before how I keep trying to prove to myself that I can learn math. My brain doesn’t want too and I’ve accepted that.
    And then last week there was an online ‘Rigging Math Class’. I saw the work sheet and my toes went numb and my brain sizzled and popped. Smoke came out my ears. But the teacher was really good. He said to consider it all a “recipe”. Once you figure out the information you need to input to that recipie, it’s all easy.
    Sure. Easy for him to say. I haven’t actually tried it yet. Someday I’m going to earn that ETCP Certificate of Rigging!

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  11. My math skills have been adequate to get me through, so far. I have a somewhat peculiar relationship to numbers in that I apparently don’t deal with them the way most people do. Husband is proficient in doing numbers in his head, and is constantly amazed that I consistently come up with the right answer to math problems although I arrive at the answer in a completely different way than he does.

    Probably the most complicated math I’ve done in recent years has involved dining out with a bunch of female friends. Trying to figure out who owes what at the end of an evening, after a couple of glasses of wine, and including tips, has sometimes proven to be a challenge, especially since one member of the group is notoriously cheap, and refuses to chip in five cents more than she owes. Oddly enough, she’s probably the most well off of the group.

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  12. Through aa nasty quirk of fate, I had the same teacher for 7th grade math, 9th grade algebra, and 10th grade geometry. He was not a good teacher to begin with and he was also a bit of a bully. I hated the classes and figured I just wasn’t good at math. I had an excellent teacher for 11th grade higher algebra and actually did quite well in class – even aced the final exam, quite to my surprise. However, all those years of lousy math education soured me on any further math classes. My chosen profession (nursing) did require the use of math but mainly plain old addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division – not any analytical stuff or the use of complicated equations. I do thank my lucky stars that I never had to learn the “new math”.

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      2. Wow! So gallbladder removal these days is a same day, outpatient surgery? Heal quickly, Jacque. And don’t forget you’re not thirty anymore; things take time.

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