Day 3, Year 7: Eleven, Eleven, Eleven–111111
Date: Friday, November 11, 2011
Weather: Overcast Turning Partly Sunny, degrees F
Location: Brewer Fiddler’s Cove Marina, N Falmouth, Massachusetts
111111–I’m feeling very binary today. Next year we will have 121212 and then we won’t have these repeating numbers until 010101 (2101). Guess we won’t be around for that one, so hope you enjoyed today and will enjoy December 12 next year. I read on a website today that the number 11 “lends itself to some interesting peculiarities” in the base 10 number system. I was fascinated to see the following examples:
(2 digits) 11 x 11 = 121
(6 digits) 111111 x 111111 = 12345654321
(9 digits) 111111111 x 111111111 = 12345678987654321
I’m just thankful that the temperature is not 11 degrees tonight! The temperature barely reached 50 degrees F today, but it felt even chillier. Right now it is 45 degrees F outside but feels like 36 degrees because of the wind. Tonight it will get down into the upper thirties. Tomorrow it warms up a bit and I like that. Yesterday when it was much warmer, Sam, Jonah, and I sat in the cockpit and watched the sun go down and the full moon. Tonight the moon still looks full. It was so much and yellow that it looked like it was putting out warmth. I’ll take it!
We started our day with another hour-long walk in our new neighborhood. We then slowly got ourselves together and headed north. We could drive 20 miles north to a Home Depot, get the conduit we needed, and then return home. Or we could drive 23 miles further, go to IKEA to get some good chocolate and more bags of Swedish meatballs AND go to Costco just to check it out AND go to Home Depot, all in the same shopping area. It was still totally overcast when we left, so we opted for the longer trip. Thankfully, the sun popped out, still amid numerous clouds, but the remainder of the day was much cheerier. Our reason for going to IKEA was simple-chocolate. We stopped at IKEA on our way home from New Hampshire last week and I picked up a bar of dark chocolate. It was really good and made us realize that our ’round the world supply of chocolate is gone. The chocolate that you can buy anywhere around the world is Cadbury. This is a British product and quite good. (Note: If you buy Cadbury in the US you have to make sure it has been imported from England in order to get the creamy taste.) Anyway. Mark had requested that I stop and buy him some chocolate on the way home from Heather and Jed’s last night. I stopped at the corner store near their house and the only option was Hershey’s. I’ve always loved Hershey’s. Great chocolate, right? Wrong. After we had dinner, Mark opened his milk chocolate bar and I opened my dark chocolate. I took one bite and almost spit it out. It truly tasted like wax with a little sugar added. I’ve been eating dark chocolate from Madagascar and this Hershey bar was a shock. How could something I have always thought I loved taste so bad. Mark can eat almost any chocolate, but his milk chocolate bar also turned him off. So we drove 53 miles to IKEA today to buy a winter’s supply of 99 cent chocolate bars and to have a $2.99 IKEA lunch. Not a bad way to spend a cold and windy day. We then went to the nearby Costco store just to check it out. We are not members and we found out today that a membership costs $55. We went to Costco with my sister and brother-in-law in North Carolina and were amazed with some of the deals on food. All we did today was get a visitor’s pass to look around. I wrote down the prices of those things that we would stock up on and I will have to check prices at the supermarket here to see if it would really be worth it to buy the membership. Then we went next door to Home Depot. I love how they make it so easy to move from one place to spend money to the other. We bought the conduit we need to make our winter cover frame and checked on the price of Christmas lights. We have a huge container of old lights, but some work, some don’t, and none of them are LED. Right now you can get up to $5 off a new string of LED lights if you bring in an old non-working, non-LED strand. You can do this for up to five strands. When we lived in Boston, we strung lights up the forestay and backstay before covering the boat so Windbird could be lit up for Christmas. We hope to do this again. These three stops took us all afternoon, so the sun was setting as we headed home. Neither Mark nor I are big on shopping, but we enjoyed our slow-paced window shopping. Mark got to play on new computers at Costco, and that made his day.
Tomorrow we will pick up Jed, Sam, and Jonah at 8:45 am to take Sam to his last soccer game of the season. Heather has to be at work at 8 am to do fundraising, so she will take their van. After soccer, we will come home and start building the winter cover frame. And surely we can find some time to eat some of that chocolate!
