Today is my birthday. Other than a brief heavy snow fall that did not accumulate, the day has been pleasant and very, very busy - which is fine. Anything would be an improvement over yesterday. If you read Ancora Imparo's posting from yesterday, I briefly referred to the day as being "curiously awful", which remains an accurate description. The curious awfulness even carried into the overnight hours. Before I went to bed, I had promised Capt. SO to do some calendar "thinking" and provide him with several dates that he could pass along to a professional we both need to sit down with. I did take the time and it did take time - almost an hour's worth of thinking - but when I was finished, I had completed some excellent thinking. I made the list for him, using a red pen, and left the sheet from a mini-legal pad in his bathroom sink......thinking he surely could not miss it in the morning. Little, little, did I imagine that he would arise in the middle of the night and subsequently have to run water in his sink......which is exactly what happened and how the red ink bled everywhere, obscuring all the writing I had done. Upon arising, when I discovered the wet paper with nothing on it but a giant red smudge, I felt as if the "curiously awful" day was repeating itself, just like in the movie, "Groundhog Day".
Today's mail brought a card that brought a BIG smile to my face. A card from my favorite second child (the other second children know this), with his quirky and wonderful sense of humor was waiting for me as I ripped open the envelope. The card's face (created by him) was a picture of six candles, all of varying heights, all lit but one. At the bottom, it read, "hey, why is that second candle not lit?"
Study hard as I might, I could reach no conclusion as to why the second candle was not lit so I sent as text with that question and he responded back, "Binary". "Binary", thought I to myself, "may as well be Cantonese. The only binary I know is a musical term from the Baroque and Classical music periods and refers (simplistically) to music with two sections - an "A" and a "B" section, with both repeating. The binary to which my favorite second child is referring is a mathematical concept, one which he is fluent in and one in which I am basically ignorant.
Not wanting to seem totally "out to lunch", I went to my favorite source of all accurate knowledge: Google, which lead me to Wikipedia. For those of you who have never and will never receive a binary birthday card, here is what Wikipedia has to say about "binary":
The binary numeral system, or base-2 number system, represents numeric values using two symbols, 0 and 1. More specifically, the usual base-2 system is a positional notation with a radix of 2. Because of its straightforward implementation in digital electronic circuitry using logic gates, the binary system is used internally by almost all modern computers.
Thank you, favorite second child. You can tell the other second children that "mother always liked you best"!
Ancora imbinario
