the kids ran off to grandma's house

so i'm blogging.

what a day it's been. maggie got us all up early, but then the 3 of us girls took naps this afternoon. i turned on the old laptop (the one i use, not the one we finally got rid of), only to find that this one's screen is suddenly broken too! not cracked, but the blue color is gone, so it's all in shades of pink and yellow. kind of pretty once you get used to it actually.

but before that, nick and i had a little issue hat needs some airing out.

what happened was, there were 7 bread and butter pickle chips left in the pickle jar. nick took 4 of them for his sandwich and "generously" said to me, "I left you some pickles. finish them so we can throw out the jar."

so i grabbed a fork, and do you know what i saw? three ends. that is, pickle chips cut from the ends of the cucumber. i (of course) immediately opened up his sandwich and saw that he had 4 lovely pickle chips cut from the more tender center of the pickle.

i said, "gee nick, thanks for leaving me the ends."
and he said, "what? i didn't notice."
not one to let things like this just slide under the table, i responded, "yeah right."
and he said, "no really, i must have just happened to get the good ones."
and I said, "you really expect me to believe you just happened to pick out the 4 good ones?"
and he said, "yes. i didn't pick them out on purpose, i swear."
and i said, "maybe subconsciously you grabbed the good ones."
and he said, "no."
and i said, "fine, but do you know what the odds of that happening are?"
and he said, "no."
and i said, "small."
and he said, "whatever, why are you still talking about this."
and i said, "it's the principle."

so what are the chances that nick accidentally got the 4 good pickles? they're smaller than you think. i'll admit i didn't do the math in my head, but knowing more about probability than nick, i was setting him up a bit by asking him if he believed it was pure chance, since i did know that the odds were much smaller than he would guess.

but quickly, let's just run the math. we had:

4 "good" pickles
+3 low quality ends
____________________
7 pickles in total


what are the odds of pulling the 4 good chips?

(4/7) x (3/6) x (2/5) x (1/4) = 24/840 = 1/35

which is just under 3%

so, there's just under a 3% chance that he took the good pickles by chance. not impossible, but not likely either.

in conclusion, we're kind of at a stalemate right now. i can believe him (and buy a lottery ticket tonight), or i can write sarcastic blog posts while my children are (probably) over at grandma's.

isn't math fun?