February 23, 2014

My most recent kidney stone is still inside of me. And it has been pretty much silent all weekend. It has me wondering. My hope is that it has made it into my bladder. This generally means that the pain is over and now I just have to wait for it to come out. The end of that journey is generally accompanied by an incredible urge to pee even though most of the time I don't have to. It is one of the worst things in the world, perpetually feeling like you're on the verge of peeing your pants. Fingers crossed this happens when I'm at home and not at work.

Today was uneventful, just like my Sundays tend to be. I nearly caught up on YouTube videos so that was productive. I also spent some time in Excel figuring out Powerball ball frequency. I downloaded a list of all the drawings to date and imported it into Excel. Then I used formulas to see how often each number has been drawn over the history of the game. I didn't look to see how often the higher frequency numbers tend to be drawn together but it is still pretty interesting. According to the Powerball website, 70%-80% of people do quick picks and 70%-80% of people who won, do so with quick pick numbers. So it doesn't really seem to be in my best interest to manually pick numbers. But I'm thinking of maybe trying the numbers I came up with today along with a quick pick. At some point it would also be interesting to see if the frequency of a number being picked has changed over time. And to see how often the high frequency numbers show up in winning numbers. I am still fully aware that the odds of winning the lottery might as well be zero, but this is my new thing, for the time being. Just like learning Morse Code and Braille or how to knit and crochet. The fun will fade eventually but for now it is still holding my interest.

Tonight for dinner I made Brussels sprouts again. I'm pretty sure that is my new favorite vegetable. Not necessarily due to the taste, because there are better tasting vegetables out there, but it's got a good texture and they are still fairly new to me, so the novelty of it is still there. Just an observation.