View from the North 40: When the numbers don't add up

I hope you’re good at math because I am going to employ my rudimentary mathematical skills to get this column done quickly so I don’t waste my valuable vacation time at a computer.

I would love to be using my mathematical skills to be tallying things like margaritas and mai tais, or the number of years older I would look from too much sun on the beach, minus the years younger I would look after the derm-abrasion treatment from the sand, but, alas, my time off is a work-at-home vacation – a work-ation, if you will, rather than a stay-cation – to give me time to get a bunch of things done around my property aside from the everyday chores.

I took a week off, which is really five days plus two two-day weekends that were mine to begin with. Still, that gave me a whopping nine days to get a ton of work done. Of course, work is not technically measured in tonnage, but don’t worry about having to do a weight-to-time conversion. It’s just a metaphor to create an exaggerated visual to show the overwhelming amount of work I need invest on the property and the house-building project.

In fact, while my list does include taking time to get rested up and work with my horses, I figure I have about 3.5 months worth of work to get done in 9 days. If you use a common (and easily calculated) 30 days for the month, times 3.5, that gives me 105 days of work to stuff into 9 days.

As I write this Wednesday, I have averaged somewhere between 10 and 11 hours of sleep per day, roughly twice my usual sleep hours.

If I continue in this fashion I will have about 2 month’s worth of sleep completed by the time I go back to work. Yes, the math seems sketchy, but it has something to do with sine and cosine which plot vectors of alternate integral realities on a graph with lines and dots. It’s higher math, just trust me. I own a calculus book.

I have spent an average of 2.25 hours per day with my horses, which is just straight up multiplication of 2.25 times 5 days which is a total of 11.25 hours. This average of hours per day spent working with my horses is likely to occur over the next 4 days, which totals 9 hours, giving me a grand total of 20.25 hours horsing around.

Since the workish work I have accomplished is horse-related, you can add to the horse time another 3 hours working my arena, 2.5 hours fencing, another 1.5 hours locating and picking up a post-hole digger, 15 minutes deciding the hole auger was too much work to hook up to the tractor and 5 minutes calling a guy to come put the posts in for me.

There’s no shame in that.

If you plug all these numbers into the sleep-calculation graph mentioned above, you will see that horse-time amounts to about 1.5 months of work. (I’m not even going to factor in the future time savings from not having to take my tired, fencing-busted body to the chiropractor.)

Written summary of calculations: By the end of my work-ation away from my job, I will have accumulated 3.5 months, or 105 days, worth of sleeping, horsing around and avoiding doing any real work, and have done so in only 9 days. A remarkable feat.

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I guess it’s a stay-cation after all at [email protected].