The rain stopped just long enough to tempt Mrs Widds and I out into the front yard …

Leaves, weighing almost nothing, sit quite happily above the grass, and moss, and mud

… Yes, ’tis the season…

Cue the garden implements

… look at this little beauty? Isn’t Mother Nature grand?

Moss has taken over our driveway, but it does make a colourful backdrop

… until all is but a memory. We’ll do one last rake-around when the last leaves have fallen, but that’s it for Autumn, which is just as well because it’s starting to rain again.

The Autumn Tree – all tucked in for Winter

-oOo-

I may have a practical mind but the complexities of slide rules, abacuses, and other mechanical sorts of calculating machines, prior to the Computer age never captured my interest … (I truly appreciate how ingenious they are though)

… until the other morning, when I opened my daily newsletter from Instructables and came across, Genaille’s Rods! … here’s a hint – you don’t have to know your times tables!

So, of course I had to check the figures with my calculator and yep, it works!

Screenshot – 21879 x 5 = ?

I printed out a couple of copies of the pdf (linked in the Instructables tutorial) and will go forth and entertain myself for a while playing with them.

– Why, oh why, didn’t they tell me about these when I was in primary school? (Note – I wrote down the wrong number. It should be 49,119 – Thanks for the catch, Tofino. 🙂 )