Being Late

The Math Behind Lateness
I have the vision that eventually I will be less late. Of course, this means that I am fighting against many factors. The primary factor is being a Watterworth. It is a rule that if you try to get more than one Watterworth together for an event, you can expect the event to occur no earlier than W^2 minutes late than the originally agreed upon time. Of course, some of us are able to counteract this by marrying incredibly on-time people.

A secondary factor related to my lateness is the fact that I have two small children to deal with. The formula for predicting the earliest time a parent of small children will arrive at an event is: Earliest Arrival Time = EventTime + 10*(1/C1 + 2/C2). Where C1 and C2 are the ages of your first child and second child in months. Notice that the first one causes more lateness than the second one. The assumption is that you have figured out how to deal with children (to some degree) after the first one and you can parallel process them a little. So for us, our formula indicates that we will be at least 10.5 minutes late to any event. Do you have more children and want to calculate your value? Here is the normalized formula:

E.A.T. = EventTime + 10*(n1/C1 + n2/C2 + ... nx/Cx)

Of course, my discrete math classes were a long time ago. Plus I haven't gotten enough sleep lately. If the formula isn't quite correct, please post a comment correcting it. I'm also sorry that I couldn't figure out how to display sigma on the blog post.

So what is this blog post about? Here are some things that are late in coming...

Super Tuesday (Late Post)
As a person who has a Political Science degree, you would expect that I vote in elections. This year, as a resident of California, I got to vote on Super Tuesday! Now I didn't register with a specific political party when I registered. And in California, if you are "non-partisan" some parties allow you to vote in their primaries. I had the choice of voting in the Independent Primary or the Democratic Primary. So, when I went in, I asked for a Democratic Primary ballot. Who did I vote for? Someone who has the same name as one of Will's stuffed animals. That's right, even the voting part of my life revolves around my children. After voting, I gave my "I voted!" sticker to Alex.

Christmas Letter - Also Late
Dan and I finally finished our Christmas letter for 2007! Like 2006, we finished around President's Day. Normally the Christmas letter is full of subtle humor. This year, it was much shorter. However, we made up for the briefness by including lots of pictures of Will, including one of him golfing. Golfing... before he was 1 year old. We have strange children.

If you haven't received our Christmas Letter yet, it is probably on its way. Give it a week. If you don't get it, harass us. We probably didn't send it to you because we don't have your current address.

Regular TV Watching for Will
What else is it too late for? Given that we have 3 TiVos functioning in our living room, Will has never had to simply watch what is on at the moment. He will never know the restriction of sitting down at a particular time to watch the show that is on at that time. What does this mean? Every time he watches "Little Einstein" or "Handy Manny," he knows that there are more where they came from. He used to start asking for another episode during the credits. Then he started asking for another episode during the Little Einstein curtain call. Now, he asks for another episode when Leo says "Mission Completion!" He will even go over to the collection of remotes and bring the correct one over so that we can continue to feed his on-demand-tv addiction.