Cookie dough, etc.

My long lost friend Sean showed up this week. We were best friends when we were in elementary school, but the summer before 4th grade his family moved to a neighboring city. We kept up the friendship for a few years, but through no fault on anyone's part we slowly drifted apart and basically haven't spoken for the last 10 years. Now Sean is getting married and he wants to buy a house so he called up my dad and was sitting at my kitchen table when I got home from work on Friday. An unexpected surprise (like most surprises I suppose). We reminisced about the good old days and had a fun time catching up. Anyone who knows me knows that I prefer cake mix to cake, brownie mix to brownies and cookie dough to cookies. I counted and I have eaten cookie dough six times in the last two weeks. During our conversation Sean randomly said, "Do you know what I liked about coming over to your house? There was always cookie dough." I laughed pretty hard at that as I realized that some things never change. What's the moral of the story? If you want to be tall and skinny eat insane amounts of cookie dough.

Joan, the old lady I lived with in Mexico called me this morning. I had so much fun talking with her. Who would've thought that talking to a 71 year old woman on the phone for an hour could be such a blast? We talked about hip replacements, back surgeries, pain medication, the ills of society, and cats. The usual. While I was in Mexico I became pretty good friends with the girls that Joan and I worked with and I enjoyed petting Joan's cats. At the end of our conversation I said, "tell the cats I say hi," and Joan said, "okay and I'll tell the girls you said hi too." I replied with, "uhh.....sure." I later felt pretty stupid for thinking of the cats and forgetting about the people.

I'll try and make this next part as anonymous as possible. I'll use letters instead of names to facilitate this. Here's what's going on: my friend A used to date person B. Person B and friend A broke up and person B later dated C. Person B and C later broke up and person C started dating D. Their relationship did not last very long and now D has asked out friend A. This completes what I will call the "love square." It's pretty much like a love triangle, but a little more complicated. The good news about a love square is that unlike a love triangle everyone can end up happy in the end because there are an even number of people involved. However, it looks like A likes B, B might like A, D also likes A, but A doesn't like D, and C likes anyone who isn't involved in the square. Let me sum this up with an equation: A+B+C+D=? or ([A+B]-D)-C=happiness for every except D. Got it?

P.S. I haven't taken a math class since 2001.