The Battle Belongs to the Lord

In honor of Tax Day, I give you the following quotation from an Ozzie and Harriet radio episode I recently stumbled across.

[Filling out income tax forms] is rapidly becoming one of America’s most exasperating traditions. It calls for a complete mastery of arithmetic, trigonometry, surveying, semantics, foreign languages (including Double-dog and Jabberwocky) not to mention mind-reading and above all, the control of temper.

From the Ozzie and Harriet episode “Tax Return and the Blue Suit”. From Old Time Radio Comedy Podcast, March 25, 2010.

Good luck to those of you still applying on your surveying, mind-reading, and Jabberwocky skills.

Kids, pay attention in math class. You never know when life might throw at you a word problem like the following:

You have to take 6 pills every day.

Pill A must be taken 1 time per day in the morning.
Pill B must be taken 4 times a day.
Pill C must be taken every 4 to 6 hours.
Pill D must be taken 3 times a day.
Pill E must be taken every 6 hours.
Pill F must be taken 1 time per day in the evening.

Calculate at what times you need to take which pills, minimizing the number of different times throughout the day you have to take a pill. Assume you wake up at a different time each morning. To best approximate the real-life condition of a drug-induced stupor, wake up at 3 a.m. and do the problem before you’ve had a chance to become alert.

That gives you an idea of what I had to face each day last week after my surgery. I think I managed to get it all right and not take Pill D 4 times a day and Pill B 3 times by mistake. Maybe the pill bottles of the future will have little built-in alarms that ring when it is time to take the next dose and a blinking light to let you know which bottle sounded its alarm.

I am done with the drugs related to the surgery. I still have a low level of pain from the surgery which Tylenol takes care of for the most part, but aside from that, I have been up and about, taking walks, and generally feeling pretty good.