Christmas Shopping!

With Bonfire Night over, and Halloween all but a distant memory (being a week ago! lol) it's next stop Christmas. So close the curtains light the fire and wrap up warm, sipping at cups of warm cocoa. Well ok maybe not just yet! Besides we don't even have a fire.

It is only 48 days til Christmas! And with 8 major presents to buy over the Christmas period, that only gives me 6 days to think of and buy each one. Eeek! Factor in lots of minor presents at a lower importance level, that leaves me with approximately 4.83 days per major present! Which, taking into account four days postage for internet presents being sent, and assuming that half will be bought from the internet, leaves me 2.83 days per present!!

However, given that for 5 of the 7 weeks left, I only have 2 days available to shop, that factors the time down to 1.415 days per present. Assuming the trip into town to be a round trip, my effective time is 2.415/(2*pi) which takes it to roughly 0.225 days per present, which equates to 5hrs and 24 minutes effective shopping time.

In addition, the majority of my Christmas shopping will be done accompanied by Rachel. Unfortunately, any time spent shopping with her results in a split between her buying presents and me buying presents, and (being kind to Rachel!!) I shall set that at a 1:1 ration, lowering my present time to 2hrs and 42 mins per present.

Finally the overall time T is a function of 5 variables, l, c, t, f and q which relate to the time spent reading the Christmas list, time spent consulting with other family members about who's got what, time spent thinking of ideas, time spent finding the product and time spent queuing in the shop respectively. The equation is roughly shown below.

Assuming the majority of my shopping will be done for my family, it is possible to compute the variables above.

l within our family takes a value somewhere in the region of 0.5
c is related to the number of people in the family, and is usually roughly (n-1).0.166
f can be taken as 1.
q takes either the value 0 if bought online, or the average for Harrogate shops, which is roughly 0.2. I will assume as before that half the presents will be bought online, giving an average q of 0.1

Substituting these into the equation gives an available thinking time (t) of 1hr and 25mins. I'd better get started!

A glooming peace this morning with it brings

Here follows the second blog of this latest stint. With a suitably gloomy title. You can tell the seasons are changing in Britain when you wake up to a chilly morning, blowing a gale and you've had sun and rain by midday! And so autumn begins its long dark descent down into the depths of winter, and with it, the sun drops lower in the sky turning orange as it glides along the chimney tops.

It is of course Bonfire night (hoorah!) where we all celebrate the death of a man, executed for trying to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Perhaps one of the earliest Terror threats to the capital? I wonder how the event was used to promote the agenda of the Government at that time?Hrmm. Anyways all November 5th makes me think of these days is V for Vendetta. And that made me think about Hugo Weaving which is a cool name, and how he just sounds like Elrond the whole time! Elrond got me thinking about Lord of the Rings and quicker than you can say ' my precious' I was thinking about the Council of Elrond, and how much Frodo annoys me. Keeping on that train of thought i tried to think of a film i liked him in, and dismissing Deep Impact i settled for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which is a good film, but not really because of him.

Anyways, as one thought follows another, I considered the other actors in that film, in particular Kate Winslet, which of course led me to think about Titanic, arguably her most famous film. Then i was reminded about how annoying Leonardo DiCaprio is! (Close to James Blunt) However I also considered the fact that loads of people say how good he is in a couple of films, and i contemplated the fact that Romeo and Juliet is a good film despite him being in it. I particularly like the closing lines at the very end. And so i thought to myself, why not name a blog after it, and spend most of the blog explaining it!