Quirks

As I have shared earlier, I count stairs. If I'm not having a conversation with someone and I'm going up or down stairs, it's safe to bet that I'm (silently, thank goodness) counting them as I go. I know another math person that does this too. Also, due to twelve years of dance classes, I occasionally start counting them in eight-counts.

When looking at a digital clock, I often attempt to make true mathematical statements out of the time, i.e. 6:23 is 6=2x3. This started when I was about six years old on a cross country car trip to Illinois. My favorite ones to catch involve square roots. 7:49, yay!

If I'm eating something that comes in individual pieces (like M&M's), I want to chew the same number of pieces on each side of my mouth. So I alternate.

If I step on a crunchy leaf with one foot (which I usually do on purpose, crunching leaves is nice!), I feel funny if I don't also step on a crunchy leaf with the other foot.

In written language, nothing bothers me more than when "less" is used where "fewer" should be. It happens all. the. time. For the record, "fewer" is used if the object of the adjective can be counted. There is less milk in the glass, but there are fewer glasses of milk. (Bold, italic AND large size font, just to emphasize how much I hate that mistake.)

When I play computer solitaire, I line up the cards at the end like this, so that I can put four cards of the same suit in the correct pile in order. I told my husband this, and now when he wins, he lines them up like this and lets me finish.

My spider solitaire quirk is worse. When the cards pile up in the bottom left corner, they have to be in some kind of pattern (black-red-black-red, or black-red-red-black, you get the idea.) If the game goes in such a way that the pattern is messed up, it's entirely possible that I will quit and start a new game.

I'm sure there are more, but quite frankly, I don't want to lose any friends. People can only put up with so much.