saturday night stats

The weather forecasted for the weekend was a bit unsettling and, being married into a meteorological family, I accepted the prediction with a long grain of salt. We took the train into Leicester, a city where I spent, on average, 1/5 of the work-week for the past 8 weeks. I played tour guide for only a small part of our trip, as a visit to the building, where I had class, and the coffee shop, where I bought a morning coffee to help me stay awake for the duration of the 6 hour class, was briefly made.

After visiting various UK cities, we totally agreed with Bill Bryson’s (paraphrased) words, “Every city in the UK is essentially the same. There’s always a W.H. Smith, Boots, and Marks and Spencer”. In lay language, that would be equivalent to a Chapters, a Shoppers Drug Mart, and, well, a Marks and Spencer. While we did set foot into the M&S, we tried to individualize our Leicester trip with visits to the Jain Centre, Jewry Wall (remains of yet another Roman bath), and, I must not forget, the market.

We really could have spent hours in the market. There was so much fresh and inexpensive (!) produce. Vendors were yelling left, right, and centre to get customers just to look at their fruits and veggies and depending on where you were standing, you could have seriously popped an eardrum; my ears were ringing as an after effect. The pathway getting around the market was narrow and tight with everyone eyeing the produce and navigating their wheely, old lady shopping bags. The atmosphere was rushed with no considerable time for sound decision-making skills and English pounds hurriedly passed from wallet-to-vendor's-hands in a matter of seconds. And I was giddy as a school kid and loved the total experience. I definitely got caught up in the excitement and we ended up with three punnets of strawberries (which half a punnet went towards yummy strawberry scones for our Sunday morning breakfast), a whole pineapple, six Asian pears, two mangoes, grapes in two colours, and other things for a mere £6! It was then with bags of our new-found goodies in hand, we really regretted not having the car.

The sky just didn’t know what to do today; a West Side Story tug-of-war between the dark, grey clouds and the puffy, white ones. At times, it looked like it was going to burst into uncontrollable tears and minutes later, it was an April’s fools joke with smiles all around - emotions, I admit, that I am far too familiar with. We tempted our fate probably a bit too long, and we ended up walking to, and back from, the train station in the rain and cold wind.

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In lieu of weekend photos...

As you know may know, we are avid Scrabble players and very competitive to say the least. We are so competitive that we know all the acceptable two-letter words in the official Scrabble dictionary so that we can play our titles tightly together to maximize our total points. We are so competitive that we will not self-sacrifice ourselves for the benefit of opening the game board; often ending up in bottleneck situations. We are such avid players that we actually keep a log book of all our scores from 2001.

We have been playing the board game quite frequently not only because we like it but also because we don’t know anyone else in our new hometown. Most recently, I basked in the glory of playing my first triple-triple, which, before now, I had only associated with a figure skating move. We ended our Saturday with some statistical analysis, which I will now present (see note above about not knowing anyone in our hometown).

After 143 recorded games,
H: mean score = 324.5, standard deviation = 50.3, min. = 227, max. = 475
G: mean score = 321.6, standard deviation = 44.7, min. = 232, max. 467

And after conducting a t-test, there was no significant difference between these mean scores (p=0.7).