Habit I Didn't Realize I Had

Conversion factors. Inches to centimeters, miles to kilometers, pounds to kilos, and the other way too. I just do 'em in my head, bounce 'em back and forth. And fractions to decimal. No wizardry, just to 2 decimal places, working estimate kinda range.

I mean, doesn't EVERYBODY do this? 3 meters is 9'9”, right? 10 CM is 4 inches, right? 40 KPH is 25 MPH in real money? I just do it, allee timee. Remember that 1/7 is pretty much 0.14 and all the rest is gravy! I mean, what's so hard about this? A meter's 3 foot and a quarter. Every 4 meters multiply by 3 and add 1. This is not rocket surgery. Most of the time you don't have to be too accurate. Peso is 12 to the dollar? Call 80 Pesos a buck, less a bit (4cents, not a “2 bits, 4 bits, 6 bits a dollar” bit). 12.5, you're dead on, 13 P/$ it's $1.04 in real money. This within rounding error, or as I think of it, sales tax margin. If you're buying real estate or jet planes...fuggit. You're already paying accountants and tax specialists, and they're doing rocket surgery.

But don 't bother with temperature conversions. There's “too damn hot I'm staying in the A/C”, “I'm sweating like a pig but this yard isn't gonna mow itself”, “God the pool looks lovely”, “Lovely day innit?”, “Football season already?”, “Too damn cold, but these leaves aren't gonna rake themselves”, and “Too damn cold I'm gonna stay in side in the warm”. Some effete wimps use shorts v. sweaters as a metric. For that matter I understand that the name of the band“3 Dog Night” comes from an aboriginal American metric for “Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey”, which in turn has to do with iron cannonballs and brass trays, and the relative expansion in cold. No monkeys were hurt in the making of this post.