The Mysteries of Living With a Woman Redux or A Feuer Christmas Carol

Scene:  Christmas Eve morning in the Feuer household.  Tammy leaves for work before Richard.  She has a "hospital full of angry patients who can't be home for Christmas" to run while Richard only has one unlucky patient "who bit the wrong way into a candy cane the day before Christmas" to ameliorate.  Tammy is gone by 7 AM.  Richard finally works his way down to the kitchen at 8:30.  And there, in the semi-early morning dawn light he sees the note on his place-mat.  He already suspects it is not an "I love you, have a blessed day" missive.  Richard and Tammy have been together too long for the kinds of platitudinous crap trappings more commonly seen in 6 month old unions.  No, it is most assuredly a honey-do list on this, the most horrific, nauseatingly frantic, and insufferably annoying shopping day of the year.  So before Richard even sees the print on the sticky note he is "oh crapping", "you gotta be kidding me", and I don't freaking believe this" himself to death.  But, blessedly (Christmas miracle number one) the note is short.

Action: There are only two items on the list and they are conveniently labeled 1 and 2.  But helpful numbering system aside, the instructions are in "Tammy shorthand".  If you are unfamiliar with this time and space saving method of enumeration let me explain.  You see, even the most lengthy of instructions, lists, and commandments, can be squeezed onto a sticky note no bigger than 1" by 1" square.  If Tammy had been the set designer for Charlton Heston in the Ten Commandments he could have come down from the mountain with not only the big ten, but the entire Torah on a stone tablet no bigger than your basic Etch a Sketch screen.  The key is to start randomly somewhere in the middle of the page, with really big print, and then when you start to run out of room, merely start twirling the paper around and around, writing smaller and smaller, utilizing every corner of the paper without regard to top, bottom, left or right.  And then, as with indecipherable ancient Aramaic, expect the generations that follow you to use this as a guide for their resultant behavior.  Or in my case, as merely a guide to how many, and what kind, of rolls to buy for Christmas dinner the next day.

Here then, for your interpretation, is the note:

It is obvious, if you are a student of semiotics, that the Pillsbury Crescent instruction was actually written down first.  The green beans were added as an after thought.  Thus the helpfully circled 1, 2 informational symbols inserted in the margin.  But the more significant sign of Tammy's thought process is the smaller typeface and banishment to that portion of the memo pad already taken up by the sponsor of the instructional note, the NJDOT, of the green bean commandment.  We can further assume, once we have this information, that the style of cut, size of bag, and brand of green beans will not be too crucially important to the success of the covered dish for which they are intended.  So we are good for the frozen food isle.

What is not so apparent is the number and possibly style of rolls to purchase.  In solving any Rosetta Stone style hieroglyphics one must first rewrite the words in the proper order of the translationalist's language.  So for us, commandment number two reads as follows, or so I thought:

28's =16 Pillsbury Crescent + 4 rolls.

My first thought, of course, took me back to eleventh grade chemistry class and those confounding oxidation-reduction equations where the number of electrons "in"must equal the number of electrons "out".   Could it be that we were having 28 guests and Tammy was trying to figure out if 20 rolls could feed 28 people without a loss of satiety?  I really had no idea so I knew what I had to do; recruit someone who spoke the language of honey-do lists.  So I showed the note to my dental assistant after we finished fixing the tooth of the hapless candy cane eater.  "Do you know what this means?  What are 28's?" I hopefully asked.  She, too, had no idea what the note meant.  Then, once at the supermarket I ran into a patient of mine who happens to be an engineer and a female.  I hopefully showed her the note.  She had no idea either.  But once I got to the refrigerated  section, it began to make more sense.  The crescent rolls were in packs of eight.  Oooooooohhhhhhhhh, I thought to myself.  She means two packs of eight.  But what about the + 4?  Still worried about buying an incorrect number of rolls for our carbohydrate deprived guests I asked a lady standing next to me what she thought.  After her initial shock at a strange man saying to her in the refrigerator section "can I ask you something?" (from her circumspect glare I really believe she thought I was going to proposition her) she had no insight for me.  So, assuming the note was making a distinction between crescents and regular rolls I bought a smaller pack of Pillsbury Grandes.  This was a five pack, but since there were no four packs of anything, I was satisfied with my ultimate decision.

The only thing now, standing between me and Christmas break relaxation, was the inevitable ten people deep lines at every register.  But here was Christmas miracle number two; I found a register with only one person in front of me and she was already ringing up the last item, a 12 pound, serves two,  fruitcake.  I was home 10 minutes later.  And it was only after taking the picture of Tammy's note for this post that I decrypted its full contextual meaning.  She actually wrote it utilizing a vertical columnar pattern a la Chinese characters.  Here then is the note reinterpreted:

2-eight packs equaling sixteen (as if I needed help with the addition) plus 1-four pack of Pillsbury Crescent rolls.  If you look again at the note more carefully you will see the columnar structure.  Numbers in one column and letters in the next column.  Mystery solved.  Except for the fact that I found no four packs of crescent rolls.  Here is how a man would have written the note:

1. 1 lb green beans
2. 2x8 pack and 1x4 pack Pillsbury crescent rolls.

That's how we order lumber by the way.
(ask a man what this means; 5x2"x4"x8' stud grade, and he will know).

And by the way, for Tammy's Christmas gift, I adopted mile 83.2 to 84.2 of the NJ Turnpike in her name because I believe her choice of sticky notes was a hint at what she wanted (being the cryptologist that I am) .  So don't throw anything out your car window while driving there.