ATC 40 - Page 6

Cards 1..7 are from some of CHG's Scottish-descent relatives. Card 3 is from CHG's aunt, listing Celtic bands that she likes. Card 6 is from CHG's uncle, showing scenes of Scottish culture. CHG's aunt takes care of her daughter's three children. The trio made cards 1 and 2 for their parents and cards 4, 5, and 7 for themselves.

When Pounce and Lady J wed in August of 2005, young Card 7 Artist was feeling a bit fussy. He didn't want to do what his mama asked of him. Just as the minister asked "Who gives Lady J to this man, Pounce?" Card 7 Artist boldly told his mama, "NO, NO, NO!" much to the amusement of the congregation. A coincidence we will tell often.

Card 8 is from the teacher who did attend my party, known as Short. We had three math teachers in our school system who all had the same last name. Short as at junior high, and the other two were known as Teacher Upstairs and Teacher Downstairs, much like a Tomie de Paola book. Short is my favorite teacher. I had her for seventh and ninth grade math. She is the one who taught me Krypto and the Cyclic Math Card Game and the Math in Your Head game that I never kept up with.

She is drawing for me what I drew for her. In ninth grade, my first period class was a runner for the attendance office. I had to take the mimeographed purple list of the day's absent kids to all of the teachers. On Short's copy, I would draw pictures.

When one is adding equations, and one equation has a term such as 4x^2 (four ecks squared) and the other equation didn't have any x^2 term, one was advised to write a 0x^2 (zero ecks squared) as a place holder, much like 405 has a place holder in the tens slot to keep it from looking like 45.

Mathy-artsy me saw 0x as an ox, and drew an ox. Thus, 0x^2 must be an ox that is drawn square and 0x^3 must be an ox that is drawn cubed. And Short remembers this, 26 years later. Cool.

She also said that she considered drawing her signature self-portrait of Mean Person, but didn't, and that a card from the elusive Maynard was lost. I suspect he spilled lemonade on it.

On the back of the card, she gave me a Krypto to solve.

{5, 27, 9, 12, 3}
{4}

Use all five upper numbers once and only once, in any order, to achieve the answer of the bottom number. If you solve it, leave the answer in the comments.
Typically, we keep the numbers between 1 and 20, inclusive. I mentioned that she went out of bounds with 27. Every other Krypto fan who saw her car noticed and commented about that as well. In this case, it can help to make a cool roundabout way to get to 4, involving sine.

Card 9 is from my mom. She likes cows so much she once drove a van that was painted white with black splotched. She likes stickers. She likes me. I'm glad that we get along so well.