Trigonometry has another purpose beyond making high school miserable. For me, Trig was sheer memorization -- SOHCAHTOA, Sine = Opposite over Hypotenuse, and all that. I passed the course, but it never made intuitive sense to me. I went on to do some college-level math and I still like playing around with numbers, but Trig never made sense. Recently, doing some carpentry, I decided that the best way to measure an angle would be to figure it out full scale, which meant using some basic math, meaning sines and cosines. I worked my way through, and suddenly a light went on -- the cosine and sine are the (x,y) of the endpoint of the hypotenuse! Knowing that little bit, I can work my way through the real world.

Yeah, yeah, geek city, I know. Maybe I'll only use that once in a year, or maybe once in five years, but it makes me happy to have that moment where the fog lifts and I sit up and say, "Ohhhhhhh!"

Deer do make noises. Our dog was lying on the lawn gnawing a bone the other afternoon, and my wife was sitting nearby. A young deer who has been doing her to ravage our flower garden came bounding lightly through the woods to see what was on the menu. When she saw the dog and the person, she slammed on the brakes and made a sound like an animal slamming on the brakes -- a sort of honk that clearly meant, "Eeeeeek!" or maybe something stronger. There are YouTube clips of deer making noises. Really.