fire, weather, and equations

This morning, after a wonderful breakfast of Momma's bread toasted with cinnamon and sugar, I finished reading "The Big Burn" by Jeanette Inglold. It is about the Idaho (and rest of the northwest) wildfires in 1910. It is written through the eyes of three different teenagers. Seth, a black soldier; Jarrett, a young man who leaves his home and his father to fight fire; and Lisbeth, falling in love with the land she helps her aunt homestead. The book tells the story of how these three different people come together while fighting the same fire.

I finished "The Big Burn" and read a few pages out of my "Basic Essentials: Weather Forecasting" book. It is a Falcon Guide, written by Michael Hodgson. I learned about coalescensce. Coalescence is the process by which water droplets inside a cloud become large enough that the pull of gravity is stronger than the lift of moving air. Then, they fall as rain or snow. The book also had a really good diagram and description of seasons, and the position of the earth and poles toward the sun. During the spring and fall equinox, the north and south poles are equidistant from the sun. During the summer, the north pole is tilted toward the sun. During the winter, the south pole is turned toward the sun. This goes on to help explain shorter vs. longer days, colder vs. warmer days, and many other things associated with weather.

My algebra lesson today is world problems and fractional parts of numbers. Here is an example of a world problem we did: The number of boxes was doubled when the new truck was unloaded. Then, 7 more boxes arrived. The resulting number of boxes is 13 less than 3 times the original number. How many boxes were there to begin with?
I learned how to set up the problem like this: 2b + 7 = 3n - 13.
To add fractional part of a number to this concept, we did this problem:
One-fifth of the rodeo cowboys rode black horses. If 30 cowboys rode black horses, how many cowboys were there in all?
I learned to set it up like this: 1/5 x C = 30

Well, that's all for now.