Figuring ski boots sizes = ugh

I'm not a fan of math. The day I learned that computer science courses met my undergraduate "math and science" degree requirements, I never took another traditional math class again.

I can figure out sale prices easily, having spent my entire life in search of a good sale. But when faced with figuring out cross country ski boot sizes, I realized I had forgotten basic math.

I collected foot lengths for each child in a ski club I organized for my kids' 4-H club. I was told by a friend that the best way to figure out accurate cross-country boot sizes was to have the child's foot length in inches.

Everyone in the group emailed me their sizes and I sat down last week to put in our group's order to rent all the boots and skis through the Healthy Hometowns Program.

Originally I thought I could skip my own kids' measurements because I knew their downhill boot sizes. Nope. Cross-country ski boots use Euro sizes.

I did a web search for a conversion chart from MONDO (downhill boot size chart) to Euro but that proved time-consuming because G. wears an adult size and L. wears a child's size. Finding a chart that included the full range of sizes wasn't a quick thing to find, although I did track one down.

But that really was a waste of time. I should have just measured their feet in inches like everyone else.

I moved on to the other kids' sizes. According to the directions from my friend, I had to take the length in inches, add 1/8" and then convert that number to centimeters to figure out the Euro boot size.

Note to self: Have everyone send me their foot size in centimeters next year.

But OK, I could do the conversions as soon as I figured out first how to convert fractions to decimals and then figure out how many centimeters equaled an inch. This was not something I knew off the top of my head. Actually there was not one person I asked last week that knew the answer to either equation.

1 inch = 2.54 centimeters
1/8 = .125

I did the first size conversion with my trusty calculator and then decided to do another web search and found sites that did the fraction conversion and another for the inches to centimeters conversion.

After figuring all the sizes out and placing our group's order, I treated myself to a nice bowl of chocolate cookie dough ice cream and thought about how much I love the web .....