New Year, New Looks, no, not that one...

Happy New Year, everyone! and I hope the day is going well for you. We have lovely mild weather, and what with a long walk in the sunshine and far too much shortbread and eggnog and other sugary stuff, I spent a peaceful afternoon officially reading, actually sleeping, on the sofa.

The New Look that I'm not talking about was the Dior fashion creation in about 1947, with small waists, huge skirts and much more feminine looking clothes than the uniform-influenced rotten fashions of the war years in Europe. That's not the one I'm putting up here, dating myself severely since I remember it.

The first new look here is the color of my blog template, high time for a little change -- the other choices are either colors I'm not so fond of, or white lettering on solid color, which is unreadable by so many people that even though the colors were good, and the pix show up well, I spared us all that; the other is the new look I'm giving at mathematics.

I think the math part of my brain was dying to come into play, literally, since I'm playing happily with my algebra, working or playing on it about an hour a day, and getting it. The math dude is an excellent teacher in that not only does he explain, it's so simple, what the heck algebra is (why, oh why did I never in all my puff have a teacher who could and would do that, in one sentence, huh, riddle me this?) but instead of showing equations and problems and saying go solve, he actually shows me how to build my own equations.

This is the functional equivalent of teaching someone how to cast on and knit, so as to end up with a sweater, rather than the way I was taught math, which was all about being shown a sweater and told how to unravel it! it amazes me that I passed all my national exams, considering how skimpy the teaching was. I even did well on the GRE math, which amazes me even further. And of course working on algebra at home sitting with my cat, is so much less pressured than in a classroom being poked with a mathematical sharp stick by an impatient teacher. Now I have time to go back and forward until it all slides into place, aaah.

Then, thanks to Stefi M., who put me onto it, I'm reading Here's Looking at Euclid, a funny and very good account of the history of math, put in a way that makes you want to read it, because it underpins so much of our psychology and decision-making and even our neurology.

Yes, I know, those blogistas who are math people are rolling their eyes and saying, well, duh, she's finally discovered the obvious, but well, to me it's all very exciting, like your Auntie Marge when she discovered email and drove you mad with all those stupid jokes she passed on, which you have been seeing for at least fifteen years on the internet. Or those people who used to go about the street saying I'M TALKING TO YOU ON MY CELLPHONE!

The Moving of the Bed has been accomplished, thanks to HS spending a whole afternoon helping move stuff, lug big pieces down a flight, wait patiently till I remembered where I'd distributed some of them seeing service as shelves, assemble them with many a curse from me, until I finally remembered how it went.

The old bed frame left a few minutes ago for a new home via freecycle, the platform bed is all made up and sturdy, and I slept the sleep of peace all night. Which tells me this was a good thing to do at this juncture, to reclaim something important to me. And the new setup is just too high for Duncan, a nonclimber, who has to pull himself paw over paw up the furniture. So I am spared a massive cat pinning me down, too, a big plus. He's not so sure about this.

And it must be January, because I've started having thoughts about gardening...I really want to take a shot at a hanging garden system this year, using the fence, instead of planting in the ground right where the groundhogs and rabbits can stroll up and scoff the lot. I already asked my permaculture maven for advice on this, and found some great DYIers who've rigged up systems using those hanging shoe storage things, the pocket kind...we'll see. Next I'll be outside looking for my five snowdrops...and foraging for witchhazel.