Well, the new plants survived the cold night.

I got my "1 gallon donor" pin at the blood drive my church had Sunday. I'd be prouder of it but a guy (from the Methodist church across the street) giving blood at the same time as me was getting his "9 gallon donor" pin.

They let me give blood even though I started coughing while they were taking my blood pressure (and trying to take my temperature, and stick my finger for the blood-iron test, all at the same time. Then they wonder why my blood pressure is elevated...). I'm feeling still better today; I think I must have dodged the bullet of pneumonia/sinus infection/bronchitis/other scary secondary infection. Mucinex is my new best friend.

Not much knitting progress to report; still working on the seemingly never ending moebius scarf. I think this is getting to me because:

1. It's on a deadline. I want to have it done to take with me when I go visit my folks in May; my mother's birthday is 23 May.

2. It's black. Dark colored yarn is less fun to knit on.

3. The pattern is extremely repetitive, but it's not the sort of thing that can be knit on without looking - so I can't knit and read on this one.

4. It's very fine-gauge yarn.

5. I'm doing it on straights and the way I knit, I have to stop midrow almost every row to unwrap the yarn from the end of the right-hand needle. I've tried different ways of holding the needles and the yarn but I can't get a way that's comfortable, gives an even gauge for me, and doesn't wrap the yarn.

After a while, I put the scarf aside and knitted on the Patch Antik socks while I read more in "Pi in the Sky." Now it's on a section about logic and internal consistency of systems and unknowability and Godel and the consortium of French mathematicians who call themselves Biribaki or something like that...and it's less interesting and less comprehensible to me. Part of it is, I think I'm kind of unsettled by the idea that mathematics might not be an internally consistent logical system and that it may simply be a human invention, rather than a human discovery. (I am very much a "the truth is out there" sort of person. I want to believe that there's an underlying order to the universe). Also, this section borders on the totally abstract, and like my brother said (when he was working on a Master's degree in math) "Those people who go heavy into the philosophy of mathematics are just weird." Seriously. Godel sounds like he either had Asperger's syndrome or had some kind of brain chemistry imbalance which made him difficult to deal with in interpersonal situations. Yet, he was brilliant, brilliant to the point that people like me - and I'm no intellectual slouch, I think - cannot really understand what he's getting at.

I don't know. There's some kind of a generalization there, I think, that people might be tempted to make....kind of like the people who talk about folks like Einstein and Edison and such who were basically failed out of school, but were brilliant people, and then go on to imply that those of us who liked school, and did well at it, are just these kind of unimaginative sheep who aren't really very special after all, and just really become cogs in a bigger machine, despite all their A's...and that kind of thing just makes me angry, because usually the person saying it is someone who isn't an Einstein, but is someone who wants to justify poor grades or laziness in school....