Today is going to be some random disjointed bits.

First of all: the efficacy of lambswool as a first-aid substance.

Sunday morning, while rushing around to get ready, I banged my foot. At first I thought I had broken the toe - labored under that suspicion all day yesterday, in fact. So after the "fieldwork" where I mainly stood on the roadside and sent the students into the forest to do the actual work - because, after all, I had a BROKEN TOE and couldn't be expected to leap over downed trees and suchlike - I went to the pharmacy (some time I should talk about the pharmacies 'round here. They tend to sell a lot of edgy "alternative" cures like emu-squeezin's and made-in-Mexico big black bottles of oily liquids with lot of Spanish written on them (and no English).).

I have to back up: before this, I tracked down my friend Donna who is an avid runner and teaches aerobics and knows exercise physiology and asked her "I think I broke my little toe. What would the doctor do if I bothered to go to the doctor?" Her response was, "Laugh at you." The upshot being, I'd sit in a waiting room for an hour and a half, have an x-ray done, and be told, you have a broken toe, now give me $300. She said the most they ever do is tape the toe to the toe next to it to stabilize it.

So I needed surgical tape, and, I imagined, cotton to wrap the toe.

No cotton to be had. ("No cotton...lambswool. And no fries! Chips! Chips! Pepsi! Cheezeboogie!"). So I bought the lambswool. And yes, it looks just like something you could spin with were you so inclined. (I suppose if you were traveling, and got hard up for something fibery to do, and there were no yarn/craft shops in the area, you could improvise a drop spindle out of a pen and a CD and buy the lambswool from a pharmacy. It's nice and clean and is already carded)

When I got home and experimentally removed the shoe and band-aid (I also sustained a very nasty cut on the top of the toe). I tried putting weight on the toe and found I could. And bend the toe without pain. So apparently it's just a very bad cut/scrape. I wrapped the toe in lambswool anyway to protect the cut (I had washed the cut well first and applied an antiseptic, and the lambswool seemed pretty clean - it didn't say "sterile" but as it's sold for medical use it's probably fairly ok).

The lambswool has kind of felted around the toe now, and I was able to work out this morning without pain. I'm wearing sandals just to be careful (and going up and down stairs still hurts in closed shoes)

Speaking of working out, I am seeing a tiny bit of result from my recently-increased workout time: the incipient arm-wattles (weak triceps muscles) seem to be going away. I am happy about this. (And hoping it's not too hypocritical, being one of those "love your body and don't get sucked in by the airbrushed images of women who look like they need to be hooked up to a sandwich IV" people, to say that I'm preventing the development of arm-wattles. I guess we all have blind spots. I don't mind that I have a small potbelly (well, don't mind TOO much), the fact that I have "cheerleader legs" is okay with me. But I didn't want to develop arm-wattles. I can't explain why...it just seemed like a defeat, somehow.) So I'm glad about my new stronger triceps muscles.

I broke the stall on the second Aran braid sock but made a big mistake (picked up a stitch that wasn't and got a big ugly line in one of the purl columns), so I wound up ripping all the way back to the heel turning. Ripping back makes me angry, all that time lost, and also it's aggravating to pick the stitches back up (I am generally too impulsive about ripping to put in a safety line). I did realize that using a needle one size smaller than what I had been knitting with to "grab" the live stitches resulted in fewer stitches dropping below where I wanted them to.

And finally (if you've read this far!) I have a book to recommend. It's called "The Rose's Kiss: a Natural History of Flowers" and is by Peter Bernhardt.

This was one of my recent "maybe it would be a good Directed Readings book for one of my students" purchases (U of Chicago press, probably available on Amazon and elsewhere). Yes, it is a botany book, but it's a good "intelligent layperson" read - he goes through a lot of the detail of the development of flowers, and some of the evolutionary history. He also touches on the folklore and mythology involving flowers. And he includes ethnobotany, and history (for example: the mysterious "yellow rain" event on some refugee camps in the 1980s: the US government was very concerned that the group that was causing the refugees to become refugess was somehow dropping poison on them. It turned out the "yellow rain" (which did contain low levels of some toxins) was bee poop - it was yellow from the pollen the bees ate, and the "low levels of toxins" were from some fungal filaments in the bee's diet).

One thing he does, that I like very much, is that for all the botanical terms, he not only defines them, but also gives their etymology, and, if there's some kind of mnemonic device to remember what they mean, he mentions that too (for example: the tunica cells in the anther - just like a tunic is an outer garment for people, the tunica cells form the outer layer of the pollen.) I wish I had had that kind of detail in basic Botany, I probably would have remembered the anatomy better.

Definitely if you've had botany in the past the book will be fairly smooth sailing (and interesting), and I think even if you've not, but are interested in flowers, the book won't be too difficult. (And yet, it's not boring, even to a botanist - I'm learning stuff I didn't know, or relearning stuff I once knew and had forgotten).