I have a number of things to talk about....

Firstly, I've added a couple of things to the bottom of the candy jar (part-way down the right side of this page).  You should definitely take a look if you're bored.


Secondly, My mother now has to fill out a ream of paperwork about my disabilities.  I feel a little bit sorry for her, especially since she's already done this once before.  I'm just going through the motions at this point, but I'm dragging her along with me.  They'll probably send another pile of papers to my husband, as well.

I have what are probably the two mainstays of diagnosing CVID--the blood test (repeatedly) for low levels of antibodies, and the blood test that shows that a pneumonia vaccine didn't 'take' (I still have no immunity to pneumonia).

What I really need is a doctor and a neurologist and a lawyer.


And thirdly (if you're still bored (or, sadly, even more bored than when you started))--on a happier note, I might not be such a sorry excuse for a geek after all.  For the last couple of weeks I've been reading all about numbers on the internet.  You might be a geek if you have favorite kinds of numbers.  I like composite numbers--numbers that aren't prime.  The more tiny little factors a number has, the better I like it.

Some numbers have their own name--for example, a 'dozen'.  12 has several factors--1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12.  Then there's a 'gross'--144--12 x 12, or 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 3 x 3.  There's even a 'great gross'--1,728--which is 12 x 12 x 12.  Cool, huh?


Just in case you're really, really bored, I also like triangular numbers.  You might have heard of square numbers--1 x 1 = 1, 2 x 2 = 4, 3 x 3 = 9, 4 x 4 = 16, and so on.  Well, here are the triangular numbers--1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, 28, 36, etc.  The thirteenth one is 91, which is 7 x 13, or a quarter of the days in a year (calendars are cool, too, aren't they?).  The thirty-sixth (6 x 6) one is 666 (the biblical number of the beast, DCLXVI in roman numerals).  The 50'th one is 1,275.  The 100'th one is 5,050.  And the 144'th one is 10,440.  I've learned this week that there are also pentagonal and hexagonal numbers (but don't worry, I'm not going to talk about them today).

Triangular numbers also look like this:

1   X


3       X
     X     X


6           X
        X       X
   X       X      X


10             X
            X      X
       X       X      X
  X       X       X      X


Pretty geeky after all, aren't I?