I gave away two potted plants yesterday. They were spathyphyllium or "peace lily" clusters, which I had separated from two main clusters a couple of years ago. I had four pots of this persistent plant, which was two pots too many, so the lesser ones could go. They will find new homes thanks to Freecycle, a grassroots social program which finds new owners for used but still good things.

This meant that a couple of square feet of table space opened up in my packed house. On Sunday I vacuumed and dusted and cleaned, and re-populated the space that the peace lilies occupied with a collection of African violets and their grow-light. I have had this same fluorescent grow-light fixture now for over thirty years; I first got it when I was a sophomore in college.

The place that the African violets occupied was now open, and I filled that with a lightweight bookcase which is still mostly empty, believe it or not. There is more open space coming as I continue to shift boxes and cases around in my house. I consider it a solid geometry exercise, and also a mathematical "packing" problem. I took my old algebra and geometry homework, sorted through it to keep the nice-looking diagrams or calculation pages and notes, and put the rest in a paper recycling bag. One good thing about math is that it can always be recycled and it will still pop off the page fresh the next time you work with it. Recycling my old sheafs of paper leaves at least two or three shelf inches open. I will take every bit of space I can get.

Behold, the clutter parted, and my math book was revealed. I did the last few problems in the "functions" set. Or rather, I took my chances on them and then looked them up in the teacher's volume to have them explained. The "composition" of one function with another involves running one function process through the other one. It's kind of like processing a process. I suppose you could just keep going if you wanted to, and compose any number of functions together, or keep running one function's results through itself again and again. One of my Friendly Scientists tells me this last action can generate chaotic results, as in chaos theory.

The end of the Functions chapter brings me to the conclusion of the algebra review section, and the next page begins: "Introduction to Calculus: Tangents and velocity." My inspirational bookmark, with a picture of a galaxy on it, is in place.

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