Even though summer is my favorite time of year, I have been struggling these days with some physical problems, which I've detailed in earlier posts. They have to do with female complaints and the "change of life." Recently I started on a prescription drug (I'd rather not identify it here, but will on private request) which is known to reduce or even stop the hot flashes which were driving me crazy. The drug has worked, along with the soy extract I've been taking all along, and I hardly have any hot flashes now. But the drug is powerful and has some side effects which I will have to work through before it settles down. So my activity level has been a bit curtailed these last few days.

Meanwhile the late summer insects have awakened and are now chirping and chattering away in the warm, stuffy nights. The crickets' rhythm is like a clock to me, ticking off the precious days of warm summer before the misery of cold winter returns. I'm not looking forward to that at all. Not looking forward to heavy sweaters and cracked fingers and chilly car metal and freezing rain. Hot flashes did not keep me warm in the winter. As for the physical symptoms and side-effects, who knows. You don't get nothing for nothing, as the saying goes.

I am starting a new painting which I will be working on for at least the next few weeks. The little orange painting which you saw in the last entry is a warm-up for it. The new painting will be another space and nebula picture with geometric abstraction, plus some religious symbolism. There will be orange, but not as much as in the warm-up picture. I guarantee that it will not look like anything by Kandinsky.

In my calculus study, I am still working through the chapter on limits and finding them by computation. From the limits of simple functions, the book adds on more complexity, while instructing me on how to find the limits of polynomial functions and rational functions. I didn't know before now that the typical "quadratic equation" polynomial such as x² + 4x + 3 is actually three separate functions added up together. Not only that, each one has a limit, and the limits can be added together too. Meanwhile, in a rational function, that is in the form 1/x, you have that abyss that faces you where x might be zero, which is a big mathematical no-no. So limits of such functions sometimes edge around and towards zero though they politely never, ever get there.

Posted at 2:08 am | link