I May Be Nuts

If you click on the picture, you may recognize that it is a Ficus Benjamina or Weeping Fig, a common houseplant. This particular specimen graced my super-deluxe cubicle when I was employed at Tedious Systems. This little guy was my faithful companion for several years and when I left Tedious, so did the plant.

Ficus can be a tough plant to grow. It loses leaves easily, leaving the branches bare. This is usually a result of over-watering, I think. It should be watered when it is moderately dry and fed regularly during the growing season. It likes light. My plant has been in low light since I brought it home and seems a bit leggy.

Ficus Benjamina is actually a tree in tropical climates, but it is too big for use in the typical home landscape. It has invasive roots which can be damaging to walls and walks. It is also the national tree of Thailand, where it is sometimes called the Yul Brenner tree. Okay, so I made up that last part, but if you're old you will figure out the connection.

This morning, out of the blue, the lovely Mrs. Sneed kicked my Ficus out of the house. I have had it on a side table in the dining room, but now it is out scout because, and I'm quoting her here, "it's hideous". I was stunned, such venom towards a poor little plant.

Here's something else. At the risk of having you discover that I am even nuttier than you think, I will tell you about something that I do habitually. I add up sequences of numbers that I see around me.

For instance, if I am behind a car with the license plate number 989-CDW, I automatically think of the number eight. 9 + 8 + 9 = 26 and 2 + 6 = 8. See? I don't know when or why I started doing this, but it might have something to do with having kept baseball statistics in the days before the calculator. I have discovered that most numbering schemes have a pattern to them.

For instance, I was sitting out front of the house this evening and I noticed my neighbor's house number, which 1004. I reduced to 5. Then I glanced at the house next to that one, 1012 (our house numbers are incremented in intervals of eight) and reduced it to 4. I thought to myself, 5 and 4, is that a coincidence?

The next house down the block is 1020 or 3, followed by 1028, which is 1 + 0 + 2 + 8 or 11, which can be further reduced to 1 + 1 = 2. The next house is 1036, which becomes 10 and then 1. Once I get to 1044, I am at 9, 1052 is 8. That's the end of the odd side. My side of the street is even numbers and my house is 1005 or 6 and we go down in the same pattern, 1013 is 5, etc.

This got me to thinking about whether this only works with intervals of eight, so I tested intervals of six. With an interval of 6 the pattern is 5,2,8,5,2,8, on the odd side of the street and 6,3,9,6,3,9 on the even. Weird.

Tens work just like eights, but nines always result in the same number. If you begin with a five, you get all fives. A four, is always all fours.

During my two-year ill-fated experiment in teaching, I tried to get the idea of repeating patterns in numbers across to my students. They were mostly unimpressed, as I suspect readers of this blog will be.

By the way, I always get my boxer shorts at Kmart, in Cincinnati.















Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky