Digging for Rubies

I've recently started exploring this language called Ruby. I've been plodding through Programming Ruby (an excellent book, so far) for the last couple of weeks, and I must say that it is one of the oddest languages I have ever taken up. Coming from a more traditional programming background, some of the constructs and concepts found in Ruby are just plain baffling. If statements returning values? Blocks of code returning values? Cats and dogs, living together?! Madness!

Why Ruby? Pretty much because the Internet won't shut up about it and Rails, so I figure there must be something there that's worth learning. I fully intend to move onto Rails when I get a solid enough grounding in Ruby itself, but I have this feeling that Rails won't be nearly as powerful without first understanding the language behind it. That's how ASP.NET works, anyway.