Tuesday, July 25, 2023

Find the ceremony in every instant

Interrupting this busy work day/silent bloggery month with two very important items. First, in the course of blurbing the word natant which is basically a fancy way to say swimming, I found this helpful information:

Doge writing so useful much help


And part two is that a few weeks ago, Mark and I were walking Clover when we passed one of Zoƫ and Isaac's high school teachers. "What's his name again?" Mark asked, and I reminded him. After we were home, I opened my email to find a LinkedIn suggestion that I add this exact same person to my "network." (Not an invite from the person, just a LinkedIn-generated suggestion. LINKEDIN IS LISTENING)

Friday, June 23, 2023

You're the pupil in god's one good eye

My work queue has recently included so many antiquated, obscure, and fancy words that I feel like I'm writing a Decemberists song. Banderole. Cumbrous. Breviloquent. Ailurophile. Kemp. Maybe I'll call it Here I Dreamt I was a Vexillologist.

Weather report: fairly summerish. Summer-adjacent. The sun is shining at the moment, Mark and I were last-minute invitees to a wedding this afternoon, there are farmer's market strawberries in the fridge, and the only thing I'm concerned about right now is where my crow friend is this morning. It's the first time in several days that he hasn't come by to eat one single, solitary peanut in my back yard. 

THANK YOU


Tuesday, June 20, 2023

Isn’t every season, no matter what we call it, shadow season?

Reporting live from inside a month-long rain cloud:

FULL SET ACRYLIC TOES (seen in the window of a nail salon).

Looking at my gory finger (I accidentally poured boiling water upon it last week), thinking about Yellowjackets.*

An entire family of starlings has moved into my yard, including a dozen juveniles who scream at each other as they compete to hog the bird feeder. Each day I watch them shove each other out of the way, gobbling the birdseed and plunging their beaks into the suet cake. Today there's nothing left to eat but still they stay, squatters in my back garden. (Very Werner Herzog voice) Their hunger is almost incandescent. Again and again the birds continue their instinctive struggle for survival, pushing aside their own kin.

A thought, several days after I wrote the above, days and days later, as I watch these same starlings continuing to assault my bird feeder: it's only a murmuration of starlings if they're forming mesmerizing, shifting cloud shapes in the sky. If they're noisy back yard interlopers, you can instead call them a vulgarity of starlings. Or a scourge of starlings. Or, most accurately and benignly, a clutter of starlings. 

Speaking of Werner Herzog, I happened to read this in an interview with him and it made me laugh out loud. Interviewer: "Is anything cute to you? Have you ever seen a dog and thought, 'That’s a cute dog?'" WH: "No. I would assign a dog a different word."


My entire search history



*If you know, you definitely know