Your spine is a flower

Egad, that last post hath no title.

And today is Monday, so I'm in organized work mode. But I want to share a snapshot of morning work before I dive into blurbing these babies:

Okay, they're totally just making words up at this point to keep me employed?

And briefly, a highlight of my weekend was mishearing "Lancaster, PA" as "Cirque de Soleil," which made Mark and me laugh (I laughed harder). Another highlight was ice skating down a frozen river and around a large pond and not falling down. And a lowlight was seeing a full grown adult man in the Trader Joe's parking lot wearing a sweatshirt with a cartoon dinosaur that said in all caps DON'T BE A CUNTOSAURUS.

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

Their greenness is a kind of grief

Alas and alack, I knew this day would come:

HORROR OF HORRORS

How am I going to blurb this "word"? Ah, but there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Right?

In other news, various birds and dogs, it's Calendar Spring, and tiny crocuses are poking up through dry brown leaves and dirty snow. It seems as though the yellow ones were tastier, since I've only espied purple and white so far.

And now for some things I collected for you on the internets:

I suspect Japan is the best place on Earth.

Hamster content.

More hamster content (not ham).

Everyone needs a wee baking raccoon tattoo.

And a sausage dog named Nigel.

People also ask.

Take omens from the flight of birds

Hello, it's 2023! 2022 wasn't my favorite! But it brought many sweet and beautiful things, as well as some crappy ones. What a lovely holiday celebration we had with the whole family in North Carolina, with (mostly) lucky travel and very lucky health and some of my most favorite humans (and dogs) all in one place together.

Items from the year so far:

• A game I play sometimes is Floater or Fruit Fly? (It's January, so it's usually a floater.)
• I met someone this week who...how to put this...if I learned they were a serial killer, it wouldn't totally surprise me? 
• I've been doing Adriene's 30 days of yoga every day this year*
• I'm ridiculously delighted with the etymology of inauguration!! 

Okay, on to the important stuff, the internets archaeology:

Why is no one talking about Libby's black jumpsuit?

Best bolster.

In other words, what to do with a whistlepig?

TIL

I can't stop thinking about Fishtopher.

#même

*hellloooo, it's January 5

A puzzle, a monster puzzle, a heavy choking, a neglected Tuesday*

I asked recently what someone's job was, made a note so I'd remember: cloud engineer. Now when I see the phrase (I wrote it on a work thing, I see it every day), I picture an adorable cartoon about a smiling young man who works overnight designing and building clouds. 

Part of my work these days involves trolling several news sites for stories and associated words that might be interesting from a vocabulary/etymology viewpoint. The stories can't be too violent or terrible, or controversial, or generally involve Israel or Tr*mp. There can't be too many Covid ones in a row, or, you know, an overload of environmental catastrophe. Adults might read this thing, but so will 12-year-olds. Hoo boy. You're generally left with a new prime minister in Samoa and a tiny computer on a snail and an upset in men's basketball.

Yesterday I watched a squirrel fall from above, abruptly, like the frogs in Magnolia. He hit the fence, tumbled head-over-tail several times, and landed in the Hostas. I seriously thought he was dead, made Mark go check, and then investigated myself this morning. There's no sign of a body, so I guess he staggered off? The plants are thick there so I'll keep looking.

It's a trick question, they're both correct.

*Gertrude Stein is making more and more sense to me lately, which may be evidence of a brain defect?

Astrophysicist and lead guitarist

Things all in a day's work:

Triple-double

Heir apparent

Left-handed marriage

"Assassin" shares a root with "hashish."

"Asteroid Day was co-founded in 2014, by Dr. Brian May, astrophysicist and lead guitarist of QUEEN."

Other items of note:

Adam walked over for dinner last night, and I made a delicious low-FODMAP meal (one food left to test, and it's APPLE). My brother walked over for dinner last night.

It is a teenage lifeguard's job to show up for work before 7am (how early? 6?) so he can shyly ask middle-aged ladies with dogs if they could possibly come back in 8 minutes (when they say dogs allowed on the beach from 7-9, they mean it).

As I was driving home from the beach, a woman on a scooter flew through a stop sign and screeched to a halt, almost hitting my car, dropping her scooter. I hazard-lighted, jumped out, and helped her pick the scooter up. She had on platform sandals and light khaki pants, and they were barely smudged from the fall. She promised she was okay. It was definitely her mistake, but in retrospect I worried that she thought I'd run the stop sign. (Reader, I did not.)

I am fasting for fasting blood work in about an hour, and I am hungry. I am also a dumbdumb: why didn't I schedule it for 8:00 instead of 10:00?

My color's green. I'm spring.

I've been collecting some things in my wanderings. Striped rocks mostly, and smooth rocks that feel good in your hand, but also these:

This would've been a good rabbit rabbit.

Blurry old sword dance photo of Isaac!

Wait, what?

Can't wait to throw formal magic parties again.

This is a dog reading a newspaper.

4

Four, fourteen, forty-four, all my lucky numbers. I have a friend who's deeply superstitious of the number four, and many cultures consider it bad luck. I searched far and wide for a contrasting superstition, with no luck (no pun intended). So it's mine, all mine, lucky number four.

The word of the day is heuristic.

The first book I finished in 2020 was Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror, and I enjoyed it so much that I didn't rate it three stars (my usual appraisal of almost all books) but (wait for it) FOUR.

Mom recommended this article by Heidi Julavits, and I agree, it's wonderful.

Honi soit qui mal y pense

That phenomenon in which you learn how to pronounce the word metronidazole, so that you can stop calling it "Gus's diarrhea medicine" every time, and then you hear it repeatedly spoken on a podcast (about the Iditarod) and come across it while blurbing the word diphtheria (it's recommended, along with antibiotics, by the CDC, as treatment for humans infected with diphtheria). 

Also, would you ever have guessed that diphtheria has two Hs? Several times a day, daily, I have occasion to think, "Now there's a word that would've lost me the National Spelling Bee."

In actual news of life, while Gus is doing very well, clearly feeling bright and cheerful and hungry-all-the-time, he's off the clinical trial and onto a modified course of chemotherapy. It's shorter than a typical treatment, and paired with another trial drug, but it gives us more of a clear, defined idea of how long he will live — approximately a year. I started to say something self-pitying about how all my dogs die young, and I do wonder what's up with that, but mostly I feel incredibly lucky to have had so many good, good dogs in my life.

In other news of me and my privilege, I am trying not to be whiny about Current Events and Politics. I am sitting pretty in my position as a white, cis, straight, educated, etc etc, person with a home and clean water and a support system etc etc. I have no right to "give up" on all of it, or opt out of caring/resisting. Still.

Me on the Mueller Report = 17 year old Jodie Foster drinking tea during an interview

The circumambient air was redolent with doughnuts

Since the romance of my working life is no doubt of great interest to my reader(s), I will let you in on this secret: it is more challenging to define "waterfall" (for an audience that may include both middle schoolers and adult English learners and without using the words "water" or "fall") when you are experiencing brain fog than when you are not.

And now it's later and I've been laboring on "doughnut," which has made me hungry for circles of fried dough and also brought me to this extraordinary historical information about how the Civil War, doughnuts, and the state of Maine converged:


The ladies of Augusta, Me [Maine], distributed over fifty bushels of doughnuts to the Third Volunteer regiment of Maine, previous to their departure for the seat of war in 1861. A procession of ladies, headed by music, passed between double lines of troops, who presented arms, and were afterwards drawn up in hollow square to receive the welcome dough-nation. 

Never before was seen such an aggregate of doughnuts since the war began. The circumambient air was redolent with doughnuts. Every breeze sighed doughnuts – everybody talked doughnuts. The display of doughnuts beggared description. There was the molasses doughnut and the sugar doughnut – the long doughnut and the square doughnut – the rectangle doughnut and the triangular doughnut – the single twisted doughnut and the double twisted doughnut – the “light riz” doughnut and third kneaded doughnut – the straight solid doughnut and the circular doughnut, with a hole in the center. There were doughnuts of all imaginary kinds, qualities, shapes, and dimensions. It was emphatically a feast of doughnuts, if not a flow of the soul.

All I want in this world is a doughnut banjo picnic.

Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts from one foot to the other

• The sound of the dishwasher just doing its methodical job early in the morning is miraculous and soothing.
• There is a worried pup curled at my feet, and across the room a cat, oblivious, threatens to knock a picture off the wall in his campaign for second breakfast.*
• The NPR people are my constant companions, an intelligent background murmur.
• Murmur, what a word, huh?
• Upstairs, three sleeping humans.

*I keep a supply of rubber bands to shoot, not at Theo, but adjacent to him, when he is gently terrorizing this way. I love this cat, but a person's gotta get some work done some time.

It doesn't scare him. It diverts his attention in the direction of the rubber bands. It is extremely satisfying on my end.

10

“That’s another great thing about getting older. Your life is written on your face.” - Frances McDormand, 60, one of my heroes.

Also, Pause by Mary Ruefle, mentioned in the article above.

I love reading wise words about growing older.


This morning we looked and looked for the beautiful red fox we saw yesterday on Mackworth. We've done the Mackworth loop walk hundreds and hundreds of time (it's as much part of my routine as brushing my teeth or setting my alarm for 6:30), but we've never seen a fox there before. This guy was big and fluffy and magnificent, with his head held high (unlike the smaller, low-slung gray Oakdale fox). We looked at him and he looked at us. He only trotted away when we moved slightly closer and Gus barked. He looked like the fox I follow on Instagram.

Sometimes she snuggles.

Hey, we went camping last weekend! We drove farther north and east than we've ever been in Maine, so far up the coast our phones got confused and thought we were on Atlantic time.

I ended up with the warmer (borrowed) sleeping bag, and Mark got chilly and we both woke up from the fact that we were basically sleeping on the ground, and we were late getting to the camp ground in the first place and had to pitch the tent in the dark (of course). BUT, despite all that, it was so much fun. It's been so long since I've camped — we always talked about doing it with the kids, but somehow 25 years went by, and we never did it. I love the food preparation (hotdogs on sticks over the fire) and coffee drinking parts of camping, the smells and slowed pace and lack of screens, etc. And this was such an idyllic spot, right by the water, facing east for the sunrise. And both dogs were angelic, seriously. They snuggled up to us at night in the tent, and were happy to be tethered to the picnic table or to walk on leashes around the (empty) campground otherwise. We hiked too, and make great use of all our (mostly borrowed) camping gear.

HOOOONNNNKKKK

 I am incapable at the moment of doing anything with the word "pixel."



Um, it's that little square

those little blurry squares when

you know how a picture

you know when you're watching Downton Abbey on Netflix and it separates into, like, little

a picture is made up of separate pieces and


See what I mean? I have a job that requires a fully functioning brain.

Discreet Charm

Hello, and welcome to my very first Gif.


I made it! For some reason* I was thinking about the disturbed woman who used to come into Casco Bay Books and yell at me, and especially about the time she asked if I'd seen The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and how when I said, "Yes! I have!" she started yelling about how it was about me and I was the bourgeoisie (all I specifically remember now is her saying, "It's pasty-faced people like you...").


*The reason comes back to me now. I am writing blurbs for "petite bourgeoisie" and "petit bourgeois" over in another tab right now. Or I was until I got distracted by figuring out how to make a Gif.

Twenty-seven

“I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence. Well, anything for variety. I am ready to try this for the next ten thousand years, and exhaust it. How sweet to think of! my extremities well charred, and my intellectual part too, so that there is no danger of worm or rot for a long while. My breath is sweet to me. O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.” ― Henry David Thoreau

Today's Horoscope for Libra

Sometimes I see the words that appear in my docket for work on a given day as a kind of fortune cookie or horoscope. Today, on this dull day of cold gray skies and ice-drizzle, among my words are "aimless," "doubtful," "scattered," "shuffle," "unfit," and "unwelcome."

Fourteenth

It's always bothered me that there's a U in "four" and "fourteen," but poor "forty" has to go without. Also, fun fact, did you know that in the St Louis accent, it's pronounced "farty"?

Well hello. And welcome to my bathroom:

I've still not provided a really good look at the gorgeous tile in the shower--I keep forgetting to take a picture during daylight hours when you can really see it--but here's a peek. Note, too, the fancy curved shower curtain rod and the finished beadboard paneling. Well, not finished, clearly, because now we need to patch some holes and paint the whole bathroom and put the radiator back and paint the floor. But still!

À bientôt mes chéries.

Thirteenth

Eighteen degrees can look like this, friends. Another chilly day, another cup of tea! I found a pretty pretty little feather on the ground this morning, after weeks of searching for the two feathers from my dream a while back. The feathers in my dream were more exciting, but this is a sweet speckled brown and tan and white one that I like very much.

I had a dream that this beautiful girl was coming home in January, only it wasn't a dream!


Back to work, where I am blurbing, in this order, these words: Shiite, cartoonist, commie, zoologist. Yay!

A Mind of Winter

A day like this.

 


 

Listening to Low, drinking ginger tea, feeling under the weather (literally and figuratively). I keep trying to work and running into the word "nauseating," which I should be defining creatively, but which I am not.

Smiling at Me

Outside, it was blue skies, long shadows, plenty of dogs, choppy waves, puffy clouds, and gusts of wind.

Inside, it was new little plants and a curious cat, and cups of tea,* and history homework, and cheesy quesadillas on rice tortillas, and the death of Hugo Chavez on the BBC, and words like "rollicking" and "wacky."


*Made with my brand new fancy electric kettle, a belated birthday gift from David and Ellen!