I found an unpublished post from 2015 in my drafts folder. I can’t believe that it sat there so long. It’s still funny, and for me it’s also nostalgic, so I’ve decided to publish it now.
My son wanted some dominoes for vacation, probably because he remembers setting up cascading dominoes with his cousin Colby last year. So, at his Grammie’s request, I bought a big box of them before we went. I picked the Click n’ Play brand, because they seemed like they were a good size, and the price was right.
I’m happy with the product, and I would buy them again. But the best part, for me, is the writing on the box. Here are the highlights.
Dominoes are one kind of game, one kind of movement, also one kind of culture.
Its game rule is simple, the dominoes according to certain spacing becomes the single line, or the branch platoon becomes ground.
Sound of the dominoes hit, clear delightfully.
Warning: Please don’t mutually throw the toy.
P.S. 1/16/2022: We still have this set of dominoes, which we keep in the drawstring bag that came with it. The kids have been pretty good about not mutually throwing the toy, but they’re still really bad at putting the dominoes away. Just the other day I accidentally stepped on the whole bag of dominoes, which the children had left right next to my piano. Perhaps the manufacturer should add an instruction on how to put the game away after playtime is over!
One of the things I love about the English language is how interrelated so many of its words are. For example, when I was looking up the meaning of “kenspeckle” (a Scots word that means “well-known” or “conspicuous”), I was curious if the “speck” part was related to “spectacle.” I didn’t find a definitive answer, but my research led me to realize that there is a whole series of spec/spic words in English that all come from the same Latin root: special, species, specimen, spectacle, spectrum, speculate, inspect, prospect, suspect, perspective, perspicuous, conspicuous, etc. It blew my mind.
Later, as I was writing the word “incorporate” I realized that the meaning of it was probably literally “to add into a body.” That turned out to be true. For a word so obviously derived from Latin, you can make an intuitive leap with some confidence that you’re right.
But English gets its words from so many sources that it’s especially tricky. One day, as I was writing the word “bully,” I wondered if it might mean literally “like a bull.” Wouldn’t that make so much sense? But, according to Merriam-Webster, “The earliest meaning of English bully was ‘sweetheart.’ The word was probably borrowed from Dutch boel, ‘lover.'” The word then went through a series of transformations that took it from referring to a “good fellow” to a “blustering daredevil” to its current meany-pants definition. I never would have or could have guessed that.
English pronunciations are tricky, too. A recent discussion about how to pronounce the last name “Hough” (usually “huff,” but sometimes “how”) made me consider how many ways there are in English to pronounce “-ough.” There are more even than I had realized. My favorite case is the word “slough,” which rhymes with “cuff,” “cow,” or “coo,” depending on how it’s used. Though I never use the word to describe a swampy area, it always reminds me of the “Slough of Despond,” which I learned about in high school.
In January of last year I showed you a picture of an ant farming aphids on a maple-leaved viburnum. That picture had been taken in the late summer or early fall of the previous year. During the spring of last year, I found more little insect farmers.
Big Ants Farming Aphids on Maple-Leaved Viburnum
The plant hadn’t even quite bloomed yet.
During the summer I found some smaller ants farming aphids on a jewelweed leaf.
Little Ants Farming Aphids on a Jewelweed Leaf
I learned a few things from these discoveries. One thing is that the ants start farming early in the year, before the plants even bloom. Another is that we have at least two types of farming ants and at least two types of plants that make good aphid farms.
Finding these hidden farms was also a reminder that there’s a lot going on in this world that we don’t see because our points of view are so limited. I only spotted the farm on the viburnum because I happened to be looking at the plant from the side rather than above. I saw the aphids on the jewelweed because the leaf was twisted so that the underside faced upward. Otherwise, I’d never have realized that the farm was there. If we want to have a full understanding and appreciation of this world, we need to look at things from many different angles.
Previously in How I Met My Book I told you about some of my hand-me-downs, unexpected loaners, and permanently “borrowed” books. This time I want to tell you about my treasure trove of old paperbacks. I keep most of them behind another row of books, not because I’m trying to hide them, but because that’s where they fit. My husband often comments on my ability to pack books into boxes and onto shelves with very little wasted space. It would seem an odd gift for someone like myself, who typically struggles with spacial puzzles and tasks. That’s because it’s not a gift, but rather a skill developed over a lifetime of having more books than shelves. When you have inadequate storage space for your books, you learn to organize them not by genre, author, color, or any other such nonsense, but rather by size. You squeeze them in, layer them up, and stack them horizontally, even diagonally, if need be. You learn to use every square inch of shelving.
Revealed: Hidden Trove of Paperbacks
Though I don’t hide these books deliberately, some would say I have reason to. They’re a shabby lot, mostly genre fiction. Many of them look and smell very old, pages all brown and spotty, covers crumbling, spines cracking. Some of them are almost bizarre in that the prices on their covers no longer resemble normal prices.
OMG, the prices on these books! What can you even buy these days for 35 or 45 cents?
As a general rule, I prefer hardcovers to paperbacks. Paperbacks are great, though, when you don’t have a lot of room, and they’re ideal for a collection of Agatha Christie novels. She wrote a lot of books, and I own a lot of them. I wouldn’t be able to keep such a large collection if they were all hardcover. But, the reason that I prefer hardcovers is that they’re more durable, and indeed, some of these paperbacks aren’t holding up so well. The pages of Crooked House, for example, are falling out. I won’t be able to read the book again unless I can find a way to repair it.
As to how I met these books, I can’t tell you where each one came from, but a lot of them came from tag sales. I used to love shopping for books at tag sales. When I was a kid, books were so much more difficult to get. New books were too pricey. Used books were often hard to find, and though they were cheaper, they weren’t cheap. Tag sale books were wonderfully affordable, though, and much more readily available. During the summer it seemed like someone was always having a tag sale somewhere nearby.
Tag sale books were a great deal of fun to look through, if a little scary sometimes. The trouble with books is that they are so common and cluttery, not to mention hard to store, that they end up everywhere, including places where they don’t really belong, like basements. Wherever books go, they are bound to absorb elements of their surroundings–food, water, dust, mold, insects, perfume, cigarette smoke, and other alarming smells–and while it is interesting, this way in which books incorporate their history, it is not always pleasant. But, for those intrepid souls with the spirit of treasure seeking, and greedy for new reading material, nothing was more fun than digging into a box of dusty old books. You just never knew what treasure you might find.
I have read all of the books in my hidden trove, and will probably read most of them again. But I think the reason I love these books is that, more than anything else, they speak of that time in my life when all the books were “new to me” and it was such a joy just to find them and be able to bring them home with me. Now I can afford to buy new books, and I can buy them from all over the world, at any time of day or night. And while that is fantastic in its own way, it does take away a tiny bit of the magic of ownership. We love most those things that we have had to struggle for. Some of my books are treasures, not because of any intrinsic value, but simply because I found them while hunting for treasure.
Twitter asked, “What’s your best advice for young adults?”
My best advice for young adults is to find a way to forgive yourself for your mistakes. This might not seem like a pressing issue when you’re young, but as you grow older and your mistakes accrue, it can become one. The sooner you learn to deal with guilt and regret, the better off you’ll be.
First, remember that everyone makes mistakes. “Life is so easy and all the answers are so obvious!” said no human ever. Forge a path to forgiveness and keep it open. Formalize or ritualize the process, if necessary. Focus on fixing the mistakes that you can, making amends where possible, and taking whatever life lessons you can learn from those mistakes. Then let the mistakes and all of their attendant feelings go–officially and permanently–and never allow anyone to continue to beat you up over them, not even yourself. And last, do the same for other people. Forgive them, and do what you can to help them along their path to redemption. A society that doesn’t foster redemption not only creates unhappy people but also gives its worst offenders no incentive to do better. Life will never be easy, but it can be made to be less difficult if we all work to make it that way.
I have finally finished reading all 29 of Barbara Michaels’s novels! I finished up the last one (The Walker in Shadows) last week, and I gave it a B-. The benefits of finishing this reading challenge include….
I will never have to guess about which ones I’ve read and which ones I haven’t. I know that I have read them all, and I know whether or not I liked each one.
I was hoping to find a few that I liked enough to keep, and I found two: Houses of Stone and The Grey Beginning. I also remember Witch and Wait for What Will Come with fondness.
This is something that I wanted to do, and now it is done. There is power in finishing things, especially things that take time and persistence.
So, what will be my next reading challenge? I’m not sure, but I’ll keep you posted.
Every January I like to look over the blog posts of the previous year and highlight one post for each month as a review of the year. 2021 was quite an experience, huh? Well, let’s review and see.
January:If any month ought to have a positive message, it’s January. The message that I have chosen from last January still speaks to me because I often feel like I go through my life trying to take up as little space as possible and apologizing whenever I brush up against the boundaries of my tiny sphere. But, what I really ought to do is to create a whole new, expansive space for myself, even (and especially) if that means dinging the fabric of the Universe.
February: For this month I chose another positive message, in this case from a book review. Ernest Cline’s Ready Player Two was a disappointment in some respects, but it contained a quote that I still think about occasionally, especially in conjunction with my opinions about Helen Keller’s unusual upbringing. Just imagine how great the world would be if we all tried to make life better for each other. America needs a good, strong dose of this mentality right now.
[L]ife is like an extremely difficult, horribly unbalanced videogame. . . . Your body is your avatar, and you spawn in a random geographic location, at a random moment in human history, surrounded by a random group of people, and then you have to try to survive for as long as you can. . . . Some people play the game for a hundred years without ever figuring out that it’s a game, or that there is a way to win it. To win the videogame of life you just have to try to make the experience of being forced to play it as pleasant as possible, for yourself, and for all the other players you encounter in your travels. . . . [I]f everyone played the game to win, it’d be a lot more fun for everyone. (Ready Player Two, 2/12/2021)
March: March was an emotionally painful month, so I chose a post about that.
Though the virus had already spread to America by January of 2020, it wasn’t until mid-March, give or take a few days, that it became real for most of us. It’s been a year since. Even if the media weren’t talking about this grim anniversary, and even if I hadn’t noted the particular day that we started our lockdown, I think I’d know that it had been a year. It feels like a year. It feels like time for the kind of grieving that comes with the first anniversary of a tragic event…. (Sadness and Hope, 3/14/2021)
April: In April, I wrote a joking post about my supposed “life philosophy.” There was a lot of truth in it, because all good jokes are based on truth, and the ludicrousness of it has made me more conscientious about finishing tasks.
My life philosophy, according to my actions: If a task will take many hours of hard work, slave over it long enough to get within sight of the finish line, but not over it, then stop and do not start again except under duress. If a task will take only a few minutes, put it off forever. (Philosophy, 4/23/2021)
May: For May I chose an angry post about the CDC’s poor decision-making. I still cannot believe how badly they’re handling this pandemic.
The CDC announced shortly before I got my second dose of vaccine that vaccinated people no longer had to wear masks. I was a little cheered by the announcement. I mean, hooray for normalcy! And it’s great to know that vaccinated people are unlikely to spread the virus. But I was also a little dismayed, and the more time I have to think about it and see the way people are reacting, the more dismayed I become. So I’m going to share an updated version of the journal entry that I wrote about the announcement at the time it was made, because I need to get these feelings off my chest…. (I Just Gotta Say…, 5/23/2021)
June: I wasn’t sure what to choose for June, so I picked a post about something that the kids said, because the kids are so much fun.
When it comes to hobbies, there are, I think, roughly three types of people in this world…(Hobbies, 6/17/2021)
July: Every part of 2021 was overshadowed by Covid, and this post from June strikes at the heart of what is so hard about living through a pandemic. It’s the uncertainties that get you.
Marshall got his first dose of Coronavirus vaccine a few days after he became eligible and he got his his second dose in due course. We had, I think, always assumed that we would vaccinate him, but we still gave it a great deal of thought and worried occasionally over the decision before all was said and done. Because it’s an experimental vaccine for a virus that is generally not as hard on youngsters as it is on adults, it was hard to say yes to the vaccine, because what if? But it was also hard to say no, because what if? And it’s hard having a kid who is still too young to be vaccinated, because what if? I am so sick of the what-ifs! Life is so much harder when it seems like every decision is fraught with peril. (Because What If?, 7/28/2021)
August: For August I chose a post about finally seeing my parents after a long time apart. Maybe things are a little bleak right now, but at least we had that time during the summer to live a semi-normal life. What could be better than spending time with family, playing games, picking berries, making jokes, and just generally enjoying each other’s company?
We brought some of our family games with us. My father even played a few rounds of Stinker and Five Crowns with us, which was awesome, because normally he’s not a big one for games, particularly not in the evening when he is tired. He was just as good at Stinker as I had thought he’d be. But, it was my husband’s entry for the category of breakfast cereal slogans that was the most memorable. It was “Doo doo that sunrise!” After that round, every player who had the same selection of letters also incorporated “doo doo” into their answer….(Our Vacation, 8/3/2021)
September: In September I found out that an old friend had died. It still hits me hard every time I’m reminded that he’s gone.
“Life it seems to fade way, drifting further every day…” Those are the first two lines of Metallica’s Fade to Black. I heard it on the car radio the other day, and it made me think of my old friend Phil. He’s been on my mind a lot lately, because I found out recently that he died from cancer earlier this month….(Gone Too Soon, 9/25/2021)
October: The post that I chose to represent this month is about flowers. I discovered some real beauties in 2021, and this one was one of my favorites.
It’s a good thing I was hunting so carefully for interesting things in the woods last week or I might have walked right past this charming wildflower.
November: My husband did a lot of work around the house in 2o21, and one thing he did that was particularly nice was to fix the front door. It looks great or, as we like to say, posh.
Have I mentioned how posh the front door of my house is looking these days? My husband recently repainted it. It used to be red, and now it’s black. Far from paying homage to the Rolling Stones, we were never happy with the old shade of red. The new black matches the window shutters, and it helps to distinguish our house from the neighbor’s (she recently painted her door red). Our new family joke is that black doors are “posh doors.” Now, whenever we see a black door, we say, “Oooh, that’s a posh door.”… (What’s Up Today, 11/7/2021)
December: There was a noticeable lack of Christmas spirit in the world in December of 2021. I mustered just enough of it to write an extra Christmas post as a favor to my friend. It turned out to be a gift to myself, too, because I wouldn’t have written about this favorite Christmas tradition otherwise.
…I’m going to tell you about a silly Christmas tradition that my father and I have. One Christmastime, back when I still lived with my parents, we were talking about O Holy Night, a song that we all liked. I said, “I bet Pavarotti sings that one well.” Not long after that conversation, my Mom bought a Christmas Pavarotti CD. That CD got a lot of play, because Pavarotti did indeed sing the song well…. (Sing It Like Pavarotti, 12/23/2021)
Now 2021 is over. We are already more than a week into 2022. Calendar units are arbitrary, and time doesn’t pause between them, so there’s no distinct dividing line between the events of last year and this year. Still, I’d feel a lot better if everyone who is here with us in 2022 were to take a long, hard look back at 2021 and try to learn something from it. I mean, it was certainly a “teachable moment” in the history of mankind. So I guess that’s my New Year’s wish: may everyone learn something valuable from the difficulties of 2021 and incorporate those lessons into 2022, creating a better year for all of us.
Today was a snow day for the children. They played outside in the snow. Livia built a snowman. Good.
I had my annual work review. My boss said she was happy with my work. I got a raise. Good.
The School Superintendent sent us an e-mail with a link to a memo from the Department of Health. The document began with an acknowledgement that Covid cases are rising and that children make up a significant proportion of new cases. So what are they going to do about it? Are they they going to ask for better masks? Use more testing? Go to a hybrid model? Allow some kids to attend remotely? Keep the kids in “stable pods?” Have a week or two of distance learning to give the surge a chance to ebb? Of course not. They’re slashing the quarantine requirements instead. That will certainly keep more kids and teachers in school…along with more Covid. Not good!
School has already been cancelled for tomorrow. Livia came home with a full backpack, because she’d been told to bring all her school stuff home with her just in case. Quelle surprise.
My Covid test came back negative. That’s good, I guess, though I would like to have had a simple explanation for nearly losing consciousness yesterday.
Meanwhile, the schools are already having problems with staffing. Today we got word that they’re not 100% sure that they can staff all of the schools tomorrow. I bet they’re hoping that the approaching storm will be really bad so that they’ll have weather as an excuse for closing the schools on Friday. If they’re smart, they’ll tell everyone to bring their books and computers home at the end of the day tomorrow, just in case they need to shift to distance learning for a while.
