Clear and Clean

  Today was a great day! Western Michigan has had very little sunshine this month. Very little. Today looked promising with almost a sunrise.

There was even some blue sky in the afternoon, and the air felt springlike.

For the first day since I've been home, I ached perceptibly less. Not really pain-free yet, but SO much better. I got a lot of stuff put away, and for the first time in a long while, the kitchen floor is empty and clean. It's nice to have one space that isn't covered in stuff to be sorted. At the very least, it gives me a space where I can work to sort the next pile!

Om is home, and we started talking about the basement, but he's really tired. We'll get more serious about it tomorrow or the next day.

See Some Days Are...

Some Days Are...

  I had decided to do a small vendor/craft event to be sure I had all my stuff in the right places again. I was hoping to make a little bit of money, but didn't expect it would be a big show. Today was the day.

Well, it was poorly attended, and I didn't even make my booth fee. But it does get my head back into the swing of doing this. Some days are like this. The worst part was that the building was freezing. But we all survived.

There is no other news, except I am trying to put a few more things away yet this evening. Om gets home tomorrow.

See Books Leaving Footprints

Traverse City Trek

  I had to do some errands in Traverse City today. 90 minute drive each way. I had hoped to find something pretty to take a picture of, but the quality for the day will have to be in accomplishing what I needed to do. It was a miserable day with wet, dirty roads and a cold wind like a knife. Just stepping out of the car was miserable.

I came home tired to the bone. It's sure taking me longer than I want to get my energy back. But I'll get there.

Here are the answers to yesterday's quiz. Three people played. Thanks!

They will receive the short story. Glen VanAntwerp got 7 right, Java's Dada got 5, and someone got 2.

Answer	Word	Source
A-6	ahoy	Dutch- before the British ruled the seas, the Dutch did. A hoey was a type of ship. To call ahoy! was to hail the ship
B-1	alcohol	Arabic- through Medieval Latin, but from the Arabic and referring to distiled liquids. It came to have the more specific meaning of spirits of wine or ethanol in the 1700s, and then the specific chemical meaning after 1850
C-2	budgeriar (a budgie or parakeet)	Austrailian Aboriginal - the word literally means "good cockatoo"
D-3	bungalow	Bengali- agents of the East India Company comfortably found housing in a "bangla"- a house
E-11	cash (n.)	Tamil- when the Portugese were the primary traders from the Far East, they took the Tamil word for coin, "kasu," transmuted it to "caixa," and it eventually became the English word for any hard money
F-7	criterion	Latin- this word comes to English without change except for the differing alphabet
G-5	law	Danish- from "logh," that which is firmly established. This word also came with the early Anglo-Saxons who poured into England after the retreat of the Romans
H-8	moose	Native American- Naragansett "moosu" for "he strips bark and twigs from trees when eating"
I-10	potato	Spanish- "patata," but adapted from the Taino "batata" which meant "sweet potato." The Taino people are indigenous to the Carribean
J-9	shirt	Scandinavian- both "shirt" and "skirt" come from "skyrta." The Vikings overran England after the Roman's abandoned the island around 400 AD
K-4	Thames	Celtic- considering that the Celts were the dominant peoples of Great Britain for a disputed amount of time (but probably from at least about 300 BC to 100 AD) very little of their language remains in English except for place names such as the famous river. Scottish Gaelic, Irish, and Welsh are Celtic languages.
L-12	Wales	Teutonic- the early Anglo-Saxon invaders who rousted the Celts pushed their remnants to the west of the British island, and called them Wealas- "foreigners," ironically, since the Celts were there first.

See A Bunny Trail to a Treasure

A Bunny Trail to a Treasure

 

"Bunny Trail or Rabbit Trail" is an American idiom meaning (among other things) to go off on a tangent while trying to make a point, never or belatedly to arrive at the goal of the speech or conversation. Rabbits don't travel in straight lines; the etymology is obvious.

So here's how a bunny trail led to today's post. I'm a Nero Wolfe fan (a brainy and eccentric American detective created by writer Rex Stout).

I "met" Jim during the golden age of blogging. We became blogging buddies because his blog was about a dog, Dennis' Diary of Destruction. But Dennis was a Vizsla, as was my dog, Maggie. It turned out that Jim and I had other things in common like reading, writing, and some shared locations in our personal histories. So we have stayed in touch via Facebook.

Cue the non-sequitur. The only attempt I'd ever seen to dramatize the mystery series was one created by NBC in 1981. William Conrad (best known for Cannon) and Lee Horsley played Wolfe and his side-kick Archie Goodwin. It was terrible. The screenplays were wretched and Conrad just wasn't a believable Wolfe.

Jim is also a fan of Nero Wolfe. Just a few weeks ago, as a result of a word game not accepting "pfui" as a real word, he mentioned an attempt at a Nero Wolfe series by A&E. "Pfui" is one of Wolfe favorite expletives. Since I am a Wolfe fan, I knew why he was outraged that this word wasn't accepted. We've never had cable TV, and I wasn't even aware the A&E series existed. But I had to watch an episode (available on YouTube) to see what I thought. I've now watched both seasons that were produced and am on my second time through, while reading the original stories first to compare. The scripts have not been dumbed down for TV or spiced up to make them more rough and tumble. The screenwriters did a tremendous job.

Well! Maury Chaykin plays Wolfe and Timothy Hutton is Archie. Chaykin IS Wolfe (although in the pilot the directors didn't let him be quite as rude and brash as he is). Hutton took a few episodes to get into the role, but he is a believable, supercilious Archie. All the supporting characters are perfect, although possibly the best is Bill Smitrovich as the perpetually frustrated, cigar-chewing Inspector Cramer. Fritz, Saul, Fred, Orrie, Lon Cohen, and Purly Stebbins are also on the money. Colin Fox as Fritz occasionally rises to greatness.

Cue the aside. In the pilot and the first episode, A&E chose to dramatize my two least favorite of the Wolfe stories (The Golden Spiders and The Doorbell Rang). But they got the personalities of the cast and the setting so perfect that I had to keep watching.

So, closer to the point. I've always been interested in books mentioned within books. Two titles come into The Doorbell Rang, one is The FBI Nobody Knows. I assumed this was fictional, because it is a pillar of the plot. Turns out that's a real book, published in 1964, the year before the mystery was published. The other book mentioned is The Treasure of Our Tongue, which Wolfe is reading. Of course he doesn't want to stop reading and actually work. But the bank balance is low and Archie must goad the great brain into earning some money to support his chosen lifestyle.

Cue the rodomontade (one of Wolfe's words- look it up). I own every Nero Wolfe mystery, including The Black Orchids which was hard to find, and I've read them all about five times.

The Treasure of Our Tongue is also real, also published in 1964. It's written by Lincoln Barnett. It is a brief (343 pages) history of language in general and particularly of the English language. The first chapter- general history is really dated by being written in 1964, but after that, if you like words, it's a fascinating book.

Cue the mechanics. How did I find a book that old, that fast? There is a web site called Internet Archive. It is a non-profit archive library of books, movies, televison, music and more where you can borrow many things that are not yet in the public domain. And there it is! You can borrow a book for an hour at a time, but you can renew as often as needed. The text is presented as the page of a book, thus fixing what I hate most about reading things online: the too-long lines of characters. You can zoom, etc. The text is searchable. Pretty darn wonderful.

Parts of the book are frankly prescient. There is a whole chapter outlining how the English language has been debased and is declining. This was 1964, remember. Barnett should see the state of the language in 2023! He cites multiple sources of how ill-prepared high-school graduates are for college in the use of language. I graduated HS in 1965. If my near classmates were that bad, I wonder what he'd think of today's crop. For example, this quote from a college administrator: "the graduate of an elementary school today [1960s] cannot with certainty be accused of knowing any given subject, but he can be guarranteed to know no grammar."

The author clearly believes that proper language is not simply a conveyance for social snobbery. One of his final conclusions is "In the health of the English Language, the health of Western civilization may well reside."

Finally, the treasure (where all our wonderful words come from). I haven't done a quiz for a long time, but because I'm finding this book so much fun, I want you to play too. Column A is a list of a dozen English words. Column B is a list of languages/countries. Both lists are alphabetical. Match the word with where it came from. Tomorrow, I'll give the answers with explanations. Put your answers (eg A-5- not necessarily a correct match) in the comments. If you play and leave your email (unless you are sure I already know it), I'll send you my most recent short story, a dark little North-Dakota-inspired noir tale.

Column A	Column B
A. ahoy	1. Arabic
B. alcohol	2. Austrailian Aboriginal
C. budgeriar (a budgie or parakeet)	3. Bengali
D. bungalow	4. Celtic
E. cash (n.)	5. Danish
F. criterion	6. Dutch
G. law	7. Latin
H. moose	8. Native American
I. potato	9. Scandinavian
J. shirt	10. Spanish
K. Thames	11. Tamil
L. Wales	12. Teutonic

Phase 1 Success

  I spent all of today's energy getting the basement dried out. This is the primary room. The couch you can see the end of usually would be against the right wall where I've pulled back the wet rug. I got that moved on to now-dry concrete. Also note the three large bookcases against the back wall. They are pressboard, and they are sitting on wet carpet. You know what has to be done.

It took a lot of time, but I got all of those moved. Then Cathy came over to help me do a couple of things I didn't think I could do alone.

It's not in a picture, but Omer has a big old heavy wooden desk- the kind that used to be used by schoolteachers. The water had seeped almost to the wall behind that desk. I could either lift it or pull the carpet out from under it but not both at the same time. We got that done together.

Om is not home, but via phone we decided that it isn't reasonable to try to save this carpeting. It's really old, dirty, and now soaking wet. I really have no place to dry it. So, all that was left for Cathy and I to do was get the rest of the wet carpet out. Thankfully, the water did not reach the part of the wall you can see on the left. So we cut the carpet off beyond the damp seep and dragged the wet stuff outside to be disposed of later.

It looks as if I got everything dried out in time to prevent any mold in the walls. Nothing of importance was damaged. By hustling and getting some things moved yesterday that were more vulnerable, the water did not seep into anything of value. Of course, when Om gets home we have to decide what to do to cover the floor, move all the rest of the stuff, cover the floor, and put everything back. It's total chaos, but at least that doesn't all have to happen in the next 24 hours. And, we'll probably have to pay to get rid of the old carpeting.

I'm exceptionally happy to have been able to do this without calling in one of those companies that deal with this sort of thing. I know several people with horror stories from using them. I'd rather work my tail off than use one.

Next step- wait to hear if this water heater can be fixed, or if we have to get a new one.

A satisfactory conclusion to one of life's rather unpleasant surprises.

See Not the Day I Planned