Two three quick things:

1. Probably no post tomorrow as I'm getting up at the crack of dawn to go out to a nature preserve with a former student who now is its steward. (She wants to formulate a survey plan to map the vegetation of the site). I'm kind of excited for it (been a while since I've been able to just go somewhere new) but she also warned me about the ticks, so I'm a bit apprehensive there.

2. It's rare, in my reading, to run across a word I don't know. It happened the other night though - when we finally meet the father of the awful Arabella Trefoil he is described, among other things, as "plethoric."

Now, I know the whole concept of the "humors" - the idea that someone used to be either sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, or choleric based on the type of bile (or other "humor") they produced in excess. So I figured it was something like that, and that it might also be related to "plethora" (which means "an excess" - not, as some use it, simply "a lot").

Well, here is plethoric. I assume Lord Augustus is described by that first definition. ("an excess of blood" Ew.)

3. Received an e-mail from one of those 419 scammers this morning that claimed they would make a "fransfer" into my account. Heh. I suppose that's because too many people have used "transfer" as a term to immediately junk an e-mail over into the "trash" file, but also, I can imagine a Saturday-Night-Live-like situation where the scammers actually get hauled into court, and their defense is, "But, but, yer honor, we didn't promise no funds TRANSFER....what we offered was a FRANSFER." (you have to imagine that in a sort of nasally, vaguely Brooklyn-accented voice)