Friday, June 02, 2023

Friday evening things

 * National spelling bee time. A lot being made of the wining word - Psammophile (a species that lives in sand - "phile" is derived from philos, loving, and Psamm has to do with sand (from Greek, if I remember correctly).

I knew the word and could have likely spelled it right. Yes, there are soils described as psamments so that's familiar, but I actually knew the word root from having read "Five Children and It" (E. Nesbit) years and years ago - the "It" of the title was the Psammead, a "sand fairy" that the five children (siblings, if I remember rightly) find. It's kind of....it's sort of like a genie, but it does monkey-paw wishes. In the old illustrations of the book it looks something like a monkey, but with eyes on stalks like a snail.

I was in the spelling bee when I was in seventh and eighth grade. Made it through the first (citywide?) round in eighth grade but went down early in the regionals, partly because of nerves. Being good at spelling - like a lot of things I was good at in school, it's proved fairly useless as an adult. (Especially given spell checkers). Though I guess the kid who won got $50,000 dollars. 

Still, I wish some of the dumb little things I was good at had some actual value. There was a supposed online vocabulary-size test people on Twitter were taking, and it claimed I was in the top 0.01 % of English speakers for breadth of vocabulary. (I don't think it was a long enough or complex enough test to give a fair assessment, but I do know I have a large vocabulary). But more and more, in our culture, it boils down to: how much money do you have or can make, how attractive are you, what kind of entertainment or sports talent do you have? and that's about it.

* I drove out to the farm store today - there is a small farm here that grows a variety of vegetables and also has cattle and pigs. No beef for sale; I had forgotten the seasonal nature of such things (they don't butcher until later in the summer, when the steers are large enough) but I did get some frozen pork chops. I also got some green beans. With vegetables, it's difficult: there are  a lot I cannot eat because of my allergies (summer squash, which give me bad indigestion) and there are some that aren't really doable for a single person (heads of cabbage unless you are willing to eat cabbage every meal for a week). They had purple kohlrabi, which looked intriguing, but the couple times in the past I've tried kohlrabi, I didn't care for it.

But it is nice to be able to get just outside of town (without driving the whole hour's round trip, over interstates with annoying construction going on, which I'd have to do to go to Sherman) and to maybe have a chance at something different/better than what the groceries have

*  I also got hanging baskets (a callibrachoa and a lantana) and a porch-pot of petunias today. I hope the difficult neighbors aren't in to plant theft. I know some folks in other towns have had issues where they have had people steal either flowers or whole entire plants. Okay, I get if people are genuinely hungry and maybe filch a few vegetables from a neighbor's garden (though if I had a garden and knew that was the case, some would show up on their porch with a note saying "I'm getting more than I can use, I want to share them so they don't go bad"). But it does bother me when people do stuff like steal flowerpots - to me, it feels a bit the same as vandalism - destroying something someone tried to do to make the world a little nicer place.

I also need to cut a lot more brush but by the time I got home (morning reviewing stats; afternoon running errands) it was really hot and I was tired and didn't feel like it. Maybe if it's not storming tomorrow...


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