Archive for January, 2009
The exterior work is done for now: we can’t paint until it’s warm at night, and the green roof stays until there’s some positive cash flow.
The painted plastic pipe along the roofline was replaced with a metal piece that we’ve sprayed with vinegar–it’s already rusting (rusted metal is very big out here). But the best part of this picture is the sign in the window:
Love it (let there be jobs).
Last winter the snow was so deep it covered the fenceposts.
Last winter if you stepped off the trail you’d be floundering in deep powder. The snow nearly covered this sign, and I liked being told to read a notice that was impossible to read.
This winter there’s a few feet of snow on the ground–it’s fully winter–but when you step off the trail there’s no disaster and the sign is nearly completely exposed.
Alchemy is defined as “any magical power or process of transmuting a common substance … into a substance of great value” and more specifically “a form of chemistry and speculative philosophy practiced in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and concerned principally with … transmuting baser metals into gold … .”
In Arabic, “al” is the definitive article “the”, so al-kīmiyā’ is al-, the + kīmiyā’, chemistry. Alchemy started out as “the chemistry”.
Algebra is the classic “al” word from Arabic (since algebra dates all the way back Mesopotamia, it’s an Arabic word) al-, the + jabr, bone-setting, restoration. I think it’s the knitting together in the bone-setting that brings us to algebra.
Allah is a contraction of al-ilah, ‘the God’.
And here are four words I’ve never thought of as Arabic in origin:
albacore - al-bukr ‘the young camel’ (but I couldn’t find bukr in the Arabic-English dictionary, so this might not be correct)
alcove - al-, the + qubba, vault.]
alfalfa - al-, the + faṣfaṣa (variant of fiṣfiṣa, from Persian aspist, clover).]
and finally
alcohol - al-koh”l ‘the kohl‘ kuḥl, a fine powder most often made from antimony used by women to darken their eyelids… Arabic chemists came to use al-kuḥl to mean “any fine powder produced in a number of ways, including the process of heating a substance to a gaseous state and then recooling it.” The English word alcohol, derived through Medieval Latin from Arabic, is first recorded in 1543 in this sense. Arabic chemists also used al-kuḥl to refer to other substances such as essences that were obtained by distillation, a sense first found for English alcohol in 1672.
Almost is off the hook; it’s from Old English.
I let the Halloween pumpkins hang around outside until they’re limp, and give them to the deer in January. This year I put a pumpkin right near the porch and set up my tripod six feet away. The only deer brave enough to get that close was the little buck who walked towards me the other day.
The pumpkin, after many freeze-thaw cycles, is drippy with sweet pumpkin juices.
Which is how I got this series of photos of wild mule deer’s tongues.
This is probably the only mule deer tongue series you’ll ever see
(as the pumpkin gets smaller, the deer’s tongue looks larger)
and after half an hour of flipping, biting and licking the pumpkin, he stood still for a final pose and walked back into the forest.
We settled on colors over lunch Friday (after months), and I got paint that afternoon.
There are three shades: a startling green, a bright yellow
and a plummy wine shade. We’ll be going a little richer on the plum.
Kaila and Bob put on the final coat of green on Sunday.
Kaila is visiting from Vermont until she decides to go to school for a while. We’ve known her since she was a baby and she’s very dear; she’s twenty now, and handy as can be. My kitchen has never been cleaner, Sam is showing off his competence and helpfulness, and we have labor on tap. We’re entitling this shot, Kaila thinking of her RN (that’s my baby).
I put out some alfalfa pellets and this buck came by. He’s looking thinner.
A younger buck wanted a bite but this older one chased him away.
I was kneeling in the snow with my tripod, very still, and the younger buck peered at me,
sniffed the air for me,
and walked right towards me.
He posed for a profile
and a beauty shot, and then I stood up and waved so he wouldn’t get any closer.
Dear Readers,
I was nominated for Best New Blog (thanks to your kind efforts), but I did not make the list of top five finalists. This leaves me at a loss: I had planned to blog for a year and stop at the new year if I hadn’t reached 100,000 page reads a month or a Bloggie.
It is a fact in this networked world that people can catch a wave and have huge audiences. I haven’t caught one, and I thought if I didn’t then that’s the game. What I failed to understand is that a blog is cumulative, so incremental growth is probably enough to get me to the point where it’s big enough to pay… or, sites fail because people give up too early.
So I need suggestions, if you’re so inclined, of what you think would make this a better blog.
Thanks in advance for your help,
Alice
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