An interesting word
math
vizsludraugas
I'd never heard of it before today, apparently because it failed to take off, but "chirology" as an equivalent for "phonology" when studying sign language is a very neat word.
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Slugs, why did it have to be slugs?
math
vizsludraugas
I find slugs to be extremely repellent. I don't like seeing them out in nature.

I find them even more disgusting when I catch two of them in my house.

The first was almost a meal for Ouse, but I got it away from her. The second was in her bowl when I went to put it in the dishwasher.

I'm not sure if those two are an aberration or if they are the beginning of a plague. The ants have been mild this year (although some of them got into the house via a leak), but I'd rather have them than slugs...and I hate ants.

We recently had a leak repaired, but there is some more work to be done, so we wonder if this is related to that. It could also be a symptom of the seemingly never-ending rain in the area and our lawn's current overgrown status-the service I hired to mow the lawn will take care of the latter, if true.

I like nature as much as the next person, but I wish it would stay outside.
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On patrol
ouse
vizsludraugas
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Boots!
math
vizsludraugas
Ouse has boots, which is a good thing now that the yard, and a good deal of the neighborhood, is a sea of mud.

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Mine was made of cardboard!
math
vizsludraugas
Taking a look at this reminded me of the TARDIS I had when I were a lad. I must have been 8 or 9, and my parents let me have a fridge box or something along those lines. I have vague memories of gluing a transparent plastic cup to the top, and drawing in a TARDIS console and a bunch of hexagonal thingies that one usually sees in the TARDIS control room.

His is a good deal more sophisticated than mine was-it will make a nice storage shed if the kid stops using it. Mine didn't survive too long.

I am so totally stealing this idea when we have our own house.

It fell in the forest, but I'm not sure if I heard the sound
math
vizsludraugas
We've had a fair amount of snow this year, and quite a bit of wind this week. Coming on top of last year's insanity, the local trees are having a tough time. Fallen branches are pretty common, and more than a few trees have come down.

One of them is in the forested area behind us. Žmona came out into the howling winds to provide some scale.

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I'm not sure if I heard that tree being uprooted-I heard a big bang last night, but that might have been due to the large branch that fell about 20 inches from the kitchen.

I spent some time this morning clearing things up a bit. It's 29° F/ -1.67̄° C with the windchill, so I wasn't out too long, but I did round up all the really big branches in our yard, and I also got rid of the mammoth branch lying on the island in the roundabout of our little cul-de-sac. It's been there for over a month, and neighbors have asked the city to remove it, but city crews are busy, so they have not gotten around to it. I decided I would handle the problem. The branch wasn't quite as heavy as I thought it was, but it still required some effort: I kept most of the weight off the ground, but I let it drag a bit. I kept it off the grass and drug it on the street and the paths, then hurled it in the copse with all the others.

It's too bad I don't know any carpenters, because we've got plenty of material for them.
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Gone, but not forgotten
math
vizsludraugas
It was one year ago today that we learned that Swag had cancer, and it was so bad that the best thing we could do for him was to send him off to the Rainbow Bridge the next day.

I wasn't in good shape for a while after that-my wife did her best to help me, as did many of my other friends. Some of them sent me little mementos of him, some provided friendly shoulders to lean and cry on-I was grateful for all of it.

There are two poems that remind me of him: one is by Kipling, the other, which my mom pointed me to, is by Robinson Jeffers.

I also have the picture of him that, I think, just captures him the best: a copy of it stands, framed, next to his ashes.

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I still miss him.
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Faster, doggie, kill, kill!
yawning_dog
vizsludraugas
I took Ouse for her first long post-winter walk today-I bit over 3 miles. She had a good time-she got to sniff lots of stuff, played with two other dogs, and terrorized squirrels.

She also killed for the first time.

We were walking along a spot where there were a lot of broken bird shells-it was pretty obvious there was a nest nearby.

A baby starling hopped along the trail. It look at Ouse for a second too long, and bam-Ouse shot out nailed the bird. I heard a snap and I knew that was it for the bird.

There was surprisingly little blood, and Ouse lost interest after the snap. I disposed of the body and went home.

She had a little extra in her strut on the way home.

In case anyone was wondering, the Lithuanian for starling is Varnėnas..not too far off from Varnas, the word for a crow or raven. I suspect it's some kind of diminutive, but I'm not sure.

It's always so strange to get reminded that while one's pets can be really affectionate balls of cute, they're also stone killers.
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A dose of spring
math
vizsludraugas
It is wonderful outside-real spring weather, even though it has some cold gusts.

There are downsides, of course: all the melting snow has turned a good deal of the yard into the kind of mud that makes one understand how soldiers drowned in mud at Paschendale.

But the upsides are so wonderful-the smells of spring, the sounds of chirping birds, the wrinkling of my dog's nose as she scents things that she'd almost forgotten about, the sunlight falling through my wife's hair in a way that you only really see as the world emerges from the slough of winter.

It is glorious.
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It was a little over a year ago
math
vizsludraugas
Ouse has developed an annoying habit-she only wants to do her business in the snow. This is getting to be tough as there is a lot less snow than there was a few days ago, and a good deal of the snow is a thin covering over sheets of ice.

This got me to thinking about last year's überstorm. I'd measured 32 inches in the part of the yard where I could be fairly sure that the snow was just straight snowfall, and not drifts piling up. (I did this by taking a broom outside, sticking it into the snow as far down as it could go, taking it out, and then measuring the snow mark when I got it inside.

According to the National Weather Service, this is pretty accurate:

2 N COLUMBIA 33.8 320 PM 2/06


When I told my dad how much snow we had, he said "That's worse than 1967," which is the benchmark for a bad snowfall in Chicago, and it was. In fact, that was worse than any snowfall in recorded Chicago history. (Interestingly enough, I was around for two of those snowfalls. I have only hazy, vague memories of 1979, but I remember 1999 pretty well, although I spent the aftermath in Kalamazoo, Michigan.)

I can't say I ever want to go through anything like the Snowmageddon ever again.

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