Hey, you up there on the snow cloud.

MEMO

TO:         Weather Gods

FROM:  MPG

RE:          Overnight Snow

DATE:    April 22

Please note date above.

As of this date, no more snow is required. Please send warm and gentle rain instead. Sunshine would be good also, but that may be beyond your capacity at present.

Propitiation will continue as burnt offerings in the woodstove until further notice. Weather dances are cancelled for the present due to cold-aggravated arthritis.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Faking it.

The lock-up affects us all in different ways.

In a moment of madness I went looking for face  mask patterns through Google search and found several. My helpful husband also found and printed off one for me to use. I dug into boxes of craft materials that I have not accessed since the grand girl got too old to come out here and make things while we looked after her for her parents (she was putting in her own zippers by her last visit). I have piles of suitable fabric and filter material. I looked for and found an incredible assortment of sizes of elastic. And got at it, yesterday.

Needless to say, the first try was an abject failure. I used the pattern JG found

and it turned out to be way too big and too loose. I am now about to embark on a second that strikes me as being a bit small, but we will see. Goodness knows I have lots of stuff to keep at it until I get one that actually works. In the meantime, a Facebook friend who is an incredibly talented seamstress has made one mask (that she posted about anyway) that not only works and fits but has a matched pattern on it. Oh, well.

More on this topic later. Maybe. For non-sewers, I promise to warn you.

My other preoccupation has been, of course, news. On the internet, on the radio, in our two daily papers. Quite a bit of it is very confusing. Quite a bit of it is bad for my blood pressure. Some of it made me cry. And I made a most embarrassing discovery about a mistake I have been making for quite some time.

I have this prejudice about the meaning of words. I like them to be used the way I think is accurate. I can work myself up to a really good grumble when someone uses ‘decimate’ to mean a high but indeterminate number of deaths. You see, I was a Roman era scholar back in the day and learned that ‘decimate’ means ‘destroy one in ten’, * I know that the meaning has broadened, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

* Definition of decimate (transitive verb)

1: to select by lot and kill every tenth man of, decimate a regiment

2: to exact a tax of 10 percent from

3a: to reduce drastically especially in number. cholera decimated the population

The connection between decimate and the number ten harks back to a brutal practice of the army of ancient Rome. A unit that was guilty of a severe crime (such as mutiny) was punished by selecting and executing one-tenth of its soldiers, thereby scaring the remaining nine-tenths into obedience.

It's no surprise that the word for this practice came from Latin decem, meaning "ten." From this root we also get our word decimal and the name of the month of December, originally the tenth month of the calendar before the second king of Rome decided to add January and February. In its extended uses decimate strayed from its "tenth" meaning and nowadays refers to the act of destroying or hurting something in great numbers.

Decimation by William Hogarth Beavers, Roman Military Punishments, Chapter 4 (Wikipedia)

Um, I was going somewhere before I got diverted into Merriam-Webster. Oh yes. It finally percolated through my thick skull that the modern world is using ‘fake news’ not to mean something that is made up rather than real but to indicate something that is exaggerated by the press beyond its neutral news value. Not as in ‘fake it till you make it’. Back to Google.**

** adjective: fake, not genuine; counterfeit.

Similar: forgery, counterfeit, copy, sham’ fraudulent

(of a person) claiming to be something that one is not, "a fake doctor"

There are even several definitions*** of ‘fake news’ that could have clued me in earlier if I had not been so arrogant.

*** Fake news is written and published usually with the intent to mislead in order to damage an agency, entity, or person, and/or gain financially or politically, often using sensationalist, dishonest, or outright fabricated headlines to increase readership, (Wikipedia)

Words that ‘stray from their original meaning’. Little lost sheep, Bah, humbug. I feel obliged to take a different look at what President Trump has been trumpeting about, much as I would rather scrub toilets.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/what-it-really-means-when-trump-calls-a-story-fake-news/2020/04/13/56fbe2c0-7d8c-11ea-9040-68981f488eed_story.html

It is so easy to misread someone’s comments when a word is not being used in the same sense by both parties. I recall pleading with my junior high school students to regard language as a tool and realize that the sharper the tool, the better the result. I have not long since been hammering at my ESL students to try to get them to understand that there is a difference between the simple tenses and the progressive tenses. (‘I eat my breakfast at 8:00’ am vs ‘I am eating my breakfast’) My father was a lawyer, my mother a life-long student and teacher of English. They used to argue about language, my mother accusing my father of obfuscation in some legal document he had written and my father complaining that Shakespeare was not poetry because it did not rhyme. (Not hard to see why I turned out the way I am, eh.) And misreading plays hob with cooperation and fellowship.

To top it all off, of the patterns I found that made sense to me, only one mentions seam allowance width and it is not clear whether you are to cut it outside the provided pattern or not. I am going to have a lot of masks of wildly variegated sizes before I get one right, I can tell. Ah well, I do have a lot of time to spend on this project.

A Distanced Diary

This is a very dull set of sort-of diary entries. I am going to make it more fun, for me anyway, by adding, quite randomly, some photos that I like.

Saturday

It is a grey sort of day, cool cloudy and still. It is not melting the tired old snow and ice. It is not enticing me to go out and walk. But when I was out, I could hear a robin, cheerful soul that he is, happily singing, interspersing the song with the odd chirp. He couldn’t see me any more than I could spot him, because the last few days when he did see me, he stopped singing and scolded me roundly, I guess for disturbing the concert. He surely does not see me as a competitor for nesting sites and worms.

I am getting somewhat tired of my nesting site, even though we have only been social distancing for ten days or so. I will probably be stir-crazy by the time the restrictions ease up. Ours are voluntary restrictions as we have not travelled or, to our knowledge, been in contact with anyone contagious. But the virus is out there… one of my neighbours (from the regulated distance) told me that our local shopping town had its first hospitalized case yesterday. I can’t imagine how the medical community is coping, waiting for the onslaught that we know will come. I am so amazed at how brave they are. They remind me of my local robin in fact, cheerfully preparing for the season with occasional pauses to scold.

On a winter's day. This set of old buildings is on a farm two down from our land. It actually has some fields that can be tilled and used. If  enough rocks are picked up.

Monday.

Yesterday it rained and rained and misted and thundered off in the distance and rained some more. It was a dark, damp and dismal day all around. A lot of snow got away, though, and there is water running everywhere. I read that the melt has been long enough and early enough that even this amount of rain is unlikely to cause flooding. And a good thing too. I cannot imagine how anyone could cope with a flood on top of everything else that is going on. In vulnerable areas people rely on volunteer sandbaggers and helpers and, at the moment, no one is supposed to get within a shovel length of anyone else, let alone toss them sand bags. Let us hope that the forecasters are right, for once.

JG spent a lot of time this afternoon organizing a comprehensive grocery list and he is going into town tomorrow to get what he can of what is on it. We are well-supplied with most of the items that are hard to get, I believe, so he should do okay. He has been planning this get-away since last week and I do hope he enjoys it.

The remains of an old barn in the middle of a beaver flood on our property. The beaver pond was once a hay field with a stream flowing through it. Then the beaver arrived.

Wednesday

JG came home with everything on his list. The store even had our usually hard to find favourite bread. We did forget to add a couple of things to the list though. I guess we will do without those for the next while. He said that there were some empty spots on the shelves, one being dishwasher pods. It occurs to me that this might be a problem with our local YIG grocery’s ordering patterns, because they are erratic, rather than a run on the soap. But I will never know for sure. I guess if toilet paper is an hoarder's item, so could soap be.

Another view of the same beaver pond. The dam that keeps the water there is at the right, between the two clumps of evergreens.

Thursday

This morning we had our usual first Thursday of the month book club meeting, using Zoom. Or those of us that thought we could cope with it met. Several members emailed to say that their computers or their computer skills were not up to it. It was a bit of a choppy meeting, as we are just learners, and also because the initiator of the Zoom session did not seem to have enough bandwidth to carry her voice and her video properly, making her hard to understand. We spent more time on things peripheral to the book than we did on the book itself. The setting was Russia and two of our members had experience living in a communist country or visiting there. The consensus was that it is a tense place to live in, or even to navigate inside, with fascinating stories to illustrate.

Rain is forecast for tomorrow. It is harder to stay cheerful when it is rainy and dull and muddy and cold. Not impossible, however. It may be impossible, though, to find anything to write about.

Yet more beaver floods. This rather unfocused shot was taken by the sister of the girl pictured, from their punt.