change is good

With Tuesday’s election in the US, people all over have been talking about change. Lots of people are saying they want change.

As such, it seemed a good time to offer up some change myself. Some spare change.

I dug out these coin things from deep in the pockets of my brain (and a few from between the couch cushions) just in time for ThThTh.

A Coin Collection¹

  • “Christmas is Coming:” an English Christmas carol

    Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat
    Please put a penny in the old man’s hat
    If you haven’t got a penny a ha’-penny will do
    If you haven’t got a ha’-penny
    then God bless you

  • a penny for your thoughts: an expression spoken as a request to hear about what someone else is thinking. Does not usually actually involve a cash transaction.
  • “A Penny for Your Thoughts,” a treacly song from the faux musical from Waiting for Guffman. (You can hear a version of it performed by Elvis Costello, even. It’s still painfully treacly.)

    So here’s penny for your thoughts, a nickel for a kiss
    A dime if you tell me that you love me

  • lucky penny: Pennies are sometimes kept as good luck charms. Finding a penny is said to bring good luck: “Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck.”
  • There is a wedding custom for the bride to put a penny in her shoe for the ceremony for “good fortune and protection against want”:

    Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue and a copper penny in your shoe!

  • penny loafers: shoes in which people would stick a penny as an ornament.
  • “Pennies from Heaven,” a song and a movie from 1936. Originally sung by Bing Crosby, then by many others. (Here’s a youtube version by Billie Holiday.)
  • it’s your nickel: an expression meaning “you made the phone call” and also “it’s your turn to talk.” My grandmother used to say this when I’d call her long-distance.
  • nickel and dime: an expression meaning “cheap” or “inconsequential.”
  • Nickel and Dimed: a book by Barbara Ehrenreich about her experiences working at various low-wage jobs.
  • dime store: a somewhat archaic term for a store carrying various and sundry low-price items.
  • dime bag: the quantity of marijuana that can be purchased for 10 dollars.
  • “Dime,” a song by Cake. About a dime. Really.
  • “shave and a haircut two bits:” a very short song. Two bits is a quarter, or 25 cents. (Apparently small change was once cut wedges of a silver dollar, each worth an 8th of a dollar.)
  • Pac-Man Fever, a song from the 80s (duh) beginning with the line:
    “I got a pocket full of quarters and I’m heading to the arcade.” (Oh, the nostalgia triggered by bad 80s music and references to arcade video games. If you want to subject yourself, you can hear the song on YouTube.)
  • 50 Cent: the stage name of rapper Curtis James Jackson III
  • silver-dollar pancakes: very small pancakes, such as might ressemble a large coin.

dime
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¹ It’s a bit heavy on the pennies, but so are most change piles.²

² I almost forgot the word of the day. I’ve chosen denticles : “Small tooth like raised points on the inside edge of coins.” How could I resist a word that rhymes with tenticles?

euphoria

We did it, we did it, we did it!

Less than 12 hours ago, John and I went to vote at one of the local schools. We waited till after picking up Phoebe from daycare so that we could bring her with us. Of course we brought Theo, too. One day, we will be able to tell them that they were there when we voted for Barack Obama.

And as you all know, at 11:00 p.m., the election was called for Obama.

I felt like dancing in the street. (But I don’t live in that kind of town.)

Vote now!

Election day is finally here in the US.

There are quite a few hours left to go before we get the results. The world is all aquiver with antici…

…pation.

Making us wait.

So the word that’s been on my mind today is anticipation. Which brings to mind this song.


(Anticipation, by Carly Simon)

Which brings to mind ketchup commercials.(And ketchup goes so nicely with Dr. Frankenfurter…)

And seeing as WordPress has this cool new poll feature, I thought I’d take advantage on this historic day to ask you an important question.

making history

There are events that affect us collectively more than others. All too often these momentous events are tragedies. Natural disasters. Attacks. Assassinations. Calamities. These events leave marks in our collective memory, as well as in our history books.

What were you doing when …?

In my lifetime, I can remember quite a few such events. Where I was when I heard the news, saw the footage. How I felt, what I was doing.

Tomorrow, I feel like I’m going to have the chance to witness something monumentally positive. I feel like I’m marching for women’s suffrage. Like I’m marching on Washington for civil rights. I feel like I’m helping to tear down the Berlin Wall.

I feel like I’ll get to see us landing on the moon.

One small step. One giant leap forward.

Progress in this country has moved slowly. But this election shows that we’ve still been, as a society, making small steps forward. I am excited that we may see improvements in areas and issues that I care deeply about. Education. Dipolmacy. Fighting poverty. Making healthcare available to all.

Not least of all, though, I am excited that we will get to see a Black man elected to the highest office in this country. I am thrilled that I get to see this event in my lifetime. That I get to have a vote in this. That my vote will be counted.

And I am even more thrilled that kids in this country will grow up accepting this as normal. That my own children will grow up accepting this as normal. It will be just a fact of history.

Obama 2008

vote

obama-kid

obama_baby1

————
Images: The top one is one that I’d seen in an email making the rounds, and sent to me by mother. I looked for it online, and found it at Yes We Can Hold Babies, where you can see lots more photos of Obama and babies.

I’d also like to direct you to some more photos that have moved me. First, Girls 4 Obama, found via Bitch, PhD. And second, a collection of photos by Callie Shell, a photojournalist. (Sent to me by John.) I was particularly impressed by the one showing the worn soles of Obama’s shoes.

The other photos above are of Phoebe and Theo. My friend Erica, who has been working her tail off volunteering for the Obama campaign, got us the buttons. Thank you, Erica!

——–

Oh, and for my word of the day, let’s say enfranchisement.

bunny and carrot (and also a cat)

I had grand ideas to have Phoebe and Theo’s Halloween costumes coordinate in some way. As Phoebe wanted to be a bunny, I thought Theo (who had no input in the matter) could be a carrot.

I early gave up on the idea of making Phoebe’s bunny costume, thinking that it would be easy to find one ready-made. I had plans to make Theo’s costume as well as my own, and thought making 3 costumes would be insane. We had some trouble finding a bunny in her size, as it turned out, and ended up ordering online. But seeing as I am a pathological procrastinator, we did so only a week before our party.

A few days before the party, we got a bit antsy, and when we saw a much-discounted white kitty costume, we decided to get it, thinking that I could transform it into a bunny in a pinch. As it turned out, the bunny costume arrived the same day. But, it also turned out to have enclosed plush-covered feet. Such that one could not wear the costume with shoes. As one might want to do when walking outside. Such as one tends to do for trick-or-treating.

So, we decided she could wear the bunny costume for our party, and then the kitty cat for trick-or-treating. (And as such may have set the expectation for future years of having two costumes for Halloween…)

I did manage to make Theo’s carrot, using orange fleece (so as to need minimal hemming) and some green felt for the greens. I made up a pattern for carrot bunting-type thing as well as a hat. We don’t have a sewing machine, so I stitched it up by hand. Much of it while I was on the phone for a work conference call a few hours before the party.

And, because I had to go and run off at the mouth (or whatever the typed equivalent is) about having each of my posts this month feature some word that I like, I felt compelled to follow through in some way. And while I do think the word bunny is a fine word¹, it seemed a bit…um…fluffy…as a followup to yesterday’s omphaloskepsis.

So, I dug up a couple of new words to go along with this post. Both of these are from a site called Luciferous Logolepsy.

    apiaceous
    adj. – parsley-like; belonging to plant family including carrot, parsley, etc.

    macrotous
    adj. – having large ears


My temorarily macrotous daughter and briefly apiaceous son.


Here is Phoebe as a kitty. No bonus word for this image, unless someone else wants to add one.

¹ I did discover though, that in British English, bunny can refer to a squirrel. Which funnily enough was Phoebe’s costume of last year.

NaNaGaMo begins

In addition to NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month), I’ve decided to participate in NaNaGaMo, National Navel-Gazing Month. Every day for the month of November, I will contemplate my navel, or perhaps someone else’s navel. In a pinch, I may stare at a navel orange.

On this theme, I’d like to highlight a word with you that I met in the past year or so, and which I’ve become quite fond of:
omphaloskepsis (noun)

literally, the contemplation of one’s navel, which is an idiom usually meaning complacent self-absorption (from dictionary.com)

I think it’s quite a good word. I try to use it whenever possible.

Phoebe at about 16 months promises to master the art of ompaholskepsis.Such a lovely belly button.
Phoebe, at 16 months, shows signs that she will be a master of the art of omphaloskepsis.

Actually, I was considering having each of my posts for the month of November feature a word that I like. (I mean, a different word that I like. Otherwise we could end up with a month of posts about pants.) (Well, that might happen anyhow.) We’ll see. I promise to, at the very least, use words in every post.

NaBloPoMoMe

I’ve signed on to NaBloPoMo once mo’, which means I’ll be posting daily for the next 30 days. Because I’m deranged.

And like last year, when I founded The Ministry of Silly Blogs, I am sorely tempted to start another group. Or several.

Really, what I should be doing more of is working on my degree requirements. Not more blogging. What I could do is make myself blog about my progress. Perhaps the specter of public shaming will motivate me.

Who else is diving in this time? I know ashley, wreke, and City Girl have signed on. And heather is contemplating it. Anyone else?

hee-haw, hee-haw

It’s Thursday again, and that means I’m due for a ThThTh list. What with my having the upcoming election on the brain, it seemed a good time to bring out the donkeys.

Some donkeys

  • The Democratic donkey: the donkey is an unofficial symbol of the U.S. Democratic Party. The jackass was first associated with Andrew Jackson in his 1828 campaign, according to the official Democratic Party’s website page on the history of the democratic donkey.
  • Pin the tail on the donkey: A party game in which blindfolded participants attempt to attach a representation of a tail to a drawing of a donkey. The one who gets the tail closest to the tail end of the donkey wins.
  • Donkey pronoun: a term in linguistics for a certain type of pronoun in which the syntax does not map straightforwardly to the semantics. Named after this example, in which “it” is the donkey pronoun:

    Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it. — Peter Geach, Reference and Generality

  • Hee Haw: a country-themed (in the sense of “rural” and “Western”) sketch comedy show with a donkey mascot. It was mostly on in the 70s. (The show’s title is the English onomatopoeic word for the sound of a donkey’s bray. For the record, my post titile makes reference to the sound, not the show. I find the show, or the memory of watching the show as a child, somewhat painful.)

  • Eeyore: the gloomey donkey from Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh.
  • The Golden Ass: Another name for the Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, an ancient Roman novel in which the protagonist turns himself into an ass.
  • Nick Bottom: a character in the Shakespeare play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bottom’s head is turned into an ass head.
  • Benjamin: the donkey in Orwell’s Animal Farm.
  • Donkey: the animated donkey, voiced by Eddie Murphy, from the Shrek movies (2001, 2004, 2007).
  • Dapple: Sancho Panza’s donkey in Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

The Curse of the Mummy Blogger

We had our Halloween party last Friday. It was a “costumes optional” affair. As hostess, of course I had to dress up. (Okay, fine. I love to dress up.) I decided to be a mummy. It seemed appropriate. You know, seeing as I’ve been pretty wrapped up in myself. And feel a bit holed up and isolated. And starting to feel old. Now that the air is getting dry with the crisp outdoor air and heated indoor air, my skin is a getting a bit shrivelled. (I don’t have time to shower most days, let alone moisturize…)

Oh, right. And then there’s the whole pun business. How could I resist?

My costume was a bit better in planning than in execution, but I guess it worked well enough. (It might not surprise you to learn that I ran out of time.) I used an old white sheet that had been in our rag pile, and tore it into strips. I then soaked the sheet in tea. (I used Lapsang Souchong, because I have a lot, and don’t drink it much. I also figured the musty smell would work.) I wore an off-white shirt and some off-white pajama pants, and wrapped myself. I stitched here and there and safety pinned to hold things in place. There wasn’t too much time, as I started the wrapping about an hour before the start of the party, so I didn’t manage to wrap as much of myself as I’d hoped. Ah well.

John didn’t get any pictures till the end of the night, by which time I was largely unravelled. But you can still get the effect. (Go see the picture…if you dare…)

I also made Theo’s costume, though not Phoebe’s. Phoebe was a bunny, which was her idea. And a harder costume to track down than you might imagine. Theo was a carrot. I’ll try to get some pictures.