Listening to: Michael Crawford’s new Christmas CD
Reading: Jewels of the Sun Nora Roberts
Weather: 50, rainy but clearing
Trivia: What expensive seafood was once used as fertilizer?
During the 1700s and early 1800s, there were so many lobsters along the coast of New England that one could walk down the beach and pick them up off the sand. Lobsters were so abundant that native Americans used them as fertilizer, and colonists thought of them as food for poor people. Servants complained when they were forced to eat lobster more than three times in a week. Today, of course, lobsters are prized as an expensive delicacy. They
are hunted intensely by humans, and they are no longer so abundant. Today's wild lobsters are puny runts compared to the huge forty- pound, three-foot specimens (18 kg, 1 meter) that were once common along the New England coast.
Cool word:haliography [n. hal-ee-OG-ruh-fee]
A description of the sea is a haliography, and someone who writes such a description is a haliographer [n. hal-ee-OG-ruh-fer]. Example: "I have always enjoyed the evocative haliographies of Conrad and Melville." The suffix -graphy refers to something that is written or represented in some way. It's from the Greek graphein (to write). The prefix
halio- is a modification of halo-, a prefix from the Greek hals (salt, sea).
Here are more "salty" words:
haloid [adj. HAL-oid]: salt-like
halimous [adj. HAL-ih-mus]: of or about salt; marine
halophyte [n. HALE-uh-fyt]: plant that lives in salty soil
halophile [n. HAL-uh-fyl]: life form that prefers a salty environment
halomancy [n. HAL-oh-man-see]: fortune telling with salt
halogen [n. HALE-uh-jen]: element that forms salts with metals
halocline [n. HALE-uh-klyn]: vertical gradient in ocean salinity
As Predicted
I spent the day exactly as I had expected. I’m so predictable. Although I did get off to a late start as we had a short power outage. I spent hours surfing to find Christmas images to use on this site, and have downloaded far too many I’m sure. Especially considering that they can’t be seen when viewers use Netscape. I still have no idea why. I think it has something to do with the angelfire site.
I’m still working on trying to figure it out.
So I surfed and surfed, then watched craft and decorating programs on HGTV, then surfed some more. I did get around to stamping eventually, so now the dining room table is covered with supplies and embossing powder.
I’ve run into a snafu with one of the new images I bought the other day, I can’t get it to ink evenly. This was an expensive stamp, and a real branching out for me. I also bought special paints to use with the stamp, which of course were also much too expensive. So I’ve turned to my rubberstamp mailing list for advice. I love these people. They respond immediately and are so anxious to help and share what they’ve learned.
It really is a family of strangers. We have met a couple of times at our annual convention in the spring, and it’s like finding long lost friends.
I’m going to have to keep working at getting these things fixed tomorrow. I also have to make a snowman card of some sort for one of my office mates. Her birthday is a week from Monday and she’s a snowman collector, so I have to give her a snowman card. I also have to find the gift I bought for her several months ago and put away. Somewhere.
I need to get these things done this weekend as I’ll be in New York next Saturday. (hooray!) Funny that I haven’t been talking or thinking about that very much. I need to get things squared away with Michael, but he’s been very silent these last couple of weeks as well.
Doom and gloom me figures that this will fall apart this week and we won’t get together.
I don’t plan to venture out tomorrow, except to pick up cat food and allergy pills for myself. I’ve never had allergies this late into the year before, but this weird weather is wreaking havoc with my system.
I like not going out and being a recluse sometimes.
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