You’d be 76 today.
Happy birthday, dad
So it goes
Like Vonnegut said, “So it goes.” Poo-too-weet!
7×7
I had the day off today. I took a broken chair and ottoman to the dump, I did laundry, I talked to my mom and got texts from my sisters, I wrote a few hundred words, I went for a 2‑km bike ride (first of the year!), I enjoyed the heck out of a Guinness chocolate cake my wife got for me at Chez Angela, and I taught/studied a couple foot/leg throws at judo[1]sasae-tsurikomi-ashi (lifting/pulling foot block) and hiza-guruma (knee wheel) .
I’ve had worse birthdays.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | sasae-tsurikomi-ashi (lifting/pulling foot block) and hiza-guruma (knee wheel) |
|---|
Semantle
I’m really only saving this for my own recollection. I managed to “win” Semantle on my first try (27 guesses but it’s still a victory).
| # | Guess | Similarity | Getting close? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 27 | surgeon | 100.00 | FOUND! |
| 26 | surgery | 61.15 | 988/1000 |
| 18 | procedure | 44.05 | 890/1000 |
| 16 | proctologist | 41.20 | 844/1000 |
| 17 | proctology | 37.50 | 722/1000 |
| 15 | zoologist | 28.61 | (cold) |
| 23 | procedures | 25.75 | (cold) |
| 5 | zoology | 16.66 | (cold) |
| 12 | zoo | 14.00 | (cold) |
| 22 | procedural | 12.90 | (cold) |
| 8 | ambergris | 12.20 | (cold) |
| 13 | zoom | 10.33 | (cold) |
| 3 | [expletive deleted] | 10.31 | (cold) |
| 4 | an | 9.07 | (cold) |
| 24 | task | 8.14 | (cold) |
| 14 | zoomer | 7.36 | (cold) |
| 25 | tasks | 6.16 | (cold) |
| 6 | ontology | 5.91 | (cold) |
| 7 | zealous | 5.78 | (cold) |
| 19 | processor | 5.21 | (cold) |
| 21 | produce | 5.02 | (cold) |
| 1 | latter[1]the previous day’s word | 2.83 | (cold) |
| 11 | pork | 2.66 | (cold) |
| 20 | process | 1.95 | (cold) |
| 9 | feldspar | 1.38 | (cold) |
| 2 | sparkle | 1.35 | (cold) |
| 10 | noted | 0.32 | (cold) |
Footnotes
| ↑1 | the previous day’s word |
|---|
In dreams
I dreamed of summer last night, bike riding. When I woke up it was ‑33 before the wind chill.
Le sigh.
Smitty’s Eggs
This weekend was, more or less, the fifth anniversary of my dad’s death. So we went to Smitty’s and had eggs Benedict, and then I bought myself a very JJ parka.
Hallowe’en Tally 2021
OK, it’s 10 pm and I’m turning off the light. I guess the rest of these chocolate bars are our delicious problem.
The List:
- 2 goth teens
- 2 witches
- 1 Wheat King
- 1 strawberry
- 1 jack-o-lantern, very excited that we were handing out full-size chocolate bars
- 1 skeleton
…for a total of 8, which I think is our lowest count in 22 years of living here.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I think there might be a Coffee Crisp with my name on it.
Autumn Trees
North of ACC.
I can’t decide which I like better. Do you have a preference?
Just people, like you and me
We’ve been watching episodes of a PBS show called My Grandparents’ War, where celebs like Helena Bonham Carter and Kristin Scott Thomas trace the histories of their grandparents’ experience in WWII. Tonight we saw one featuring Mark Rylance, and there were a couple quotes that stuck out to me. I wanted to record them before I forget them.
Mark Rylance, walking in a cemetery for war dead in Hong Kong (where, but for the grace of God / random chance, his grandfather might well have ended up), mused that he keeps hearing people talking dispassionately about war, as though it’s some kind of natural event. But, he pointed out, war is fought by people. Just people, like you and me.
Later, he met with a Japanese historian who has studied the POW camps that the Japanese ran in Hong Kong. He asked her why she chose to study the camps—a heavy question, considering some of the atrocities that had been explored earlier in the episode. She responded, “History doesn’t repeat itself. People repeat it.”
Just people, like you and me. Let’s be careful, OK?
Snow, eh?
I know, I know, I live in Canada. But every spring I get fooled into thinking that maybe the snow’s done now till next winter.
Still. At least it’s an opportunity to showcase one of my favourite graphs.
(The header image is actually about 40 images, stacked using the same method I use for my star trails.)
So close
I received this in the ol’ email inbox this afternoon.
Thank you very much for your story, and for letting us hang on to it for as long as we did. The piece has received more than one read, as our first reader enjoyed it a great deal. Due to our current (thematic) publication needs, however, we are unable to place this story.
[…]
Although we can’t use your work at this time, we thank you for thinking of us and encourage you to submit again in the future.
The funny thing is, they didn’t tell me which story they were rejecting, and I couldn’t remember what I’d submitted to their market. (I also couldn’t find my initial submission in my outbox, but that was less surprising; a lot of markets these days are using Submittable or Moksha or some other online submission gateway.)
Thank heavens for The Submissions Grinder. I did a quick search on the market name, and found that, yes, I had submitted a piece to them, wa-a-a-ay back in June 2020. Their submissions page said that they don’t generally send out rejections, so if you didn’t hear in about three months, assume you were not one of the lucky ones. I had assumed that, since September came and went with no word, that I was not one of the lucky ones.
Turns out I was right, but it seems I came closer than I thought.
Oh well. Once more unto the breach and all that. At least they liked the story; with form rejections it can be very hard to tell.
PS: If you’re a writer and you’re not using The Submissions Grinder, I strongly recommend you at least look into it.