Words are weird

OK, except for Patti's comment, it is pretty clear that you didn't think much of the "fonetik alfubet." I must admit that I worked on it late at night.

So how do you pronounce "dour"? We watched the movie "Prairie Home Companion" again the other night and looked at all the featurettes. Meryl Streep commented on Garrison Keeler's countenance and pronounced the word to rhyme with "pour" instead of "sour." Just looking at "dour" I would have used the other pronunciation, but hand it to Meryl, she got it right on this one. That's because the word comes from Latin "durus" meaning "hard." Duh! Why didn't I think of that? It's because English is spelled so goofy, I tell ya!

Now in other news, Cat and I were so sick Friday morning, we didn't go to work. Well, she went to work and then came right back because there was someone to cover for her. (Thanks, JW!) We slept until 1:00 or so and finally had lunch at 2:00. Haven't gotten out of the house today except to buy groceries. It's yucky being sick. I've had pneumonia for five weeks (and now maybe pink eye), and Cat just had zero energy. Gettin' old.

I guess this is one of those rambling posts. Let me go take a photo of my latest project and I will be right back. Don't go away!
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Seven minutes later
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Now that I have a new office (well, not NEW new, just new to me), I have been thinking I needed a little table to go between the two chairs against the wall. That's where my somewhat infrequent visitors sit to chat, and it seemed like a good idea to provide a table on which to put their keys or cell phone or coffee mug, you know, that sort of thing. Makes it more homey. So, using some oak left over from a flooring project, I made this little table: 12 inches square, 24 inches tall. It only has two coats of finish on it right now, so it is not as shiny as it will be by Monday. I am also thinking of putting a thick glossy coat on top using this stuff made for decoupage. It's left over from Mom's art supplies.

We still have lots of that stuff left over. I have a cigar box with at least a hundred pencils in it. And there is a boxful of little cutters for making clay beads. And there is a kiln out in the workshop. Maybe when I retire I will have time to make stuff.

OK, on to other things. The other night I was thinking about my neighborhood. We've been living here for nearly seven years. We know the names of our neighbor to the east, our neighbors across the street (well, two of them at least) and our neighbors next door on the west. And that's it. Oh yeah, there's the "cat people" who own the house on the end of the block but actually live in the one across the street. Their cats live in the garage of the house on our block. And that's it: maybe seven names total. That's pretty pathetic, if you ask me. And it turns out that the little girl who wrote the "Y'all R so nice" message on our driveway lives in the house two doors down. She sent us a note saying what good neighbors we are! All we do is wave at her when we drive by--that's it!

So I am thinking that before school starts, it is high time that we have a neighborhood barbecue, you know, have some burgers and sit out under the carport just getting to know each other. I'm sure the single guy who lives next door to our across-the-street neighbors would like to feel more a part of the neighborhood. Well, I guess he would; I haven't talked with him since he moved in a year ago.

Maybe, just maybe, there could be a development out of this. Perhaps we could agree to have a get-together a couple of times a month. Maybe as we got to know each other, we could talk about important things. I know that most of the folks on our block do not go to church on Sunday. I am certain that the family across the street are not Christians; we have talked some. Hmmm. I think I had better go buy a grill.

streinj langwij

Do you realize how hard it is to pronounce English words based on the spelling? It is an awful language for non-native speakers to learn (and more than a few native speakers have problems with spelling). For example, how do you describe the pronunciation of "ough" in light of: tough, though, through, trough, thought, and drought? It's a nightmare! The only logical thing to do is to use a phonetic alphabet, one in which every letter maintains a consistent sound, there are no digraphs (combination of two or more letters to produce one sound, e.g., "ph") and both vowels of a dipthong (one letter representing a blend of two sounds) are written. Well, that's a challenge if you want to stick with the letters in the present alphabet.

I decided to try my hand at it keeping with characters available on the standard keyboard. Tell me what you think. (Oh, that hibiscus is a recent addition to our porch. So far it has been pretty hardy. We'll see what happens in winter.)

Scroll way down. For some reason, Blogger does not care for table code.

Character	Sound	Character	Sound
a	fat	n	now, dinner
q	father, hot	o	poke, okay
b	bag, jab	p	poke, sap, supper
c	cheese, hatch	r	rake, arrest, car
d	deed	s	sand, face, asset, science
e	bet, edge	t	treat, better
f	fix, phone, effect	u	bug, apple, president, anonymous
g	guard, dog	v	vein, heavy
h	had	w	went, queen
i	it, you	x	shoot, sugar, addition
j	jug, wage, giant	y	shoot, tuna
=	azure	z	easy, zip, buzzed
k	clerk	#	thin
l	lit, allow	\	then
m	mix, summer	^	fee, beat, gene, receipt
Diphthongs
qi	eye, aisle, five, buy	ao	house, how
ei	make, vein, pay	qu	ought, taut
iy	few, music	yu	should, wood

hir iz u post wic wil rikwqir sum dusqifur^ng. it iz nqt ^z^ ty rqit u funetik alfubet for ^nglix iyz^ng onl^ #u k^z qn u k^bord wi\aot dqigrafs. #u vaowul saondz rikwqir men^ dif#qngz. qi \^nk #is wyud teik sum praktis az qlmost evr^ wurd wyud b^
r^speld. and wqt xyud b^ dun ubaot \^ngz lqik "etc."? qi ges #ei wyud hav ty b^ speld aot: "etseturu."

hao wyud wun ukaont fqr r^junul aksents? fqr egzampul "would" mqit b^ speld ^#ur "wyud" or "wud." wqt if evr^wun speld wurdz #u wei #ei saond ty #em (or #im)? qi no wun gqi hy pronaonsez "us" as "uz."

wqt ubaot kapitul leturs? kyud #ei b^ yzd just for neimz? but wqt ubaot neimz #at stqrt wi\ "#" and "\"? meib^ iy wyud hav ty kapitulqiz #u hol wurd: \^UDOR ("Theodore"). kuntracxuns wyud b^ streinj; "it iz" kuntracts ty "its" (or xyud it b^ "it's"?). if iy hav red #is fqr, iy mei b^ az loko az qi am.

Feeling better, thanks.

Well, let's just say that I feel less sick. And the first week of the transition is OVER! Of course, there will still be times when I will need to go back over to the other office to help out, but all day Friday I got to stay in my new office relatively uninterrupted. It was wonderful!

The lawn is starting to look like a jungle. Perhaps I can muster up the stamina to do the edging today. Cat's sister CS was here over the weekend and kept promising to mow the lawn. But that didn't happen. Oh, and Aileen, one of our friends from Hawaii, spent last week here in Fake Cow Town visiting the various offices. We wound up the week going to see the musical TEXAS in Palo Duro Canyon. The show was good (we sat three rows from the front of the stage!) and the person who got the award for visiting from furthest away was a Kenyan. I went and talked with him during the intermission. His sister-in-law, who was present, had taught Swahili at Brackenhurst, the Baptist conference center where Cat and I have stayed on our Kenya trips. Small world, eh? Anyway, Aileen seems to have enjoyed herself and will go back with memories of an incredibly flat landscape (the drive between here and the canyon). [Note to Aileen: I have opened the pineapple-papaya jam and guava jelly so far. Ummmmmm! Yummy!]

Aloha, y'all.

Personality

Over at Carolanne's site I ran across a link to a personality test online. Here's the report from my quiz (run your cursor over the blocks to see the individual components):

The inventory was interesting. I admired its construction and, at least in my case, it seems to be fairly accurate. Of courses, I am the introspective sort, so I have already considered a number of the issues that it raised. If you would like to take the inventory yourself, click on PersonalDNA. There is no signup necessary to take the inventory.

In other news, I am pretty tired today. I hope that this means that the antibiotic I am taking for my pneumonia is taking effect. Tomorrow starts a big week for me: new staff members at work, a visiting colleague to fetch from the airport, training several people at once, providing dessert for an office lunch. And that's just Monday and Tuesday!

Cat and I went impulse shopping yesterday. We bought a clothes dryer and a vacuum cleaner. Well, we have needed replacements of those two for quite some time and, by golly, let's just do it, I heard myself say. From my brief and recent experience, I can tell you that Dyson's really work.

Inspired by SpookyRach's yearbook photo, I decided to post a yearbook photo myself. It is not from my yearbook. It is from the first year that our son Greg was in college. He made quite an impression, apparently. Yep, that's my boy.

Gallimaufry

That's right--this posting is just stew. No particular subject. Who knows? I might post a photo. We'll see.

When I came back from Ruidoso, I came down with a cold on Monday. That was two and a half weeks ago. Mostly it's gone now, but I still have this hacking cough and a really sore throat. Yeah, yeah, I am going to see the doctor tomorrow. Taking a book, because the receptionist had to "squeeze me in" to the schedule, so you know I will spend most of the afternoon in the waiting room. But maybe something useful will happen.

It's weird at work. I have been an administrator at my university for the last four years. Then an opportunity came up for me to be the university's first full-time online religion professor. So I jumped at the chance. The job started July 1. In theory. The reality is that since my replacement is not on campus yet and the other new employees have to be trained and there's no computer yet in my new office, I'm hanging around the old office. And then I wander over to the new office. Two sets of keys. Two phone numbers. Two desks. It's weird.

Our Sunday school class has been studying the sermons of Jesus as recorded in Matthew's gospel. In preparation for last Sunday's lesson ("take no thought what you should wear . . ."), I counted the clothes in my closet. If you take all the short-sleeved shirts (with a collar--no T shirts) and multiply that by the number of pants, I could wear a different combination of clothes every day for 555 days! OK, so I wouldn't match at least half of those days, but think how many people in the world have two or even just one set of clothes! That's it. I'm not buying any more clothes. Well, maybe socks and undies.

I went looking for a photo and decided to give you an etymological lesson on the word zenith. It actually came from an Arabic word samt ("road") which got transcribed as cemt in medieval Europe. But because Gothic letters consist of mostly vertical strokes, cemt was mistranscribed as cenit. Because this was a scholarly word, most Europeans encountered it in books and had no idea about its original pronunciation. Eventually it became pronounced zenith. And now you know. (See how lazy I am--this appeared in a previous posting!)

Must be summer

Well, it must be summer here because we are having big ol' whopping thunderstorms. It stays hot all day and the clouds, teenage punks hanging around outside the smoke shop, keep threatening to do something. Finally it cuts loose and when the rain falls hard, the lightening takes off. Some of the strikes were no more than a quarter mile from our house. We just sat on the porch and watched the show. I was lucky enough to catch this strike, although it went behind a tree, so you don't get the full effect. And what a BOOM when a bolt hits nearby! Went on for about twenty minutes and then it just settled down to sprinkling. It's all my fault--I watered the backyard last night.

Oh yeah, I have a guess as to the mysterious chalkwriter. About a week ago, an adolescent girl riding her bike down the street fell over right in front of our house. Cat rushed out the door to see if she was OK. The girl professed to be just fine and said not to worry about her. Waving off Cat's "Are you sure?" she pedaled on down the street. I'm thinking it might have been her.