2019 - Day 349/16 - Sunday...Dally...

I can certainly understand this little guy's confusion: It is 81 degrees in central Texas, so it must be spring. Or maybe winter. Who knows. I expect everything will be verklempt again, just when things are budding out, we will gat a hard freeze, totally messing everything up. A cold front is supposed to come in overnight, and we will have low temps in the 30s (maybe even a light freeze) for a couple nights, but nothing really serious. Just enough to confuse everything and everybody. Jody and I have a new ritual on the weekends. We get up in the morning, and then we go down for a nap. We don't even wait for breakfast. Just get up, let the dogs out, and then go back to sleep. It is a tradition I whole-heartedly agree with. You should try it. I did get the plants watered. They are all in sheds or barns, since it is supposed to be below freezing another couple nights this week. Chicken coop was cleaned, the neighbor took hay to the cattle since he was taking hay to his cattle. I threatened to shred some of the pastures, but I did not get to it. Maybe over the long Holiday break. We are planning on five days off in a row, that will be totally fun!

Dally -- Verb. 1a. to act playfully, especially to play amorously. b. to deal lightly. toy. 2a. to waste time. b. linger, dawdle. "Voters don't elect leaders to dally, stall, drag their feet and excel at the art of delay." Daily Chronicle (DeKalb, Illinois), December 31, 2015

Did You Know? English speakers have been playing with different uses of dally since the 14th century. They first started using the word with the meaning "to chat," but that meaning fell into disuse by the end of the 15th century. Next, dalliers were amusing themselves by acting playfully especially in amorous ways. Apparently, some dalliers were also a bit derisive, leading dally to mean "to deal with lightly or in a way that is not serious." By the mid-16th century, dally was weighted down with its "to waste time" and "dawdle" meanings, which in time, gave way to the word dillydally, a humorous reduplication of dally. Personally, I like to dillydally.