2019 - Day 350/15 - Monday...Lacuna...

I thought I was hallucinating. Several years ago, our friends Carolyn and Joe Mac brought us a metal sculpture of a longhorn that resides out on the circle of the driveway. We have one drive way camera that reported 'animal detected on the driveway cam.' Usually there is an animal detected on the porch cam, and usually that animal is Barney. I thought that was unusual, and saw nothing in the first video, but on the second video, I thought I was hallucinating and that the metal longhorn sculpture had taken like and was walking across the driveway. As it turned out, it was not the metal sculpture; eight of the nine cattle had escaped. Escape was, after all was said and they were all herded back to their pasture, not really a good descriptive. Somebody (not me) left the gate open in one of the pastures and they all decided to see if the grass was indeed greener on the other side of the fence. There are all kinds of actions that get initiated when you find out the cattle are loose, and probably one of the most important is to make sure they cannot get out on the road. In my opinion, if that happens, all is lost. Luckily, that did not happen, and tonight all is well in cowville, and all the cattle are accounted for. It does, however, make for an interesting evening.

Lacuna -- Noun. 1. a blank space or a missing part. deficiency, inadequacy. 2. a small cavity, pit, or discontinuity in an anatomical structure. The decoding of the writings on the stone tablets filled in many of the lacunae in historians' knowledge of the ancient civilization's culture.

Did You Know? Exploring the etymology of lacuna involves taking a plunge into the pit-or maybe a leap into the lacus (that's the Latin word for "lake"). Latin speakers modified lacus into lacuna and used it to mean "pit," "cleft," or "pool." English speakers borrowed the term in the 17th century, adapting it to refer to a gap on a page or in a field (such as the night sky). It is usually pluralized as lacunae, as in the example sentence, though lacunas is an accepted variant plural. Another English word that traces its origin to lacuna is lagoon, which came to us by way of Italian and French.