2019 - Day 226/139 - Wednesday...Commensal...

Oh my. Today was full speed ahead. Breakfast at 7:30 then non-stop until 4ish. NAR Committee Leadership Camp is a full blown learning experience to make the next year a successful one, and to benefit all our 1.3M REALTOR® members, without them really even knowing it. When successes look easy, it is usually because of all the hard work that went into the planning and execution of the plan. SO, that is what the volunteer servants have been doing in Chicago for the past week. In my case, it was a quick trip with one full day of learning. Goal setting, facilitating, creativity, and organization. All these things are going to be put into use not only nationally, but also at our local and state levels. SO...can you tell I am a little bit pumped up? Enough of that. I love being in Chicago, even though it brings back conflicting emotions. Having grown up in Detroit, much of my fathers family relocated here from the DEEP south, looking for better lives and economic opportunities. For some of the family it worked, but for most of it, it didn't, and that is a discussion for another journal entry. Suffice it to say, I can appreciate this wonderful city for what it is, and I hope you enjoy this picture, taken from inside one of the meeting spaces I was in today. A bit of the old looking out onto some of the new. Oh yeah, and there was a lot of food. Food, food, food...

Commensal -- Adjective. 1. of or relating to those who habitually eat together. 2. of or relating to a relationship in which one organism obtains food or benefits from another without harm. Probiotics are a kind of commensal bacteria that live in the digestive tract of humans and aid in digestion.

Did You Know? Commensal types, be they human or beast, often "break bread" together. When they do, they are reflecting the etymology of commensal, which derives from the Latin prefix com-, meaning "with, together, jointly," and the Latin adjective mensalis, meaning "of the table." In its earliest English uses, commensal referred to people who ate together, but around 1870, biologists started using it for organisms that have no use for a four-piece table setting. Since then, the scientific sense has almost completely displaced the dining one.

2019 - Day 225/140 - Tuesday...Estival...

It just goes to show you, if you really want to see clouds, you can see them. Really, all you have to do is stop for a couple minutes, and look for them. Guaranteed you will find them. Granted, they were ever changing, and I took several photos, but this is the one that I liked the best. Looking out the window right now, from the 21st floor of the hotel I am staying in in Chicago, the clouds are unremarkable. Nothing really to comment on, although I do feel kind of bad for demeaning a cloud. Clouds do not have an easy life, to the best of my knowledge. There was I time when I pondered 'how many elephants does a cloud weigh?' Clouds are full of moisture, so there is a lot of weight in a cloud. If you can think of cloud mass as elephants, it just gives you something else to wonder about.

Estival -- Noun. of or relating to the summer. The children were reveling in their remaining weeks of summer vacation, filling their school free estival afternoons with swimming and playing.

Did You Know? Estival and festival look so much alike that you might think they're closely related, but that isn't the case. Estival traces back to aestas, which is the Latin word for "summer" (and which also gave us estivate, a verb for spending the summer in a torpid state-a sort of hot-weathered equivalent of hibernation). Festival also comes from Latin, but it has a different and unrelated root. It derives from festivus, a term that means "festive" or "merry." Festivus is also the ancestor of festive and festivity as well as the much rarer festivous (which also means "festive") and infestive, meaning "not merry, mirthless."

2019 - Day 224/141 - Monday...Pescatarian...

Today was the hottest day of the year...so far...and luckily, I have not had too much of any need to be outside. Okay, I was outside for a while this morning in the dark, watering pots and stuff that has been recently planted. BUT, after the sun came up, I have probably only beed outside a total of 15 minutes. Otherwise, I have stayed in the air conditioned comfort of offices and automobiles, and that is just fine with me. There was a news report on the radio that, a road crew was putting asphalt on one of the county roads, and it was too hot for the asphalt to set, and it was sticking to the cars as they drove over it, so they had to close the road. Suffice it to say, it is hot here in central Texas. My 'work' day started by guiding a broadcast class on emotional support animals and service animals. Then it was off to the office for some power real estate, then a couple errands on the way home. Nothing fancy. BUT...just FYI, on this date six years ago (August 12, 2103) Jody and I were married by a Republican Justice of the Peace in Glastonbury, Connecticut. I think it was a Tuesday, but it turned out to be one of the best days of my life. The picture in this post is of the moon over that farm, and if you look closely, you can see Saturn at about 'five o'clock' below the moon.

Pescatarian -- Noun. one whose diet includes fish but no meat. The cafe menu included fish tacos and salt cod po'boys, so Fiona's friends, both pescatarians, would have options when they joined her for lunch.

Did You Know? The word vegetarian sprouted up (get it?) in 1839. Fruitarian ("a person who lives on fruit') ripened (get it?) by 1893. In 1944, vegetarians who consume no animal or dairy products began calling themselves vegans. Then, in 1993, those who eat fish but no other meat chose pesce, the Italian word for "fish,' to create the designation pescatarian. In that same year, meatatarian was served up (get it?) as a word for those whose diet includes mainly meat; that word is rare (get it?), however, and is usually used in informal and humorous ways. Another fairly recent dietary word is flexitatian, a person who follows a mostly vegetarian diet but occasionally eats meat or fish.

2019 - Day 223/142 - Sunday...Rantipole...

Before I end this day, I will have completed everything that was on my list. There was not that much on my list, but when you are moving sprinklers around every twenty minutes, it kind of gets in the way of other things. Yesterday, the grass between the house in back just past the fruit trees got cut, and the grass in the front of the house up to the bamboo break got cut. I might have had a thought of cutting more grass today, but that did not happen. I got the chicken coop cleaned out (one more egg in a different nest, but I still think there is just one girl laying right now). Did a lot of this and thats. Jody and I did take the girls for a ride this morning, but otherwise, we have not moved from the house all day. Early lupper, and I have about another hour or so (maybe an hour and a half) of watering to do, and then it will be tomorrow! They have been harvesting the corn across the road from us, Hubert and Pauline's property. All around they are clearing corn off the fields. The cotton is looking pretty good, blooming and getting ready to make. We had our tenth or twelfth day in a row of 100 plus degree days, that makes about twenty this year, which is not as bad as it could be. We will take it!

Rantipole -- Adjective. characterized by a wild unruly manner or attitude: rakish. Jerome's rantipole cousin was always getting them both into trouble with his itch for causing mischief and mayhem.

Did You Know? "O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to totters, to very rags." Thus, Prince Hamlet let it be known that he didn't like ranting, and he advised the players who were about to present his special drama to the king to "avoid it." Around 1700, someone else who apparently found ranting ridiculous dealt with it in a different way-by combining the word rant (or maybe the British dialect word ranty, which means "excited" or "riotous") with poll, meaning "head." The result was the whimsical rantipole, a term that quickly found use as a noun for a reckless person, and adjective for wild behavior, and a verb for being rude.

2019 - Day 222/143 - Saturday...Tantivy...

No eggs today, but it is Melody's Birthday, so that is something worth celebrating! Jody and I gave her a call while we were on the way home from lupper. She and Bruce were on the way to visit the girls, and there was talk of a bon fire. It seems in Connecticut it is cool enough for a bon fire. Interesting. We had an egg pile for breakfast, which included the two fresh eggs we collected over the last few days. I little darker yellow, and certainly smaller than the store bought eggs. But, happy to have them and excited to be having fresh eggs again soon. I am not sure of the logic of this, when you can get eggs at HEB for $1.39 for 18 eggs. There must be something wrong with my business plan.

Tantivy -- Adverb. at a gallop. "Thus it came about that Denby and his man, riding tantivy to the rescue, met the raiders two miles down the trail." Francis Lynde, The Helpers, 1899

Did You Know? Tantivy is an adverb as well as a noun that refers to a rapid gallop. Although its precise origin isn't known, one theory has it that tantivy represents the sound of galloping horse's hooves. The noun does double duty as a word meaning "the blare of a trumpet or horn." This is probably due to confusion with tantara, a word for the sound of a trumpet that came about as an imitation of that sound. Both tantivy and tantara have been used in the context of fox hunts; in the heat of the chase, people may have jumbled the two.

2019 - Day 221/144 - Friday...Haruspex...

Tape city. The phlebotomist at the clinic this morning apparently owns stock in the company that produces the tape used to secure the gauze to the puncture so you don't bleed out after the do the draw. Not only did she use a half a roll of the tape, but she instructed me not to remove said tape for fifteen minutes. I would have been happy to comply, except that the circulation to my fingers was cut off and they were turning a garish shade of blue-gray. I am more in to the jewel tones, so that color was not a good match for me, and I unwound the tape as I was driving down IH-35. I can neither confirm nor deny as to whether or not the emergency room doctor had to amputate, but suffice it to say, I still have all ten digits. NUMERO DOS: yep, we got another egg this afternoon. Same nest, same small white egg, so I suspect it is the same girl that is doing the laying. Maybe the others will begin to mimic her in short order.

Haruspex -- Noun. a diviner in ancient Rome basing predictions on inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals. "The coroner-cum-haruspex will divine the mystery of her death, read the entrails of the bird that flew too far and too fast." Violet LeVoit, Baltimore City Paper, August 17, 2011.=

Did You Know? Haruspex was formed in Latin by the combination of haru- (which is akin to chorde, the Greek word for "gut") and -spex (from the verb specere, meaning "to look"). Appropriately, haruspex can be roughly defined as "one who looks at guts." The ancient Romans had a number of ways of determining whether the gods approved of a particular course of action. Such divination was called augury, and a haruspex was a type of augur, an official diviner of ancient Rome. (Other augurs divined the will of the gods through slightly less gruesome means, such as observing the behavior of birds or tracking celestial phenomena.) Haruspex, like augur, has developed a general sense of "one who prophesies," but this use is somewhat rare.

2019 - Day 220/145 - Thursday...Foray...

Last weekend while I was cleaning the chicken coop, I decided to put some pine shavings in the nesting boxes. I had been thinking about it for a week or two, that the girls might be getting close to laying age. They are just about 19 weeks old now, close to five months, and rule of thumb is they will start laying at about six months. When we got them, they were between 2 days and a week old. Yesterday when I was out there after work, I looked in and there was evidence that all the nests had been checked out; all the nests had depressions where the pine shavings had been 'nested.' This afternoon, I took a peek again, and lo-and-behold, there was our first egg from this clutch of the girls. We got 12 chicks, they all survived, and they all seem to be thriving. Obviously, one of them is an overachiever, even if it is a teeny-tiny egg, even compared to the nest egg. And so it begins.

Foray -- Noun. 1. a sudden or irregular invasion or attack for war or spoils: raid. 2. a brief excursion or attempt especially outside one's accustomed sphere. Eloise is normally a figurative painter; her latest series is her first foray into abstraction.

Did You Know? Foray comes from the Middle English forrayen and probably traces back to an Anglo-French word that meant "raider" or "forager." It's related to the word forage, which usually means "to wander in search of food or forage." A foray, in its earliest sense, was a raid for plunder. Relatively recently, foray began to take on a broader meaning. In a sense, a foray is still a trip into a foreign territory. These days, though, looting and plundering needn't be involved. When you take a foray, you dabble in an area or occupation that's new to you.