Monday mystery

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a…???

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Time to get back and move ahead.

A little sketchy

You see plenty birds perching on the tops of houses, but you don’t often see a duck there.  I decided to have a little editing fun with this photo of a duck atop the house across the street.  If I were channeling my inner Andrew Wyeth, it might have looked like this.

Monday musings…CoffeeCon and insect houses

It’s Sunday night and I’m really glad to finally be sitting down!  Originally I was going to have the entire weekend off from work.  However, my boss needed another person to work our table at CoffeeCon and I said I’d work.  That was Saturday 8-4 (almost the entire time on my feet).  Then today after church, I whipped out, ate lunch on the drive over, arrived at noon, headed back to church at 4:40 for our Spook-ghetti Dinner (which I was helping with) and arrived back home about 8 pm.  Phew!

CoffeeCon was fun.  Although I don’t really drink coffee except as a mocha or cappuccino, I flogged a lot of chocolate for our shop.  I’ll also tell you that Grey Goose vodka mixed with cold brew coffee makes an awesome drink that’s not a bad way to start the morning!!  (Table across from us.)  🙂

What does this have to do with insect houses?  Nothing other than the fact that I need a blog post and the insect house is it.  I’ve never seen one of these in the US, but I’ve seen a number while in France and I find them fascinating.  Here’s what one looks like.

Monday miscellaneous musings on sticking to it

It’s Thursday, April 5, as I write this, over two weeks from the first official day of spring…and it’s snowing, those big, fat, whirling flakes that look so pretty…in winter…and there are snow symbols on my weather app for Saturday and Sunday, too.   I know I can’t complain when I look at what my friends in the northeast US have been facing but come on!  I love snow in winter, but I’m officially more than done with it and the cold weather.  Please, just stop!  Enough already!  If I were in New England, it would be “ENOUGH ALREADY!!!” (caps intended).

Despite the cold weather, I’ve been walking in the park some mornings.  Every time I pull into the parking lot of the building complex where I’ve been parking to go in the back way until the new bridge is finished, I think “I should have brought a garbage bag to pick up all this trash.”  So I put several large garbage bags and some latex gloves in the van, so that I could actually do something about it.  A few days ago, after my walk, I tackled the mess.

I hadn’t taken the garbage-picker-upper stick that we bought last year at Menard’s, so I put a glove over my right hand winter glove and began:  stoop, drop into the bag, move, repeat.  I was doing really well when suddenly my wool cap was almost snatched from my head.  What was going on?  I’d forgotten in my ecological frenzy to watch for the burs/burrs about head high all around me, the same ones that get stuck in the coats of the dogs when my friend and I walk them, the same ones that are the subject of endless photos highlighting the beauty of dead things.  This was their ugly side.

And a sticky ugly side at that.  Even worse, one little devil had managed to get into my hair after the others tugged my cap mostly off.  Ouch!  I spent quite a bit of time trying to free my hair after getting the big stickers off my cap.  That cap got tucked down my jacket front, as I was warming up, and after my hair was free, I went back to work.

(You know, of course, that burrs and their tenacious stick-to-it-iveness are what inspired the creation of Velcro, a wonderful use for something so irritating in the wild! I know that, too, but it didn’t make me feel any better at the time.)

I’d made a clean sweep, so to speak, of most of the area and had a full bag, when I bent over to capture an errant piece of paper and spotted…a $20 bill!!!  I kid you not!  I could hardly believe it and the rate of pay was much higher per hour than my part time job.  

 

The actual bill the way I found it

 

To top it all off, a woman came out from the office building to thank me and offer to put my garbage bag into their dumpster.  I was happy, she was happy, the park was happy, and I was happy again this morning when I walked by the relatively pristine area.  I’ll make another foray at some point or perhaps at another spot, but I doubt that the pay will be as good.  I’ll have to settle for a sense of doing what’s right.  That works, too.

 

 

 

Are you a material girl/person?

Madonna might be a material girl, but what kind of material?  They’re not all the same.  Daily Writing Tips sent this interesting material to my inbox a few days ago and I thought you might appreciate it, too.  Sew, onward and don’t allow yourself to be worsted by any of these you don’t know.  Have you cottoned onto the appeal of apparel? Oddly enough, (see #22) in the mid-seventies, I was actually in Osnabrück, Germany.  I’m not making that up out of whole cloth and far as I know, none of these have been fabricated.  Okay, I’ll stop now, although I think they forgot cotton, “the fabric of our lives.”

25 Names of Fabrics, Wools, and Leathers Derived from Place Names

By Mark Nichol

This post lists and defines terms for apparel materials that have in common that the terms are derived from place names

1. angora: a type of wool from Angora rabbits, which originated near Ankara (previously Angora), Turkey
2. Bedford cord: a corduroy-like fabric, named after Bedford, England, or New Bedford, Massachusetts
3. calico: a type of cloth originally from Calicut, India
4. cambric: a type of cloth originally from Cambrai, France
5. cashmere: a type of wool and a woolen fabric from Kashmir goats, which come from the Kashmir region of India
6. chino cloth: a cloth originating in China (the name is Spanish for “Chinese”)
7. Cordovan leather: a type of shoe leather first produced in Cordoba, Spain
8. damask: a type of fabric named after Damascus, Syria
9. denim: a type of fabric originally called serge de Nîmes, or “serge of Nîmes,” after Nîmes, a town in France
10. dungaree: a type of denim cloth originating in Dongrī, India; pants or overalls made from this fabric are called dungarees
11. duffel: a cloth first made in Duffel, Belgium
12. Harris tweed: a type of handwoven tweed cloth originating on the island of Lewis and Harris and adjacent islands in Scotland (the name of the cloth type tweed is coincidental with the name of the river Tweed)
13. Holland (or Holland cloth): a type of linen originally made in various parts of Europe, including the province of Holland in the Netherlands
14. jaconet: a fabric originally from Puri, India (the word is derived from the name of the city’s Jagannath Temple)
15. jean: a type of fabric originating in Genoa, Italy
16. jersey: a type of knit fabric originating on the island of Jersey, next to France (but a dependency of the United Kingdom)
17. Mackinaw cloth: a woolen cloth used for thick, warm jackets (called Mackinaws or Macs) originally favored by lumberjacks and then hunters and fishermen in the Mackinac (or Mackinaw) region of Michigan
18. madras: a lightweight cloth originally from Madras, India (now called Chennai)
19. muslin: a lightweight fabric originally from Mosul, Iraq
20. Morocco leather: a type of leather originally from Moroccan goats
21. nankeen: a type of fabric originating in Nanjing, China (previously called Nanking or Nankin); also refers to pants made of this material, as well as the pale buff or yellow color of the fabric, a type of porcelain originating in the city, and a type of lace (often called nankins) and part of the name of numerous animals and plants featuring this color
22. osnaburg: a coarse cloth originally made in Osnabrück, Germany
23. suede: a type of leather made from the underside of animal skins, originally referenced in the French phrase gants de Suède (“gloves from Sweden”); similar-looking fabrics are referred to as “sueded silk” and so on
24. tulle: a type of fabric originating in Tulle, France
25. worsted: a type of wool whose name is derived from that of Worstead, one of the villages from which it originated; also, the name of a type of yarn and a category of yarn weight

https://www.dailywritingtips.com/25-names-of-fabrics-wools-and-leathers-derived-from-place-names/

Changing holidays

A few days ago, the sun shone in on my Thanksgiving gourds and pumpkins as well as on the pile of shimmery Christmas garlands waiting to be used, perfectly highlighting the change from Thanksgiving to Christmas, fall to winter. It’s the most wonderful time of the year!  🙂