1. This morning I wrestled with a moral dilemna. Should I post a Thursday meme on Friday, offending my sense of the rightness of Thursday being Thursday and not Friday, or should I cheat and alter the posting date to Thursday? I settled for uncomfortably untidy honesty.
2. Turns out I didn't finish this post yesterday, and now here I am untidily posting a Friday meme on Saturday - which also happens to be 11th September. (Ack! Should I go back and change the date in the title? Or not?) And I don't just know what to say about this day, except to send my love to my American friends.
3. As a trivial aside: hearing this date described as "nine-eleven" always brings home to me one of those quirky differences between American English and British English. In the US, the month comes first, and in the UK, it comes after the day. "Nine-eleven" has become part of the language in its own right, but in other more favourable circumstances the American 9/11 would normally be the British 11/9. Cherub's birthday is 8/6 here, but would be 6/8 there, and so on. I wonder when and why this difference arose?
4. While on the subject of language, my word of the week is "pightle". I keep coming across fields named "Pightle", or "The Pightle" in the transcribing I'm doing at the record office. With my farming background, most of the words that crop up in field names are familiar, but this one wasn't. In the end curiosity got the better of me and I looked it up. A pightle is a small, enclosed area of land. Maybe not the most useful of words, but it has a certain charm!
5. Two firsts for Cherub this week. Not only did she start school, but she also started ballet classes. Much excitement, and delight that she gets to be a snowflake in the dance school show in December. She will also be a tap dancing mouse. Or more accurately, a mouse skipping around in tap shoes. To describe it as tap dancing is stretching a point.
6. Walking to school on her third day last week, Cherub informed me very solemnly: "School can be a bit worrying when you first start, but it soon stops being frightening." Before she started she articulated one specific worry - that she would not be able to find her peg again at the end of the day. Once this had been resolved by a mix of reassurance and realising that her peg was actually very easy to find, all was well. Now she is taking herself into the classroom and sorting herself out, while the majority of the other children still want mum or dad to go in with them. Typical Cherub ... she is either very confident or very timid, with nothing much in between.
7. While Cherub was starting new things last week, the rest of us were getting back into old things. I exercised various muscles that had become lazy. I have been in an exercise slump for longer than I care to think about, and I am determined to pull myself out of it. I haven't been swimming for exercise in years, but this week I went twice. I ached for twenty four hours after the first session. Mercifully, the second was better. I also got my musical muscles back into shape after summer breaks from band and orchestra. Two tough rehearsals kicked me back into gear - lots of long, loud, lip-busting stuff at band, and sight reading through Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony with the orchestra.
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4 comments:
I get terribly mixed up with dates if they are ordered the American way.
Surely the British way is more logical, from specific to general i.e. day, month, year.
Regarding lack of exercise I worked in the garden, known in our family as also the green gym, planted bulbs for next year and did weeding too.
Ian cut down a high hydrangea that was blocking our view when we try to drive off the drive. We are aware too of making front doors visible, apparently intruders don't like houses where everyone can see what's happening.
BTW Thank you so much for introducing me to Revelry through which I have discovered a local shop for materials and more. Shop called Mrs. Moon and not too far from me.
Best wishes, Madeleine.
But how is "pightle" pronounced? Does it rhyme with "title" perhaps? I love new words, especially if they are old nonscientific ones.
And yes, the British dating system is more logical, but we Americans are certainly used to being considered idiosyncratic in spelling, measurements and oh, probably other things. I have no idea how the custom started other than we also always say the month and then day in speaking too. You never hear an American say "eleventh September" as perhaps a non-American would. Well, maybe in a literary verse, but that's it.
I agree that the British dating system makes much more sense. I've often wondered why we reverse the month and day.
I also wondered how "pightle" is pronounced. What a fun new word.
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