Altivo

Last night was the third night in a row that temperatures dipped below freezing. In fact, this morning it was 20°F when I got up at 5 am. We went out to feed horses, cats, and ducks at about 8 am and found a film (sometimes more) of ice on every water bucket, indoors or out. Indeed, the boys' outdoor watering trough had a thin glassy layer of hard ice covered with fallen leaves.

The catalpa trees around the house have been holding onto their leaves for dear life, but this was the last straw for them. The leaves are hanging like limp rags from the branches, and will likely all be on the ground by evening. This event for the catalpas is generally decisive and quick. Often I wake in the morning of a first hard frost to find that all their leaves that were still green and healthy the day before have already dropped to the ground. When I lived in Lansing, Michigan, I rented a small house with several very large catalpas in the front yard. When they jetisoned their leaves, the result was an entire yard knee deep with leaves and all at once. That means winter is imminent.

We will be swapping out ordinary buckets for electric heated ones today. Have to put the floating defroster into the boys' water trough as well. Make sure the duck house has plenty of good straw on the floor, increase the amount of wood shavings in the horses' stalls, make sure the woodpile in the garage is replenished if it is down (it may be OK for now) and clean out the woodstove. Before using that, I have to relocate all my string instruments (guitars, banjos, mandolin, ukuleles, violin) from where the cases have settled over the spring and summer. They are too close to the woodstove and its brick hearth and would be damaged for sure by the heat.

I'm not exactly complaining about any of this, though. Now that I don't have to get up before dawn in order to shower, eat, and start off my 15 mile commute to work in the dark and snow, I find that I don't mind winter nearly as much. Taking care of the animals in the cold is not exactly pleasant, but I love having them and they mostly appreciate what we do so it's worthwhile. (Reminder to self: Asher needs a new stall blanket for this cold weather. Have to order that.)

The truth is, I love having four distinct seasons in my year. The variety in weather and changes in the landscape are fascinating to me. I grew up with that in Michigan, and unlike most of my family, I'm not inclined to move to somewhere that has no clearly identifiable winter. In fact, to my younger brother's credit, I laud the decision by himself and my sister-in-law to build a retirement home in Michigan and live with the shifting seasons. They had spent time in Japan and several homes in the southeastern part of the US where the weather is somewhat milder during the years when he was in the Navy. They still decided to return to Michigan and to the area of Traverse City, where our grandparents last lived.

Here, on the wall behind the woodstove, we have four large ceramic plates depicting the four seasons. Those were painted and fired by my mother when she was taking ceramics classes about 40 years ago. She and my step-father retired to Florida not too many years later, but those plates still hung in her kitchen. Once when I was visiting them she asked if there was anything in the house that I wanted to keep after she was gone, and I asked for those plates. She laughed and said she would put my name on them. What actually happened though is that after Ted passed away, Mom decided to move to live with my older brother in Texas. He went to Florida and helped her pack up or dispose of her house contents and sell the house. And at that time, around 20 years ago, those plates showed up in the mail here, packed in pizza boxes. Fortunately, they survived the trip intact and are mine to cherish now.

They hang on the other side of the stove from my grandmother's cuckoo clock that I loved so much when I was a child. Granny gave that to me while she was still living, saying she couldn't keep it running any more and the local clock shop said they couldn't fix it. But years later, after she was long gone and it had lain in a box in a closet for all that time, my dear husband sneaked it off to a clock shop here in Illinois and they got it running again. I have to wind it twice a day (no eight day movement for that one, it's nearly a century old) but the clock and those plates keep my Mom and Granny alive in my memory still.

Sometimes I get totally sidetracked by language questions. Gary was reading some science fiction from the 1920s at breakfast this morning, and asked what "well-metalled masonry" could possibly mean. Given the time period, I could tell him that it might mean "hard and smooth," as the terminology was used (at least by British writers) in the late 1800s and early 1900s to refer to a paved road. Neither of us were very satisfied with that, and I offered to check the Oxford English Dictionary. He didn't want me to take the time, but I had to look. Fortunately I keep one of those microprint editions in the house. I was so taken aback by the explanation that I ended up 15 minutes late for work.

While the normal English meaning of "metal" refers to the metallic elements and things made of them, the derivation of the word leads us to this unusual meaning as well. It turns out to come from Latin metallum (noun: a mine or quarry) by way of French. The OED also notes that the Latin is related to the Greek μεταλλάω (verb: to search or seek.)

Apparently an early meaning of "metal" in English was literally anything that is dug up or quarried from the ground. So limestone roads or cut stone walls were called "metalled" because they were made of "metal" in that broader sense. And a "well-metalled" stone wall surely means one built of carefully cut (or quarried) stones that fit together evenly. Interesting oddity.

I was pondering this in the shower when I suddenly perceived the connection from Greek to Latin to English. Immediately, the image of my Greek professor at Michigan State University (good grief, 42 years ago) came to my mind. I could see Dr. Fairchild wagging a gnarled finger at me and hear his voice saying "Come on, Altivo, you know this."

I'm sure he would have explained it this way. "The Greeks were thinkers. They sat around and philosophized a lot (well, at least some of them, and those are the ones whose writings we still have today.) Plato would have said 'I seek truth.' (And there's that verb, μεταλλάω.) The Romans were more concerned with expanding an empire and getting things done, so they applied the idea of searching to looking for wealth and digging up useful minerals. (Hence metallum, the quarry.) But the French and English are so materialistic that they only see the valuable thing that gets dug up from the ground: 'metal.'" Just the sort of thing William Fairchild might have said. I'm sure he's long departed this life, but he'd be amused to know I remembered him so well in the context.

We went to a cocktail party this afternoon (not something we do often) in honor of two friends who have just turned 70 and 65 in recent weeks. Now this should have been a perfectly normal and somewhat boring event but it was brightened up for me almost as soon as we arrived. We were being introduced to various people when a woman who looked somehow familiar announced that she already knew me but I would have to figure out from where.

It took the better part of an hour before I was quite confident of it, but I got it right. She and I were in the same 370 assembly language class when we started at Time Inc. back in 1980. That's 30 years ago now. Eeek. We had some common interests outside work, such as Greek and Latin and the literature written in them, and Renaissance music. We used to sometimes play recorder together at lunch time. It was quite nice to find out that we still think alike on many things and I think neither of us was much surprised at anything that had transpired in the other's life during those decades.

Other than that, it was a day of sudden rainshowers and bursts of sunlight. I got distracted this morning upgrading OpenVMS on the Alpha machinery, which was a side track of my actual intention to install Samba on both machines. Patches were required to some OS libraries before doing this particular install. Then after I obtained all the patches and applied them, I found I could not download the current Samba version (now called Common Internet File System or CIFS according to HP.) Web site errors prevented it. The same errors also kept me from reporting the problem.

Fortunately I retried a few minutes ago and whatever the issue was, it has now been corrected.

I can't resist pointing out this article from the Chicago Tribune today. It explains very well why, as much as Amazon and Apple might like you to think otherwise, printed books are not going to just disappear and be replaced by Kindles, iPads, or other such devices.

The author also fails to mention one other aspect of "cloud media" that concerns me greatly, and that's the potential for censorship or deliberate alteration of content. Amazon has already demonstrated its ability to remove a book from user's Kindles and then put it back later. There is nothing to prevent the content from being altered before it is returned to the device (if in fact it is ever returned at all.) So you have something rather like the animal commandments that were painted on the side of the barn in George Orwell's Animal Farm. They kept somehow changing when no one was looking, and then everyone doubted their own memory that the words had been different the day before. Those were the words that eventually collapsed into the statement "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others," by which the Pigs justified their greed, dishonesty, and elitism.

In other news, we keep picking up pre-flattened bees from the kitchen floor and can't tell from whence they are coming.

Well, there were occasional sun showers, but mostly wet.

Highlight of the day: homemade cookies brought in by a library user. They were made with butter, and very tasty.

Would have been the low point if not so amusing: A different library user who wanted to "borrow" books to read on a Kindle. Obviously she hadn't read the terms of service for her gadget. Even if we were to buy Kindle e-texts, there would be no way for us to load them to user-owned devices. The files are tied to a particular account ID and can't be read by another. I guess she became rather irate about it, though it's hard for me to understand someone willing to spend $400 for a gadget but not willing to pay $5 or $6 for the book to read on it.

Gary is re-reading an old favorite book on computer programming tonight. He just found a scribbled note to himself in the pages. It reminds him to go to Gladstone Park Bakery and Kalinowsky's Deli in Chicago (both are now closed, the bakery recently and the deli years ago,) and to remember to get smoked sausage for our friend Paul (who passed away ten years ago) and to give a bath to his golden retriever, Sasha (who has been gone even longer, about 15 years now.) Not the happiest sort of time capsule to find, I guess. He doesn't know if he did those things, though I imagine he did.

Digging through some very old files at the library, looking for stuff to put in various displays commemorating the 100th anniversary this year. Among other things, we discovered the library director's original application for her first job there, back in 1982. Her comment on seeing it was "Look at that. We still used real typewriters then."

Better than that though, I have squirreled away in my desk drawer a handful of catalog cards that were written by hand with a fountain pen. These survived because some thrifty employee reused them years later by typing on the back sides.

Made me think of my own first full time library job. That would have been in 1972, at Michigan State University. And yes, we definitely used real typewriters, not even the electric kind, back then.