Improg word: Plethora

Every Monday a new word is posted on the Improgging site. Visit there to read how others have blogged about this week's word, plethora.

Earlier today, Child Two had an overabundance of hair.

Now it's gone.

She'll be sending her plethora of hair to Eva & Co. Wigs' Hair Donation program, the very place that gave our cousin a free wig just last week.

We can't quite remember how long Child Two's been growing her hair to donate--over a year, we're sure, but less than two. Although it was long enough several inches ago, we had to time the cut so that it didn't interfere with her ballet shows. Now, as the weather is warming up and the next show is months away, and as our cousin is going through chemo, it seemed like the perfect time.

This occasion marked her first real grown-up hair appointment, with a shampoo and a scalp massage and everything. Child Two was relieved that the stylist is as quiet as she is, so she didn't have to make small talk.

She's planning to grow another plethora of hair over the next year or two and then donate it again.

Thematic Photographic--Sky

Taken February 22, 2008, in West Vancouver, BC.

I'm posting this photo for this week's Thematic Photographic theme, "sky." Vancouver, especially the North Shore, where this photo was taken, can be a gloomy place. But when the sky is blue and full of cotton-ball clouds, the rain (at least for a little while) is forgotten.

We're surrounded here by big things--the ocean, the mountains, the trees--and from some places you can hardly see the sky. But on this day, with my back to the water, the sky seemed huge.

For another Thematic Photographic entry, see this my other blog.

Wish me luck

I am now officially the mother of a teenager.

Green Friday--The shopping question

This is “Enough stuff, already!” month around here and the decluttering is in full swing. In addition to getting rid of what we don’t use, we try to minimize the amount of stuff we bring into the house in the first place. It helps that neither my husband nor I are big shoppers. Neither of us feels the need to own the latest fashions or the newest gadgets, and—luckily for us—our kids are the same, at least for now.

One of the most effective ways for us to reduce our consumption is to ask ourselves one question as we’re contemplating a purchase: Do we really need to own this?

Then, because I’m a wordy person, I follow it up with several more: Do we need it at all? Can we make do with something we already own? If we do need it, can we borrow it from someone? Get it from the library? Rent it? Find a used one? Make one?

I still use a bowl over a pot of hot water when I need a double boiler. We borrow or rent tools unless they’re things we’ll use over and over. A great deal of my kids’ clothes are hand-me-downs from their cousins. Child One and I recently made a path from old bricks instead of buying new stepping stones. We rarely buy movies. We share books and magazines with friends and family.

Very often the answer to the shopping question is a resounding “no.”

When my kids started getting an allowance, it came with a big string attached: With the exception of Christmas and birthday gifts, they were now solely responsible for buying their own toys. Now, many years and valuable lessons later, they ask themselves the shopping question. The result is much less plastic crap and packaging filling up our house and our garbage can.

I’m prone to buying certain kinds of things on impulse: notebooks, stationery, craft supplies, books, and magazines. But I’ve recently remembered an old trick I used to use. I walk away. If whatever it is still seems irresistible several days later, then I consider going back and buying it. More often than not I forget all about it.

The ramifications of the shopping question can be much bigger than an occasional magazine or plastic action figure. When we bought this house, we knew we would need to haul in dirt and haul out mountains of laurel branches, bring home new furniture (because we left most of our old hand-me-downs in California), and carry loads of wood and other treasures from the hardware store. We had every excuse to buy a pickup truck, but we decided that we didn’t really need to own one. We borrow one a few times a year or get things delivered instead.

Some people complain that trying to be environmentally friendly is expensive. But we find that the money we save by buying less far outstrips what we spend on green products. You can buy a lot of organic apples for the price of a pickup truck.

Improg word: Smitten

Every Monday, the Improg site posts the word of the week for your blogging pleasure.

On long car trips, I tell my kids that they shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to use the washroom, even if they don't think they need to, just in case. I follow the same principle when it comes to dictionaries: I rarely pass up the opportunity to look up a word, even if I don’t think I need to, just in case.

As I do almost every week, today I looked up the current improgging word, smitten. And, as I do almost every week, I learned something new—or really, I realized something I hadn’t put together before. I’d always thought of smitten in its meaning of “infatuated,” but, being the past participle of smite, it means more than that. The primary meaning of smite is to strike something with heavy force. The various meanings of smitten share the notion of being struck forcefully, literally or metaphorically. You can be smitten by a thug wielding a hammer, by the plague, by fear, or, like Margerie, by the charms of your kitten and your children.

You might be able to tell that I am smitten by words. I mean this in the love-them-want-to-marry-them sense, but I, like everyone, can also be smitten in the just-got-smashed-in-the-head-with-a-rock sense when words are used as weapons. I’ve been smitten (in the good sense) with language for as long as I can remember—not by literature so much (while I love to read, I am not particularly highbrow in my tastes and will read just about anything), but by the nuts and bolts of language.

I remember the first time I skipped out of school, smoked a cigarette, kissed a boy, had sex, rode a roller coaster, and drove a car (not all at the same time—what a day that would have been!). But I remember just as clearly the first time I realized I was thinking in French—not thinking about French, but thinking my everyday thoughts in French—and the first time I learned about the field of linguistics and realized that I could spend a ridiculous number of years learning about language with people who wouldn’t think I was weird (or, if they did, it was for other reasons entirely). I spent many, many hours of my prime with my head in dictionaries and grammars, learning or analyzing how one language or another worked.

To illustrate just how smitten (= strange) I am, I ask you this: Am I the only one here who wonders why the American Heritage Dictionary and the Nelson Canadian Dictionary say that smite has two past participles, smitten and smote, but the Oxford says it has just one, smitten? Did North Americans start using the past tense as the past participle for some reason, or did the British stop?

And am I the only one here who wants to know why smite, smote, smitten (or smote) doesn't follow the same conjugation pattern as bite, bit, bitten?

And am I the only one here who owns several English dictionaries and looks up words in all of them just to see how they differ? Or who owns dictionaries in a variety of languages that she doesn’t speak, some of which are dead?

Am I smitten or am I a total geek?

Wordless Wednesday #19--Wild daisies

Taken June 29, 2008, in North Vancouver, BC.

For another one of my Wordless Wednesday photos, see my other blog. For other people's, see wordlesswednesday.com.

Enough, already!--Month five

Last month’s “Enough, already” theme was multitasking. My experiment in monotasking was illuminating. For the first two weeks of the month I was able to follow my plan very well. Each day I focused on just one of my large work projects, cycling through them during the week. I kept my email closed most of the time and didn’t drop everything when small, urgent jobs came in, but instead allocated time to deal with them. I got way more work done than I normally do—I even got my invoices done for the first time in three months—and I felt much more in control of my time.

Then the last two weeks of the month brought all kinds of end-of-the-school-year activities as well as increased family pressure. The number of interruptions to my work time increased by about a zillion percent. I struggled (unsuccessfully) to get my work done. I went back to feeling scattered. I constantly had a knot in my stomach. In other words, I felt like I usually do: like I’m about to be swallowed alive by demands and worries.

So obviously I’ve learned an important lesson about the better way for me to work.

Now, somehow, it’s July. A couple of weeks ago, my kids and I decided (well, I decided and they agreed) that this would be the summer of getting things done around the house. The theme this month is “Enough stuff, already!” and our motto (well, my motto, since both of them went quite pale at the thought) is “Use it or lose it.” We’ve already started decluttering their rooms, which are much too small for their packratty ways, and I’ve started on the rest of the house.

This theme applies to the yard, too, where we’ve declared “Enough weeds, already!” My work has been so busy this year (and the year before and the year before that and . . . ) that I haven’t been able to keep up with the garden, so this summer I’ve hired the kids to do a lot of the work for me. Child One has recently decided to save up for a Gibson SG guitar—the cheapest used one we’ve seen around here so far is over $900—so he’s motivated.

It won’t be all hard work, though. In the spirit of using it or losing it, we’ll be digging out the games that have migrated to the back of the cupboard. We’ll be setting up the croquet and badminton sets, both of which sat in the shed all last summer. Child Two and I are going to try to use every type of art supply we own at least once before school starts. Our goal this month is not to get rid of everything we own, but to pare it down to the stuff we really want so that we can enjoy it.

And as for my work, I’m definitely taking last month’s lessons to heart.