Bunny jumped ship this week.
Did he really? That is, did he mean to do it or was it a mistake: a moment, perhaps, of inattention? I can’t speak to his mental state, but what should have been a flawlessly executed one-night layover at our house with an on-time departure the next morning, instead degenerated into a mad scramble to the post office, to reunite Bunny ASAP with his already departed two-year-old BFF.
. . . in the semi-darkness? What? Well, with apologies to the unknown author of the Gospel of John, yeah. You may remember the pertinent bit, or you may not, so here it is.
The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome
(or, maybe, understood) it.
– John 1:5
As a complete aside, this is what happens when I wander around innocently looking to check/attribute a quotation: I can get something altogether new. It looks as if the well-known and much-loved form of this famous quotation might be, um, misinformation/misinterpretation. If only the Gospel writers had written in English, we wouldn’t have these translation issues.
I was almost this many days old when I learned about adieu and adios, the fare-thee-well words in French and Spanish, respectively. Learned what, exactly? That they are both concatenations of the word for to and the word for God in their respective languages–a dieu and a dios. It’s an ellipsis, I think.
As we part,
I commend you to God’s care.
Now, I know French and Spanish well enough to know their words for God independently, but somehow–Mon Dieu! Ay Dios!–I never made the connection. I never saw the last four letters of adieu and adios as absorbed words, which says something about how I learn other languages. Not. Very. Well.
Anyway, I learned English pretty good but I didn’t know why English speakers don’t do the same as French and Spanish speakers. (To speak a language is not necessarily to know anything about it.) So, why *don’t* we use togod when we want to say adios?
I mention this as a public-service announcement in case you, like me, almost missed this one. Monday (tomorrow, for most of you who are reading this) is a holiday.
Now, I know more than I want to about the various forms of the Civic Holiday in August (which definitely could use some rebranding work akin to what the May Long has achieved), but at least in Ontario the darn thing has nothing to announce it. No festival of dancing and tasty food. No once-annual horse races. No big turkey dinners with family from out of town. No relentless advertising to buy chocolate.
As a result, for those of us who are no longer employed outside the home, the AugLong (whaddya think?) can sneak up on you. Stay alert!
Buh-buh-buh-buh
Clap-clap
And repeat. And repeat with variation.
Buh-buh-buh-buh
Clap-clap
Buh-buh-buh-buh
Buh-buh-buh-buh
Buh-buh-buh-buh
Clap-clap
It is, of course, the opening for the theme song that opened the Addams Family TV show, which, um, opened in the mid-1960s.
Batteries not included.
You remember the hoo-haa about Christmas mornings and toys that needed batteries but didn’t have them in the package, right? Me too, although a cursory online search did not tell me when this first became a Thing. It wasn’t from when my kids were, well, kids. The 1990s, maybe? Maybe. I think I was busy that decade.
Lacking documentation, how do I know that I didn’t out-&-out imagine it? Three ways.
No, not literally. Not even metaphorically. Figuratively, maybe? Essentially, perhaps?
A reader–noticing the lack of a post two weeks ago and slightly concerned about what it might indicate–suggested that I just post a GONE FISHING sign when life intervened, and so I am.
Not, as I say, that I’ve been fishing this week, but GONE ENTERTAINING or GONE BASEBALL WATCHING or GONE RUNNING ERRANDS or even GONE WEEDING (which is about to be supplanted by a DONE WEEDING sign–not because I am, you know, done weeding but because I am so done with weeding) while all true still fail to communicate quite the same message as GONE FISHING and, besides, lack the cultural cachet.
The truth is more that, with every passing year, I find that things take longer than they used to. I’m still playing catch-up for what I can expect to get done at 72–how I need to manage my time. To repurpose another expression, THIS IS ME, AGING.
Talk among yourselves. Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em. And stay well until next week.
It’s been a week of saying goodbye:
For me, neither loss is devastating, but each is a marker of a downward trend. I may eventually find another doctor, but I will not likely live long enough to establish a 20-year relationship with any person who is new in my life. I could visit the lake pretty much whenever I want, but for me that particular mix of people and place is about to be gone forever, not to be replaced.
It started for me at 07:15 EDT, when I roused enough that the noise on the radio resolved itself into words. Something about a Microsoft update going wrong and several airlines having trouble? That initial report proved to be inaccurate: it wasn’t a Microsoft update, it was other software that had gone wrong.
The first report from the front is wrong.
– Rick Hillier (Gen, ret’d)
But the glitch was shutting down computers running Microsoft, of which there are a few, here and there, and the bit about the airlines being affected was accurate. I was now fully awake, because my day included the task of getting a West Coast teenager onto a homeward-bound Air Canada airplane. Exactly which airlines were affected, did you say?
Posted: 2025 Mar 08
