duck-shaped pain

This morning, I got up fairly early. Since it wasn't too hot yet, I decided to go for a walk, at least as far as I could go with a cane. I was walking out by one of the small irrigation ditches that dot the landscape around here, when I came across, hiding in the weeds, a book.

It's an old dictionary, very beat up and well-used. Two layers of tape -- one of old, yellowed cellophane tape and another of more modern duct tape -- keep it from coming completely apart. It's a Funk and Wagnalls Comprehensive Standard Dictionary from 1917, and who knows how the hell it got to the ditch bank.

It has lots of good old words in it and many excellent illustrations and plates. Here, I can look at both Plates One and Two of Common American Barks. I don't know how useful they would be when it came to actually identifying a tree, but they're nice to have around. And here's a plate dealing with Various Pomegranates.

The best part is the last two pages, which deal with Symbolic Flowers and Gems. It's a list of the supposed meanings certain flowers and gems have if you give them to people. Some of them are rather interesting.

• The gift of an amaranth means pretentiousness.

• Only give someone currant if you want to tell them, "Your frown will kill me."

• Better have your meanings straight when you give the gift of a mistletoe, for it means both "insurmountable difficulties" and "You are a parasite."

There are tons more of these, and they're all pretty interesting. Maybe I'll type up the whole list someday.

Things to do today:

• Go to the library and return the videos. Try to avoid library assistant who scowls at you for wearing your backpack inside and pronounces library "li-berry."

• Go through clothes with the goal of getting rid of most of them. Decide which ones you really like and try not to radically redefine "like" for this task, as you have done before.

When I moved back here from Oregon, I only had one backpack worth of clothing with me. The rest was left behind and is still up in storage. So I went a little nuts in the clothes buying department for awhile. The only good thing is that almost all the clothes were from thrift stores, so I at least did not spend very much money. Clothing that comes from the thrift store can just go back there when you're sick of them -- it's sort of like renting clothes, really. So today I'm going to plow through my pile of worthy clothes, band t-shirts, thrift store experiments and other crap to see what's worth keeping.

I've been doing that with lots of stuff -- reevaluating it to see if it's worth keeping. Since I hope to move soon, I really don't want to move many of the things I have again. And when I go up and get my crap from Oregon in a month or two, I'll have even more stuff. So I need to make some decisions about some of it.