Strong Verbs Are Just Better

In Switzerland:

Fruit cake, iced, for Christmas: two small, one mini. Fed up with the trapezoidal shape of the loaf tins I used last year, I bought square cake rings. These were... annoying. Yes, sharp corners; but given the lumpy nature of fruit cake, I'm not sure that they were better than round-corner square tins would be: I had to place them, one in a baking tray and one in an oven-proof frying pan, on a lined base, and then line the tin, and... this worked okay but not worth the fuss. The mini one was in a tiny round tin with a removable bottom. I gave the square ones to my two immediate colleagues, and the round to Prof Medieval (UNIBE), who was uncomfortable and !! because she only planned gifts to her immediate minions. HOWEVER. She reported that her children were delighted, as the iced cake reminded them of school in the UK; so she's on next year's victim list regardless.

Fruit cake, iced, possibly gluten-free but not vegan: two small, one mini. Mistakes were made (eggs added on autopilot) and then I wasn't actually sure that the stash flour I'd used was GF. I iced one and sent it to friend J's husband, who is a Brit but hadn't made his own cake this year due to the household having a SMOL CHILD. The rest got crunched into cake-pudding-balls, see below.

Fruit cake, gluten-free and vegan: not entirely satisfactory. Too MUCH apple sauce replacing egg, definitely- leaked out of all the tins (I did this batch entirely in mini round tins with pop bottoms). I iced one, with a mere single fondant layer, for friends. Attempts were made at making my own hazlenut icing for the base layer, but I had chunky hazlenut meal rather than fine hazlenut flour and it failed abjectly. For myself, I ate one and froze the rest.

Fruit cake-pudding-pops, in a. regular and b. vegan issue. The regular ones consist of: take the top of the fruit cake that you carve off when you flatten it for icing; blend; add chocolate ganache and brandy; add almond meal when you realise it's too wet; form into balls and refridgerate. Top with melted white chocolate and half a glacé cherry the next morning. The other ones much the same except you try to make vegan ganache (dubious) and you roll them in dessicated coconut because vegan white chocolate is horrible to work with.

NB: for the cake-pudding-pops, note that my base recipe is something akin to this taste.com.au recipe for mini pudding, although I encountered it in Brownie Guides rather than on line. Cross-referenced with various online recipes for cake pops, and for rum balls. Reinvented annually based on what I have to hand.

Vegan coconut ice, which took two tries - the first time I didn't condense the coconut milk enough (needs more than the recipe indicates); the second time I had only brown sugar to hand and so ended up with an unsual colour of confection.

White Christmas. I have since been vehemently informed by my mother than White Christmas should NOT involve white chocolate, so I shall investigate before next xmas. If the alternative involves condensed milk, I might nope out, because vegan white chocolate is easier to find than coconut condensed milk, here.

In Australia:

A miscellaneously roast chook (with plenty of butter, onion and garlic rubbed into it; lemon and a bit of apple in the cavities)

A slimmed down version of Ottolenghi test kitchen celebration rice (no lamb; leftover roast chicken eliminates the first step; ad-libbed a bit with reference to Samin Nosrat)

An almond chocolate cake from the Women's Weekly gluten-free cake book, i forget exactly what the title was now. It was supposed to have a peanut butter icing but I did maple philly cream cheese. It lacked structural integrity but tasted pretty good - I'd be delighted if the recipe came from anyone other than the WW. At any rate I don't think my mother loved it, but at least SOMEONE made her a birthday cake, and that someone was me.

"Popcorn Lamb", which is what happened as a result of me attempting to make Stephanie Alexander's Witty Lamb/ Epigrammes d'angneau , given my lack of precision and the fact I didn't have a former biology student to hand to help. Also I gluten-free-ified it on the fly, and I couldn't get the good Ograms GF panko crumbs. This whole adventure deserves its own write-up. The end result was worth it; I can't figure out why the de-boning part bore NO RESEMBLANCE AT ALL to the instructions, and would honestly like to try it with my Mum supervising for clarity.

Two batches of GF pancakes, using Ograms's buckwheat mix (which is less than 50% buckwheat, upon inspection).

Regarding the Christmas cake problem: at one point I attempted to colour leftover fondant icing (with a view to carving stencil trees or bells and sticking them on top of the white cake), and failed with the particular variety of gel colouring in the supermarket here. Too tacky. Gross. Ew. BUT. By angry googling I found a proper cake decorating store in Zurich, who sell both powder and traditional liquid colouring, plus proper cake tins, and cutters, etc. Probably also pre-coloured fondant in colours other than the ugliest green, which is what the supermarket sells.

PLAN. Please remind me in august-sept 2022: By mid october, I aquire new professional standard cake deco supplies. I bake the regular-flour-and-egg christmas cakes (3-4 of them) Then I organise my birthday party (birthday early Nov), which shall consist of: my colleagues bring their children to my house, and then they fuck off to drink coffee. I, possibly with someone as backup (friend LW? R who is partner of KHC?), ice christmas cakes with children; Ms Bee, who can draw quite well, shall be in charge of tracery for fondant stencils. This will solve a. a large amount of mad christmas rush and b. the thing where I never do anything for my birthday and people feel sorry for me because I am Alone. After making cakes, perhaps we then eat a DIFFERENT cake I have pre-prepared for birfday reasons. Or mid-cake, between almond and fondant layer stages.
The need for a demo cake or several means Prof Medieval, and probably also non-tt-lecturer-medieval, will get another Xmas cake. I see no problems here. I'd invite both THEIR kids, but I know my limits, I am no brownie guide leader. And we may yet be in a pandemic; both my immediate team members are in my second-string-personal-life-contact ring anyway.

Happy seems a bit of a stretch, even for the luckiest of us in 2020. Merry, perhaps, but while you can be both merry in the immediate moment and troubled at a deeper level, merry seems to require company in a way that happiness does not. And contentment... well. For many people, I think, grief may disbar contentment, in the 'I can be happy right now but I cannot yet be content, for this loss sticks like a burr'. But I'm not sure that is a universal of grief. I hope not.

I, mind you, don't really understand grief. Not the way most people mean it. I am lucky that my parents and siblings are okay, and have been okay all my life. The deaths of my grandmothers were not *nothing* to me, but they did not have the gutting impact that many people's grandparent-deaths do. My grandfather is dying, now - was not predicted to last the night on the 25th but clung, painfully, on. He may be dead by now; given I am neither as close to him as his older grandchildren are, nor pragmatically able to come home for the funeral, I won't be told as rapidly as I was for my maternal grandmother (when I did fly home, and declared thereafter that short of my actual parents, anyone else can die without me: I told you I don't really understand grief). I am clearly experiencing *an* emotion, but it is closer to concern than grief: I am not close to my grandfather but I loved and respected him, and I am both very glad he is lucky enough to die at home (not COVID), and deeply regretful that that his lifelong trait of being tough as shoe leather is leading him to a hard-fought end instead of a quiet restful passing. I am concerned about my father (and, more distantly - or through him - his family), upon whom will fall not only his own grief but various family stressors.

But I know that, when he goes, I will be ... memorially sad? I will not be grief-struck, as so many are this year. I will feel awkward, because I will want to talk about it, but I will repeatedly find how my feelings don't match up to the normal template of 'how one feels when one's grandparents die': in fact, I will probably not feel anything particularly legible to others. I know that the social rituals of bereavement are supposed to cover for that - and no doubt when a close to home grief DOES come to me I will be grateful for that- but I always feel like I should be covering for the deception, like "oh no, I'm FINE", and then I feel disloyal to the deceased. (Oddly, my maternal grandmother, who few of us actually *liked*, was easier. I could point to that and say: "I didn't like her, but she was important.")

This was not how this post was meant to go. What I meant to say was, December is weird. I have seasonal depression. And regular depression. And a coupla neurodivergences that, as I age, mean I'm always closer to burning out than I'd like to be. December feels HEAVY. I can't actually separate my notgrief from the general heaviness that is December.

In an extremely typical December sequence for me, I have had this post by Tom Cox in my electronic tbr sicne Dec 13, and only finally read it today, on the 27th:

I’m always amazed at the speed of the transfer between the falling gold of late October and the light-sucked days of December and most of November, which is the time when you remember, once again, that autumn is nearly all hype and can barely claim to be a season at all. Now is the time of year I have been least successfully constructed for, as a human body and mind, and I learn to accept that fact more with each passing year. I have sometimes wondered if I can trick November and December into hating me slightly less but it is not possible. Mostly positive stuff has happened to me in the last five weeks, I’m elated to be away from the damp house I was living in before, and feeling fully healthy for the first time since the height of summer, but the fact still remains that it’s early winter, everything is dying, people are trying to force you to be happy about a capitalist plot to eat more animals and spend more money on worthless plastic crap, there’s nobody to legally dance with and the sun is just a fleeting rumour. It’s similar every year, even ones when a pandemic doesn’t all but obliterate your social life. The difference is that I know myself now and no longer beat myself up for feeling different to the people who tell me I am not allowed to feel this way. From the moment Winter Solstice occurs, I can feel the big strong arms of nature pick me up and turn me back in the right direction. The change is slow but always palpable. As for the few days leading up to it: they are reliably total bastards.
- Thoughts from early winter on a moor

I have seen extracts from this post every few days (I follow Tom on instagram, one of his cats on twitter, and several of his fans on twitter) since the 13th and felt validated, but not actually read it until today. And lo, I feel validated.

Related, possibly the most validating thing I've read this month is timeanddate's explainer, Why is the earliest sunset not on the Winter Solstice? Oddly I knew this was true of sunSET, but somehow presumed that that was a consequence of sunRISE being an anchor. Wrong! Sunrise doesn't start getting earlier until the New Year, and therefore I feel justified in sleeping in foreeeever.

Ahem. This is a book post, I believe.

---

Currently Reading:
Fiction for Fun: "Real Men Knit", bought with a kobo voucher from my brother. Actually I started reading it mainly for a bookphoto attempt, which didn't turn out well. I bought it, having scrambled my memory of the TBR so as to think this was a gay romance about men knitting: it is not, but it IS cosy in the essential sense, and given a lot of its negative reviews are "this was billed as a romance but it's more a cosy family novel" I think I will enjoy it a lot more than I do most contemporary het romances.
Non-fiction for personal interest: Actively, only Tom Cox's "The Good, the Bad and the Furry". It feels weird, in this age of Twitter and Instagram, to read a book of "things some guys cats did" - I suspect Cox's shift to first countryside-based memoir and then weird fiction has something to do with the changing internet zeitgeist since 2010, when his book was published - but honestly, I really enjoy it. I enjoy Cox's wry humour, and his threading of cat related observations with deeply human ones.
Poetry: I don't think I've actually made any more progress with Paradise Lost since last post.
Lit Mag: Poor Autumn (Aus) Meanjin, still technically in progress.
For work: Actively, 'Before Emotion: The Language of Feeling, 400-1800'. Desultorily, 'The Fabliau in English'.
Recently DNF: 'Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows'. I gave it three or four chapters, and was a little more interested when a new, older POV character turned up, but... essentially, i continue to not believe that in the 21st century, in the Sikh community in fucking LONDON. you could post an ad for a creative writing teacher and not be flooded with candidates both more and less qualified than the protagonist, who I found utterly flakey. In that flakey way that is supposed to be "relatable", not "interestingly unlikeable" or "paralysed by internal conflict" (for the later, compare Shafak's Three Daughters of Eve). And which is neither likeable nor interesting to me. I just... in a better year I might have kept going and been rewarded. In 2020, my attention span is a sparse commodity.

Recently Finished:

Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I am genuinely dithering between 3 and 4 here, but rounding up because my glod, this book as *something* that kept me actively, if VERY VERY SLOWLY, reading it for eleven whole months. I started it on 2 Feb 2020, and finished it 27 Dec 2020. At first I read slowly because most of the space was taken up by the adult-Peri plotline, which had... no... real plot... and also adult-Peri both bored and annoyed me. The past-Peri plotline had a lot to interest me, but felt at first like backstory for adult-Peri (rather than, as it turns out, for undergrad-Peri).

I became invested in her late teens, because of course I did: bookish, socially withdrawn, invested in an intellectual rather than social self, overwrought about theism. Obviously I have a vast cultural gap between me and Peri, but her overawed Oxford undergrad self was immediately sympathetic to me. Slowly, the adult self became legible, even as nothing happened in that plot.

Then, I began to see the foreshadowing re her Professor. I saw, ahead, either a student/teacher affair or an excruciating embarrassment, and found it difficult to read more than a few pages at a time under that anticipation *even though I admired Shafak's craft in setting it up*.

Perhaps because it took me MONTHS, not days, to get through the middle of the book, I found the final culmination dissatisfying. I might actually have *admired*, although not necessarily enjoyed, a student/teacher affair plot better. It felt like Shafak was deliberately setting out to subvert that plotline, but I wasn't happy with what she offered in its place.

Then there's... it's called Three Daughters of Eve. It seems like those three are Peri and her undergrad friends (I thought for a long time it would be Peri, her mother, and her daughter, but her daughter had no development whatsoever). Peri is by far the most developed character in the book, obviously. Of the Oxford trio, Shirin, the Muslim-raised nonbeliever, gets the most flesh. Mona, the devout Muslim feminist, only really gets fleshed out in a few tiny scenes where she and Shirin debate. This book leans SO HEAVILY into the ethic of indecision, not firmly committing to any side, but it's easy to see where Shafak's own loyalties lie - or at least, of two condemned types of conviction, which she finds more sympathetic.

I think structurally the book is weakened by departing from Peri's POV right at the end, to first the Principal's then Azur's. But I do think it needed another balancing POV - and that should have been Mona's.

That's it, that's the one book I finished this past fortnight, but my goat, I FINISHED it. Today is a red-letter day, I finished that book I was determined not to give up on and yet unable to finish.

Up Next: Mostly, I need to WRITE, not read. But by end of year I need to triage my 'hiatus' books that are still marked 'currently reading' in goodreads, and then either farewell them or make a solid effort once my immediate deadlines are past to get through them. 'A new companion to Chaucer' and 'The queer child' I'm looking at you.

---

Some links of note:

Tom Cox (own blog), Thoughts from early winter on a moor and 2020: a review. Another thing I need to do is overhaul my blogreader, cull things I don't read, and add things I should. Like this blog.

nakara kalasutra (own blog), Relationship Libertarianism. Pretty incisive.

Kai Cheng Thom (Xtra), People never seem to need me as much as I need them: am I an emotional vampire? Another Just A Good Advice Column example.

Geraldine Heng (In the Medieval Middle), Why the Hate? The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, and Race, Racism, and Premodern Critical Race Studies Today. Like the book, I do not find this post unnassaible: in particular, while addressing Pearce's (negative, deeply vitriolic) review essay, it does not grapple with Pearce's stance as a Jewish academic criticising Heng's treatment of Jewish history. I think it's valid in its assessment of the weaknesses of Pearce's essay, but it is a bit skew in claiming that Pearce has no standing to criticise.

Natasha Frost (Atlas Obscura), How the 18th-century Gay Bar Survived and Thrived In A Deadly Environment. A decent overview of 18th Molly Houses.

Parrish Turner, interview with Zayne Joukhadar (Electric Lit), How do we put words to the experience of gender? A good interview. Have added the book to my endless TBR.

Jenn Shapland (NYT), Butter, sugar and a tablespoon of grief. On holiday baking as a tie to one's ancestry. I might be wonky on the experience of grief, but I concede I have the icing-sugar covered kitchen to match this essay,

Done Saturday:
* Some chores
* Called Shiny, as per yesterday's filtered post
* Good Omens readthrough with wildeabandon et al. Very fun! Very good people! Also I enjoyed being the stage directions. I'm considering asking to give up my MC slot next time in favour of God or more stage directions, actually...
* Ordered a hard copy of The Mercies, b/c no kobo aus. Also a plastic file folder, to meet the free shipping level, and to store my swiss papers in.
* I think I ate leftovers for dinner and more listening to 'What Belongs To You'? Not sure, tbh.
The DW reading post happened in there somewhere, at least.

Done Sunday:
* Called brother, had a nice catch up. He's doing... better. There was, like, 50% less bitching about his phd-holding colleagues, which was nice vis a vis less bitching and also vis a vis amount of times it seems I'm expected to explain what a PhD is for anyway. He had anticipated what I was calling to inform him of, vis, that I might not make it to his wedding.
* Called mum to inform her of same fact. Predictably she took it worse than brother, but not BADLY per se. She was the one who was like "will you be upset if they don't postpone for you?" Me:.. no. I am the last person you should postpone a wedding for.
* Meditation
* Washed the bathroom floor
* Probably some other stuff but blowed if I know what.
* 1 (one) scary email
* More Greenwell, some Penumbra. Some colouring-in.
* Made roast eggplant with spinach and pine nut pilaf.
* ACTUALLY attended german class, despite the reminder not going off on my phone.

Done Monday:
* Groceries. 150 chf worth, + 20chf in boquet and pot flowers. The latter are an indulgence; the former... THREE TIMES AS MUCH as I spent in Geneva, idek. Almost too much to carry. The flowers were a mixed bunch though and I'm pretty pleased. The pot were... small and purple.
* Made toasted sandwiches with egg, Jack M's banana ketchup, capsicum and cheese. Could have used some pineapple (*ducks*).
* Ordered online some egg rings (a set, one round and three fun shapes) and egg poaching dodads, fed up with my egg-frying experience.
* Read more of Solga
* Laundry - hung in the hangy room because someone was using the tumble dryer. Found some teatowels of mine, i guess I had dropped them and someone put them in the hangyroom?
* Did TWO pomodoros on phd>book, although the second turned out to be more COMMode related.
* Placed another Betterworld order
* Happy Hour with KHC and the drummer. Got deets of KHC's hairdresser in Fribourg; have booked for June 19.
* Cut up some more cardboard and fed it into the cardboard recylcing bin's tiny mouth.
* Got notif from régie that I can expect delivery of my free planters tomorrow (plants to follow soon). Pleased to report I could understand the gist of the letter in German without google translate.
* Previewed some docs for MF
* Et dinner, same as yesterday except cold and now with feta cheese.
* Am making this post.

I am having an ongoing problem with my google calendar. I put all my everything in it. After forgetting German a lot I went into iphone settings and told it to notify me 10 min beforehand. It does this for most other things, but not German classes, so far. Why, I cannot tell. I reinstalled iCal, synced to Gcal, and told it to give me notifications; it did not notify me about happy hour with KHC (although gcal desktop did), but that might be because not enough time to sync. I have gone through my phone and manually disabled 'sound' on almost everything except calendars, since that seems to be the only way to get a BEEP YOU HAVE A THING but not constant beeps. Remains to be seen if this... works.

Project: do not bombard Shiny with chat is going okay.

This has been Pandemic Updates.

What better thing is there to do with a small child than play humorous pranks? No better thing, according to my Dad.

Great Dad pranks of history include:

Ice Cream Topping Extravaganza:

Scene: Uncle R with his nephews, being served bowls of ice cream. There are some fast-food sweet and sour sauce packets lying around
R: Hey kids, you want this on your ice cream?
Kids: Ew, no
R: Really?
Kids: No one puts sweet and sour sauce on ice cream, Uncle R
R: what? You haven't heard of sweet and sour sauce on ice cream?
Kids: Ew, no
R: Really? You really haven't - how have you lived? It's great! You should try it
Kids, wise to his bullshit: No way
R: I mean, sure, I'll have it all for myself *slathers ice cream in mcnugget sauce*
Kids: ... you're really going to eat that?
R: Absolutely! Here, there's a couple of packets left, you try it
Kids: You first
R: *eats bowl, with relish*
Kids: ... I mean. I guess? *add sauce to their bowls*
R: See? It's great
Kids: This is weird, Uncle R
Kids' mother, appearing: what on earth are you boys eating? And WHY?
Kids: UNCLE R SAID IT WAS GOOD
R: I lied
Kids: ohmigoshwhat he LIED how DARE.

Apparently this trick also works on fully-grown airmen, too, and bonus points if the thing is actually a delicacy but not intended to be eaten in that particular context. Apparently he once baffled a restaurant by convincing his workmates to eat all the rose petals out of the finger bowls they were given to clean their fingers in.

Hide and Sneak:

This is probably a fairly common advance on Hide and Sneak, although in my Dad's case probably super-charged by him having, like, actual military Sneaking training. You wait until your kids are familiar enough with the principles of hide and seek to not bother looking in the 'easy' spots first off.

So you hide in an easy spot. Behind a curtain, say. Somewhere fairly close to the Best Spot. You wait until the kids have checked the Best Spot, and then you sneak out and occupy it. Then you wait until you're the last person still hiding, and everyone is going bananas, and then you sneak into another easy spot and wait until they give up, and saunter out going 'I was here all along'.

Also quite good: sneaking into a spot that's higher up than most hiding spots. We once searched for twenty minutes and didn't find him sitting on top of the chest freezer. Mind you, apparently we also once searched for twenty minutes and didn't find him standing quietly behind a door, despite looking multiple times behind the door in question - he was quite good at imitating a coat when necessary. Mum maintains she was monitoring that particular occasion and no sneaking occurred. Just camouflage.

It was a great trial to us that when /we/ tried sneaking it never had the same effect. Dad won by ceasing to sneak, and waiting for the rest of the family to all fail by banging into each other in the hallway while attempting to sneak.

I still don't know how this one works:

But somehow, my father has the amazing ability to win any board game, not instantly, but exactly when the players are becoming fractious and it's time to stop. This makes sense with, say, trivial pursuit: perhaps he pretends not to know things, until it's clear no one else is going to win even with a handicap. Same with Scrabble: obviously he's holding back until the last minute. But with, say, snakes and ladders, it should not be possible to deliberately 'play badly' or to improve one's gameplay. And yet. He can - or could - do this every time. With Snakes and Ladders. With Trouble. With Monopoly. Regardless of the balance of skill to chance, Dad could win the game just in the nick of time before the brattiest child threw a tantrum. (Consequently, my family never had weeks-long monopoly drama.)

Interestingly, he didn't seem to be able to do it with card games. And now he just refuses to play any games at all, so I don't know if he can still do it. It baffled me all my childhood and early adulthood and it continues to baffle me now.

---

Also there was that time he hung my brother as a toddler from a doorknob by the back of his romper suit. Obviously didn't LEAVE him there, but he did let him kick a bit and go 'EEP'. Dad was also a master of 'put child in the shopping trolley, and when we get to a ramp let it go, and then run after it and catch it before it smacks into something' means of kid-entertainment. Whether this is the greatest game ever or a cruel trick probably depends on the child...

The poll says the next family trivia I tell you should be 'Top Three Injuries My Brother Didn't Die Of', but off the back of 'agistment', let me tell you about vocabulary I am baffled to find isn't universal.

Agistment, to agist: Aus/NZ - to rent out paddocks (that is, fields) for someone else's horses or stock. The Macquarie Dictionary indicates that the subject of agist is the person taking money, but both my family idiom and kayloulee's rural idiom include the usage 'I agist my horse on Bob's paddock' (where Bob receives the money), and 'illegal agistment' as the process of grazing your horse somewhere without paying for it. This term does not seem to be in use at all in US English.

Its origins are high medieval English law: the forest charter of 1217 (which has more clauses still in effect than the Magna Carta, according to an exhibit I saw in Hereford last year) guarantees to the peasantry the rights of agistment, pannage, estover and turbary on royal forest land. Pannage is pasture for pigs, estover collecting of wood, and turbary the cutting of turf for fires. These rights were not ones that had to be paid for, and the point was you couldn't be charged with poaching for exercising them. My landlady in Darkest Lancashire thinks that some aspects of these rights remain - she's pretty sure you can collect firewood on the duke's estate.

Wikipedia thinks in current legal usage in England agistment can refer to the contract of pasture for someone else's animals or the proceeds therefrom, but evidence suggests that no one uses the term in actual practice.

I'm particularly delighted with this one, because it's an example of a linguistic phenomenon that is evident in Quebeçois, and sometimes in American English, and I believe in South American spanishes, but is rarely obvious in Aus/NZ English: the colonial dialect preserves and adapts an archaic term that the source language no longer uses, or uses in a more restrictive sense.

Manchester, n: This one I discovered in a conversation with my then-boyfriend shortly after moving to Europe. In Australian English, Manchester is the category of soft homewares that includes sheets and towels and pillows. It is roughly cognate with 'linens', I think, and is more likely to be found describing shop sections or goods for sale than items in your home. A department store has a Manchester Section. The sheets and towels you buy there will go home into your linen closet.

I gather that the logic of this, as a description for fabric homewares, is much the same as generalising 'linens' to all things in the sheets-and-towels cupboard: Mancester was a major producer of cotton, and thus 'manchester ware' would include sheets, towels, pillowslips, etc (and somehow the pillows themselves have been bundled in with this).

To flipe, v: This verb, which according to the OED has been obsolete since the 1920s but is alive and well in my family, describes the correct way to fold socks. Firstly, let me show you the correct way to fold socks.

( The correct way to fold socks, in pictures )

Congratulations, you have fliped a sock.

My family use this word for no other manouvre than folding socks. That's it. It is a special sock-folding word. I'm not honestly sure of the spelling, because until the internet I had no reason to write it down.

I have looked it up in the OED, and its origin appears to by archaic English 'flype', meaning to turn inside-out, a proceeding that could apply to sleeves and bags and other such things. It went obsolete in the 1920s, although given how rarely people write about inside-out-folding of clothes, it may have been in use for some time after the OED last records it. You could, for instance, flype a sleeve of a shirt when ironing the front and back of the shirt, so that it sits flatter. (I can't tell if my instant association of 'flype sleeve' with that specific ironing task means my mother did, at one point, use the verb for shirts, or if that's just association on my part.)

As far as I can tell, my use of this linguistic fossil is a product of my mother having been raised by her grandmother, who was a young woman in the late 19th century. I, in the late 20th century, was taught to rigorously flipe my socks because my great-grandmother fliped hers.

I discovered this wasn't a normal word only when I moved in with kayloulee, although we had to cross-check with a housemate in case it was an Australian word her Canadian mum didn't know. My family does have a few other weird/archaic household vocab quirks, and certainly some old fashioned housekeeping habits. I hospital-corner my bed, for instance, and completely baffled a 60-something y old of my acquaintance by attempting to hospital corner a tablecloth the other week.

This has been weird vocabulary with Amy. You also now know how to correctly fold socks.

Writing up that Aeroplane Saga was fun, and I have many more bizarre family stories and could do with some prompting

What story would you like:

I went with Dad down to see his father - I was supposed to get a train from there back to Sydney, but Dad drove me the whole way, long story.

Sitting around eating lunch at the back of Pop's place, with Dad's sister D, my cousin Del (who has moved in with Pop and D), my Aunty C, and Del's son Jack:

Dad: Hey Jack I've got some advice for you
Jack, with a look on his face suggesting he's encountered his uncle's 'Advice' before: oh?
Dad: don't try to file your nails with any kind of rotary tool
Jack: ... wasn't planning on it
C: Did it file your toes off?
Dad: no, it worked quite well
Me: but... lemme guess... shattered the nail bed?
Dad: no
All: well what happened?
Dad: it's the heat. It hits you all at once. One minute you're all 'oh, this is effective!' and then your toenail heats up right down to the nail bed, and let me tell you, toenails do not cool off again quickly! Aah, Ahh, my toenails are burning me!

So there you go, o readers: do not file your toenails with a rotary tool. (I think he must have been using the buffer/sander from the engraving tool set?)

---

Speaking of toenails, while I was home I asked Dad to borrow some nail clippers. He brought me a range of toenail clipping devices and gave me a sales pitch regarding the strengths and weaknesses of each one, toenail maintenance wise.

The thing he didn't tell me, which Mum filled me in on when I told her about Dad, Toenail Clipper Connoisseur, is that the reason he has so many is he ended up taking home the clippers and scissors that had belonged to not one but /both/ of my deceased grandmothers. Because, Mum said, 'they were there, and what else were we going to do with them?' (I don't know. Anything but take them home and build a specialist toenail maintenance collection with them???)

Occasioned by sending my boss a copy of The Problem of Susan (which is cited in my PhD, don't even ask):

I was about fifteen when Dad borrowed ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ out of the library. He read ‘Chivalry’ and immediately thought ‘Amy must read this!’ but couldn’t bring himself to give me the book. He read Chivalry aloud to me (it’s brilliant read aloud) and then was like ‘but I can’t give you the rest of the book’.

Me: why?
Dad: it’s just. It’d make me uncomfortable.
Mum: R, what are you reading?
Dad: it’s not that bad! She’d probably like it! There’s this great Snow White retelling, but it’s. It’s got some things. I can’t just give it to my daughter.
Me: uhuh.

So I waited until Dad went away for work for a few weeks, and then got the local mobile library truck guy to order it in for me (at 15 I had free interlibrary loans). When he got back it was lying on the kitchen table.

Dad: you read Smoke and Mirrors?
Me: You said you couldn’t give it to me, you didn’t say I couldn’t read it.
Dad: True.
Me: It was a great Snow White story.
Dad: Yup.
Both of us: *look into each other’s eyes and know that means we both have also read the same sci-fi erotica*
Dad: SO ABOUT THAT BEOWULF ONE. WEIRD, HUH?

And I think that’s how I first found out about that Beowulf was a medieval poem I should care about: because I hadn’t understood Gaiman’s weird eighties-LA-beach-culture retelling, and wasn’t going to let that kind of thing slip past me again.

Bought a hat for Pride Fribourg, after losing the previous in Morocco. Wore it on plane to UK. Left it on train Leeds-London, didn't realise until yesterday.

Got vr burned at Duxford airshow (plaaaanes!). Went and bought a hat in Cambridge today; lost it within five hours. Hopefully I left it in Michaelhouse and can pick it up from there tomorrow before we head to Bath via Oxford.

Traveling with parentals is tiring (they are inexperienced in the big wide world, but also now old enough that they are slow to intuit things or recognise patterns). Travelling with Brooke is very tiring. Not just the usual over-tired kid thing, although that's bad enough (the sun gets up early and so does miss six! Even if she didn't get to bed until eleven!). I have never met a child so paranoid. I spoke to her loudly today- "Brooke, you're walking INTO PEOPLE" - when she skittered across the pavement, and that bought us five minutes of hiding her face in mum's and my legs, and big crocodile tears. Absolutely convinced she's going to be In Trouble and, i dunno, banished forever? This happens 2-3 times a day.

She's also having difficulty with the idea that I am, in fact, travelling with them. "Amy, can you eat with us today?" Where else do you think I'm gonna eat, kid? We're in the same car! On the same holiday! Being paid for by the same parents!

In addition to the hat crisis, I accidentally bought tickets for Duxford Flying Legends 'Meet the Fighters' in September instead of regular Flying Legends. liv, if you see this, please enquire of your people if three adult and one child ticket for the 10th of Sept would be of use to them. I think young B would be into it.

Shortly after my arrival in the parental abode, I've been updated on Dad's adventures in family history. He's recently:

- tracked Brooke's ancestry back to one Isabella Tyson, convict
- established Brooke's relation to James Tyson, son of Isabella, and Australia's first self-made millionaire. Said James and his brothers sound as if they owned half the grazing land in the country by the 1890s, and James was eulogised by Banjo Patterson. He was also a major benefactor of The Women's College, USyd, as it happens

- reasonably established the identity of the unnamed ancestors he found a photo of when pulling apart a photo frame he 'borrowed' from my grandmother, and, in so doing, revised the previously-assumed identity of another set of ancestors in another photograph. This endeavour involved identifying a distinctive chair present in both photographs, also present in a photograph of my great-grandmother age 18; identifying the photo studio to which the chair belonged, and the date of its establishment as a business; and cross-checking ages of various ancestors and blowing up images of faces of great-great male relations. Probably-cousin-Jack and his wife are currently gracing the parental living room bookshelf, while previously-thought-to-be-Jack/now-assumed-to-be-Henry and his family are, I think, at my Uncle's place.

Dad likes ancestor puzzles. It's like detective stories, he says. I told him I know historians who do this for a living, only with charters. He said he likes the internet-enabled versions better.