Soft tonguing, “Sasanach santach,” new shoes, etc.
Well, last week’s heatwave peaked right on schedule on Monday afternoon, and it maxed out at 108 in my town instead of the predicted 111.
Granted, whichever spot in the blazing sun on my concrete patio that has the outdoor temperature sensor that’s connected to my central air system maxed out at 118:
I was hoping to get a pic of it at 117, but all afternoon it sat at 116 then jumped up 2 degrees instead of 1, but oh well, close enough for me to do the obligatory Izzy Stradlin embed:
It wasn’t actually that bad here, other places in this provinces got it far worse, and I stuck to my guns of not using the A/C.
After all, Hula Gator is my mascot this summer, although she never leaves the dining room where it’s relatively cool:
Funnily enough, though, the time when I was most tempted was late Monday night after the peak, and if memory serves there was even a decent little breeze coming in through the window and I had the fans on but I guess by then my tolerance had expired.
In any case, it’s over now. And I guess it’s kinda neat to be able to say I sat out a once-in-a-thousand-years heat dome without it. Y’know, in a needlessly dumb kinda way.
I also mentioned last week about the TV saga. This week’s installment is that Dad came over with his stud finder and it turns out the reason my brother and I only found that one stud is pretty much because there was only the one in the area. He finally figured out the studs are 24″ apart. Which is a pain in the ass, but I found a wall mount with good reviews that had just one mounting bracket in the middle so the stud spacing doesn’t matter. It should be here in a week or so.
Also, did I say the TV was 40”? It’s actually 46” on the diagonal.
For clarinet, I’m at the point of starting to play little riffs and scales and exercises, and I have a more stable tone now.
I still have pinky issues and bad habits like leaving my fingers way off the keys/holes when I’m not using them and that then makes it awkward to play so I’m working on hovering closely.
Also: there’s a lot of discussing of “tonguing” in methods both hard and soft, and that makes it so hard to not giggle. As in “Ok, Pyra, that was a fairly hard tongue, try it again with a softer tongue and try to not scoop it.”
Speaking of music, I once again have a tall stack of CDs that I need to rip and put into my iTunes.
And I keep dithering on working on new music… I guess I always will thought I know I don’t want to work in the music biz again, but then that shouldn’t mean I don’t make music at all but I tend to not want to dedicate any time to it if I’m not gonna make a go of it.
Sigh… gotta improve my time management.
Well, once the heat passed I did get some productivity in: I’ve had the kernel of an idea for one episode of the web series since I came up with in, and driving home from Walmart the other day I got a flash for a whole other story to build/weave around that kernel so I got that script written. I’m now up to 7 episode scripts completed and I’ve started outlining another 7.
In the episode I wrote in the flash, I wanted my Irish character Pádraig calling someone a “greedy English bastard” but doing so in Irish so the Englishman wouldn’t know he was being insulted.
Google Translate is stupid so it tells me the answer is “bastard Béarla greedy” lol… which is obviously wrong (Béarla means English as in the English language, not English as in the people), and while yes they just borrowed “bastard” without changing it, they certainly didn’t borrow “greedy.”
Anyway, Focloir.ie to the rescue: it flows better if I skip the “bastard” part and just have Pádraig say “Greedy Englishman” because that’s “Sasanach santach”. (I’ll ignore that it probably should be a vocative case with the weird consonant mutations that go with it because I’m lazy.)
But the ultimate punchline is noticing that the noun “greed” is “saint” in Irish. LOL… I feel like there’s a story there somewhere.
(Actually, the ultimate punchline is that Padraig is the real greedy bastard, but I don’t want to give anything away so early in the process.)
What else… well, I mentioned last week that I had a shoe order coming this week, bought due to a FB ad.
All 3 are all-leather and fairly sturdy and well-made. I’m trying to buy less but buy better, and I think I should have these three pairs for a good long while:
In the current weather, the sandals are getting the most wear, and I think my late iguana would approve of the color choice. The heels will be more for fall and winter; I still intend to get back to wearing stilettos (which I haven’t done much of in years because of weight and nowhere to wear them), but I already have a closet full of stilettos but no lower/sturdier heels for day-to-day use.
Anyway, let’s wrap up with some stuff from the garden:
