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5 Random Things
Dec. 28th, 2009 11:37 am1. It would be a perfect day for piano moving -- not raining, snow hasn't started falling yet, trails not good for skiing (due to yesterday's rain and today's not-yet-snow) -- but ...
2. Several people (not me) are experiencing a re-run of the stomach upset. (It may be that BBQ smoked ribs were not the most auspicious meal for people with recovering digestions, but the holiday meal schedule has a life of its own. We also finally cracked open the pies last night.)
3. Had a nice time yesterday hanging out with misc. cousins who had come for the memorial.
4. Why is it that winter holiday colds have to be compounded by arid, centrally-heated air that turn ones nasal passage and throat into the Mojave Desert every night? I keep wanting some sort of ultra-portable vapor mask to keep in my travel kit for these occasions.
5. I went through the exercise of running the list of proper names for Daughter of Mystery through Google, just to avoid any dreadful mis-steps. The coincidental overlap hits a sprinkling of assorted Romance languages (unsurprisingly, since the phonological adjustment rules leave some roots relatively unchanged) and an amusing set of superficially south Slavic items. ("Superficially" because in a lot of cases you have to strip off diacritics from the Slavic items to get the overlap. On the other hand, I may beg Alma to take a gander at the list just for a safety-check.) But overall it looks like I've succeeded in creating a look-and-feel that doesn't match anything particular in the real world and doesn't appear to land on anything too particular-and-unfortunate enough to need changing. In only one case was the top Google hit for a name one of my LJ entries discussing the writing project. Since that one happened to be for the surname of my Protagonist #1, I'm rather happy about it. (In fact, that particular name has only 5 other primary Google hits. One is a very inaccurate OCR of an entirely different word. One appears to be a place-name in a bit of fiction posted in a blog in Italian (so I have no idea whether it's a real place-name or one invented for the fiction). One is the created by the erroneous insertion of two spaces into a longer word (the genus name of some mollusk). One is part of a long list of possible typos for the name of a web site that appears to exist solely to get search-hits. So I appear to have come up with something fairly close to unique in this case.
2. Several people (not me) are experiencing a re-run of the stomach upset. (It may be that BBQ smoked ribs were not the most auspicious meal for people with recovering digestions, but the holiday meal schedule has a life of its own. We also finally cracked open the pies last night.)
3. Had a nice time yesterday hanging out with misc. cousins who had come for the memorial.
4. Why is it that winter holiday colds have to be compounded by arid, centrally-heated air that turn ones nasal passage and throat into the Mojave Desert every night? I keep wanting some sort of ultra-portable vapor mask to keep in my travel kit for these occasions.
5. I went through the exercise of running the list of proper names for Daughter of Mystery through Google, just to avoid any dreadful mis-steps. The coincidental overlap hits a sprinkling of assorted Romance languages (unsurprisingly, since the phonological adjustment rules leave some roots relatively unchanged) and an amusing set of superficially south Slavic items. ("Superficially" because in a lot of cases you have to strip off diacritics from the Slavic items to get the overlap. On the other hand, I may beg Alma to take a gander at the list just for a safety-check.) But overall it looks like I've succeeded in creating a look-and-feel that doesn't match anything particular in the real world and doesn't appear to land on anything too particular-and-unfortunate enough to need changing. In only one case was the top Google hit for a name one of my LJ entries discussing the writing project. Since that one happened to be for the surname of my Protagonist #1, I'm rather happy about it. (In fact, that particular name has only 5 other primary Google hits. One is a very inaccurate OCR of an entirely different word. One appears to be a place-name in a bit of fiction posted in a blog in Italian (so I have no idea whether it's a real place-name or one invented for the fiction). One is the created by the erroneous insertion of two spaces into a longer word (the genus name of some mollusk). One is part of a long list of possible typos for the name of a web site that appears to exist solely to get search-hits. So I appear to have come up with something fairly close to unique in this case.
