I decided to do Holidailies this year. That means a daily entry from today through January 8th. I'll say up front that there will be a few times when I'll have to backfill due to travel, but I'll manage. As for why I decided to join up (and manage to do it late enough to not get onto the portal), I wanted a change from the weekly routine. I often come up with things to write about, but forget them by the time Sunday rolls along. Not every entry will be brilliant, but I'm hoping for some inspired moments.
This is not an inspired moment.
I did learn one interesting bit of trivia this day, which came about because Alex commented on a paper I wrote yesterday and, specifically noted that I had spelled the word "bhangmeter" correctly. A bhangmeter is an optical detector for nuclear detonations. Both Alex and I had assumed it was named after a Mr. Bhang, but it turns out (at least according to the National Atomic Museum) that the "bhang" in question is a form of cannabis! Some scientists were skeptical that the optical measurement technique would work. So the name is a sly comment that anybody who trusts it has to be hallucinating.
Something else interesting I came across recently is the claim that donating small amounts of money to charities increases the number of begging letters you get. This time of year, in particular, I get tons of them. I'm particularly annoyed at a few organizations who send out letters at least weekly. Typically, I stop donating to any organization that sends me too many solicitations, on the grounds that they're wasting money on mailings. What is most annoying is that I've actually written to several organizations asking to be removed from their mailing lists, to no avail. When it's the Alzheimer's Association, one can say, "oh, okay, they forgot," but others have no excuse. At any rate, it seems like the idea of giving token amounts of money to organizations that one approves of but doesn't want to be a major donor to is a bad idea. Guess I'll up the big contributions (e.g. my alma mater, the county library association, a few microloan organizations) and blow off more of the other stuff.
Finally, I remembered why knitting and crocheting baby stuff is so great. See, I've been knitting this sweater for myself for ages. Most of the reason it's slow is that I'm working one of those graphs of color changes and that is something I have to concentrate on and can't really do while carrying on a conversation. I needed a quick and small baby gift for somebody at work, so yesterday I took a break from avoiding working on the sweater and crocheted a pair of baby booties. The whole thing took under an hour, with about 20 minutes of that spent searching for my sewing box to find the yarn needle for stitching the seams. Hurrah for making tiny stuff for a change!
Copyright 2005 Miriam H. Nadel