Pictures from Galilee

 Sunrise over Lake Galilee.

 Young man at old ruins. (Capernaum)

 Old man at older ruins.

 Northern end of lake.

Keep your word

I think I said I was going to write about war. So here goes.

WAR WARN WARM WARMTH WART SWARM SWARTHY WARBLE WARD WARP  SWARD

Should I add WHARF and QUARTET?

These are all words where "w" makes "ar" say "or."

Then there's the other kind of war, where "or" says "or," the "w" having no effect.

WORE WORN SWORE SWORN WHORL

And then there's the kind where "or" doesn't say "or," but neither is there any war involved, such as WORM WORD WORK...

Okay, I better quit.

Smart Sheep

 We had some sheep in Indiana that we would put out to graze in a pasture a little ways from the barn. The pasture was divided into four smaller pastures, each a little farther from the barn. The fence was a temporary electric fence which zapped once every second. A smart animal would learn after one or two zaps not to touch it.

One summer we removed the fence wire from the nearer pastures and put the sheep to graze in the farthest pasture. When we opened the gate they would all run at top speed through the other pastures to the barn. But I saw one smart sheep running along with the rest until she suddenly came skidding to a stop, right where an electric wire used to be! That's pretty impressive. Her understanding and memory of electric wires was stronger than her flocking instinct.

Sometimes I looked out the kitchen window and saw the sheep all standing with their ears erect all looking in the same direction. What could they be looking at? It was usually a cat or the neighbor's Beagle, who was short enough to slip under the fence without being zapped. He always had his nose to the ground, and I don't think he was the least bit interested in the sheep.

Once I watched the sheep heading for the far pasture where there was lots of green grass. But for some reason the lead sheep decided to go around the open gate and into the woods. One of the last sheep saw the lush grass and looked at it longingly, but she wasn't independent enough to leave the flock, and she wasn't the leader, so she reluctantly followed the rest of the flock into the woods.

You don't really want sheep to be independent. That creates too much trouble for the shepherd. And staying with the flock is a protection from predators. Sheep are as smart as cows, but not quite as smart as pigs.

And then you could debate whether cows are smarter than horses. Horses are more trainable, I suppose.

Now what about comparing frogs and toads?

July 2014

Last year was disappointing in many ways. This year I started out with great optimism, but everything went wrong. Everything. In fact, the first six months were just plain weird.

Now I'm mostly recovered. But maybe I should keep some sort of record of all the good things that happen. It's possible that my memory is too selective and I remember only the bad things.

J came to visit, which was the high point of the year. We went to a zoo and I got lots of pictures. One of these days I'll get some posted. He didn't get a chance to make his pomelo preserves, so I did it myself after he left, and it wasn't nearly as good as his.

Regarding cooking, and just about everything else I do, my first attempt can be a great success, but it never happens again. The first time I made crepes they were perfect. The batter was smooth and perfect, and they cooked up perfectly--perfectly round and perfectly lightly browned. Every time since then the batter has come out lumpy, and the crepes are irregular in shape. But they taste about the same, so it's no matter.

In the vacant lot next door is usually all dust and weeds. But recently there were two piles of jagged, squarish boulders. After a few days they were gone, except for some heaps of boulder crumbs. But the next day there were three piles of two different colors of dirt. And now those are gone and there is a pile of something else. So somewhere not too far from here some building is going on.

It's nice to actually see something happening. It beats spending your life at the computer, which seems to be all there is left for me to do.

A little tutoring has added a bit of interest to life. But that encourages me to spend even more time on the computer looking for pictures and checking on words. It is hard to explain a word without using words. And that means more words that need explaining. I have found that Bing Dictionary has some pretty simple definitions, but sometimes I have to make them even simpler. The best I can do is not as much as I would like because I know nothing about the Korean language. But I find out things as I go, like what sounds my two students have difficulty with. R's and L's can be hard. And they do not immediately hear the difference between "chief" and "cheap," "fist" and "feast," and "duck" and "dog." (We had a Spanish-speaking friend who pronounced "ship" and "sheep" just alike, and she refused to say the word "sheet.")  And even if you get the sounds and the words, how the words relate to each other in the sentence is a huge mystery. I look online for tips on teaching English as a second language, and the first thing I notice is that the teachers all have Personality. ........Oh, well.

chicken  chickens   cock   hen   chick
goat   goats   buck   doe   kid
horse  horses   stallion   mare   foal
{cow}   cattle   bull   cow   calf

Notice a problem? There is no singular for "cattle" unless you use "cow," which it may not be. We would never say "mare" for a horse of undesignated gender.

Or you could say "one head of cattle" ??? ["One head of chicken" would sound like some magic brew.]

New subject. I have often seen crossed swords as a symbol, but it never occurred to me that they can face up, and or they can face down. Faced up means ready to fight, faced down means the fight is over.

Speaking of symbols, why is it that lions are honored beasts, while bears are seen as mean and destructive? I think lions make more sense, actually. They get hungry, they kill and eat. Whereas bears are so unpredictable.

Now we're getting into animal preferences. Which are better, dogs or cats? Some will say that a dog truly wants to please you, whereas a cat is all for himself. I could debate that. And all the bad things you can say about cats you can say about people, but you like them anyway, and learn a lot about them and yourself when trying to live with them. So I like them equally well.

Some people like sheep better than goats. I like them equally well. And sheep are not dumb, by the way. They do what sheep are supposed to do, and if it is inconvenient to a human, people call them stupid.

So next post I'll talk about sheep, and war, and whatever else comes to mind.