Rambling along the Green Path

Saint Patrick’s Day came and green was everywhere You could even see it in the pool and fountain at the White House in Washington. The Irish green beer was being drunk in plenty in Chicago and New York and probably in lots of other places as well. I bet there were lots of green ties ,shirts and blouses , funny green hats and funny green shoes to be seen  in offices, shops, pubs and parties.

I'm not sure why green is associated with Saint Pat or why it comes at this time of the year but we know Ireland is a very green place. Fly over it at any time. There is no doubt green is the color of Ireland.

Green is also the color of a Texas spring. It is just wonderful to see all the bright leaf greens appearing after most of the blossom fades. One thing that surprises me is the many shades of green of the leaves and how quickly the pale green turns darker as the days progress.

As a painter the color green is the one I have most problems in mixing to get the shade I need. I know to get a basic green you mix blue and yellow but I can never quite get the tone I like. My color green is always too intense or primitive.

I suppose it's this variation and the link of the color green and growing plants that has come to symbolize the Green movement. I am happy that it is still moving along and progressing, be it very slow at times but there are still signs of life .

Finally we have curbside recycling in my part of Texas even though we do have to pay for it extra to our garbage pick up fee. I can remember if you wanted to recycle you had to collect all your cans and papers and haul them away to collection bins. That's if you could even find one. I understand there is big money in all these recyclables so I never can understand why we have to pay to have ours collected. Still we would recycle anyhow to do our bit to keep the earth green.

I shudder every time I think of that huge swath of plastic bags and junk that is said to be floating around somewhere in the Pacific ocean that is about the size of Texas just because people are downright lazy and will not clean up after themselves and recycle.

At least a a few countries have started the ball rolling and outlawed the useful but everlasting plastic bag. Finally shopping bags are becoming fashionable again. Maybe there is hope for the oceans yet.

Any plastic bags we do get, I collect to give to a friend who has taken on a self imposed volunteer job to go around clearing up the lanes and roadsides around where she lives as she wants her part of the world to stay green. She uses the bags to collect the bottles and cans that are thrown there by definitely NON green people.Cheers to her. She sets a great example.

I did wonder if these plastic bags and plastic items are made from oil could there not be a process found that could turn them back to oil?That could solvea lot of problems.

I am always amazed at the huge piles of garbage that is still being collected and not recycled. Travel all over the place and new mountains and hills are being made from all the junk we throw away. We have a couple of these mountains close to us. They will make good ski slopes if it ever snows long enough.

The problem is we have too much these days and are very wasteful of our resources. When I was growing up everything was saved. It was during the war and so everything was in short supply and used as much as possible. String was saved to be used over and over again. Paper bags were used as wrapping paper especially at Christmas and for mailing packages. Newspaper was one of the most useful items to be reused. Some of you will remember the time when 'fish & chips” was always wrapped in yesterdays newspaper. Glass jars were very usable and I can remember collecting a halfpenny each for each one I found when I sold them back to the store. Old habits die hard I suppose so recycling is not such a strange idea to older folk.

Just think how quickly nature takes back an area that man has discarded and believe that in the end, green will prevail

Please try to recycle and reuse as much as you can.

What did you say?

Grandad's Loblob car

“Butinski?” said Mike.

“What?” I said. Mike was doing what he always does at breakfast besides eating his very healthy meal of bran flakes, banana and raisins. He was trying to solve the puzzle on his daily MENSA calendar. Usually he can do these puzzles quite easily on his own and I only get called into adding my wise(?) thoughts if he is stuck. Not of course if the puzzle has to do with numbers or math. I'm useless at those.

” Any other clues?” I said.

“Well MENSA says it's a common uncapitalized English word.”

Now I'm the reader of the family so usually I know many obscure words or at least can hazard a guess at what they might mean. “Sounds like a Polish thing to me ...maybe a general” I said. “Or on second thoughts, maybe a person that invented something scientific.”

I left him to ponder the answer and went out to do my daily walk. While I walked, I let my mind ramble about strange and different kinds of words. I glanced down at my walking shoes. I really need to get a new pair. The shoes I call walking shoes are I think often called sport shoes these days. I can remember a while back when the term for them was running shoes. I know some people called them trainers and some called them pumps. Maybe today the kids call them by the brand name, Nike or Adidas or whatever is in fashion now.

When I came over from England and taught in Montreal, I faced a first grade class that looked like the offspring of the United Nations. There were English and French Canadians, English, Scottish, Irish, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Romanian and West Indian children facing me. I am sure all those children's mothers called running shoes something different as well but in my class they were refered to as “plimsolls” because that is what I knew them as at that time.

Wysiwig

A while back when I was first learning about computers, I adopted two darling kittens and we were trying to think of neat names for them both. Have you noticed that a lot of new words come about because of computer use? Well our kittens became Pixel, because his coat had many blended colors and a Wysiwig because “what you see is what you get".

Friend is another word which is definitely being changed because of the internet. Now it's a verb, “May I friend you?" still sounds strange to me. Still on the whole I like the inventiveness of the new computer words.  Mike tells me some people have a dongle on their computer. Well I haven't found it yet. Widget I like as well. Not sure what it is but it sounds like it would be helpful. Can't be that long before some of these new words become part of the official English Dictionary

Pixel

Kids invent words all the time and they become part of the individual family's vocabulary. When TIB was a baby and he saw an commercial on TV that featured slow motion photography of the kind where two lovers are running together through a beautiful meadow that became “soft running”. Very descriptive. I think "anbulince" came from him and we still use it today.

Half the fun of hearing toddlers learning to talk is the way they make up great new words to make their point. RMB always refered to Grandad's car as a loblob car, short for Ford Popular Prefect car. 

I remember there was radio program on the BBC eons ago and one of the characters was a small child ,Horace, who talked in baby talk which only certain people could understand and the catch phrase from the show was “ What did Horace say?” Well that became standard in our family for all kinds of situations when we encountered someone we couldn't understand or who talked in gobbledegook.

One of the old & famous comediens Stanley Unwin became a great star by using made up words to perform in a language that is both clever and hilarious. Check out his videos at Youtube. They are hilarious.

Probably the best known nonsense words that strangely enough made sense are the well known words of the poem by Lewis Carrol. He was a master of strange and unique words and very  peculiar stories if you think Of “Alice in Wonderland”

                                         Jabberwocky

'TWAS brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Check out the link for further verses http://theotherpages.org/poems/carrol01.html.

By the way, we had to look up the word butinsky on the web and found out that it was American slang for One who is prone to butt in, interrupt, or get involved where (s)he is not welcome.

Hardly a common English word MENSA!

Feeling Blue

It's a blogging kind of day today. We have had a very Spring like episode in the weather here in Texas with blue skies and sunshine when outside activities have dominated our days. We finally managed to get outside to start tidying up the garden and enjoying the daffodils and the blossom trees l after a longer and colder winter than we are used to. Now today we are back to gray skies and cold winds so inside activity is the thing to do.

Yesterday we painted our hallway , which tends to be a bit dark and a bit gloomy at times. Hallways are a bit like that. So to brighten it up we chose a yellow paint and I'm still not sure I like it.

Yellow once was my favorite color. Choose a new blouse or dress and I'd opt for a bright yellow. I was young . It was fresh and I loved yellow.

As I got older. like a lot of other things, even my choice of colors has changed. I have to think that now blue in all its many variations is my my color of choice. I began to let my mind ramble on why that might be. For sure a bright blue sky can do wonders to lift a flagging spirit. Even if it is really cold as it often is in Canada, a bright blue sky makes it feel less so. We are blessed in Texas to have many bright blue sky days but in the dog days of summer when it gets hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk, the sky looses its blueness and becomes almost white and just add to the feeling of malaise and inactivity.

Crater lake painting by SAB

Have you noticed how the blue in the sky changes? You would if you tried to paint it.

A year ago we visited Crater lake in Oregon. A wonderful trip and a must see if you visit out West. When I came back I tried to paint an oil painting of Crater lake but it was the sky with all the variation of blue that I had the most trouble with getting right. The lake itself was the deepest color blue for a lake that I had ever seen , rich and strong without being that ominous dark blue you see in some lakes.

Wedgwood blue ,that lovely light blue, is such a wonderful tone. Paint a room with it and you don't get tired of it. It always looks fresh and gives a sense of calm and peace.

I've always thought how great it would be to have blue eyes. Not so many people seem to have blue eyes anymore and we all miss Paul Newman who had outstanding , penetrating blue eyes. I met a girl once, a friend of friend and she had such intense blue eyes that I couldn't help staring at her. They mesmerized me. I had never seen eyes so blue. It was not till afterward I was told they were only colored contact lenses. I should have guessed. They had been too blue to be real. What a disappointment.

Blue also brings to mind my blue cat. Blue was a stray cat that was hiding out in our barn

Blue Cat

and at first he looked a bit like a cat out of a horror movie. His coat was dirty and almost black ; he was scrawny and thin and very very scared. It took months for him to become the beautiful Russian blue cat he became. His blue was a very special blue, a silvery blue grey. He loved sitting on your lap and I can guarantee the best kind of Blue to have.

There are a lot of songs with blue in the title and as I think of them it brings back memories. “Blue Moon' brings to mind an intense young man I danced with years ago.”Blue Skies” always makes me feel happy but the “the Birth of the Blues' makes me think of the other feelings associated with blue. The dark side. Are you feeling blue? That's not a nice wedgewood blue feeling more like a dark navy blue tinged with charcoal with maybe a mournful trumpet playing in the background.

Definitely not my kind of blue.

Here's one more blue song much more to my liking by one of my favorite singers, Neil Diamond of his greatest and well known. “Song Sung Blue.”

Listen and enjoy , courtesy of youtube.com 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ighSddnnaPE&feature=related

Just looked outside and there in the clouds is “enough blue to make a Dutchman's pair of trousers “ so be assured grey skies are clearing and it will be a nice day after all.