chock-a-blog

bedizen \bih-DY-zuhn\, transitive verb: To dress or adorn in gaudy manner. I've never heeard this word before but I love it. It's a fancy bedazzle, as if bedazzle needs to be fancified. When I heard this word my first thought was Joe Biden. I tried to think of a quick limerick or collage, to do with Obama and Biden bedizened a la Elton John as Captain Fantastic or David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, but nothing came easily. In my current projects I bedizen simple wooden crosses with bright paint, decoupage bottle caps, and glass pebbles pasted over fanciful designs. I'm all over bedizen, even if Obama and Biden aren't.

popinjay \POP-in-jay\, noun: 1. A vain and talkative person. When I started teaching preschool I discovered a talent for reading aloud to children and a predilection toward performance, leading to a subsequent discovery of delight in reading aloud in church as Lector. I can only express my gratitude to God for these talents, for I believe they were given me by Him. At the same time, I'm graced with paranoid humility. Whenever I'm complimented on my reading, I smile and quietly say "thank you" lest I be perceived a popinjay. In conversation in general I keep my remarks brief and innocuous, unless I'm with people I know and trust. It seems incongruous to me that I'm unafraid to address an entire congregation but terrified to express an opinion.

neophyte \NEE-uh-fyt\, noun: 1. A new convert or proselyte. 2. A novice; a beginner in anything. I've been to plenty of craft fairs, but when it comes to being a craft fair vendor, I'm a neophyte. This weekend I'm sharing a space with my friend Susan, who makes jewelry, at the KXCI Festival en el Barrio Viejo. I'll be hawking bottle cap earrings and pendants, Capri Sun juice totes in several different styles and sizes, and bottle cap/glass pebble crosses. I'm excited and nervous. Wish me luck.

portentous \por-TEN-tus\, adjective: 1. Foreboding; foreshadowing, especially foreshadowing ill; ominous. 2. Marvelous; prodigious; wonderful; as, a beast of portentous size. 3. Pompous. Well, crap. How can one word mean three completely different things? If you're supposed to interpret it in context, what if you make the wrong interpretation? I could talk about what a portentous day I'd had, and you might think some small thing went awry, foreshadowing something terrible that might happen later in the week. I'd have to give more details for you to make the correct interpretation, but still I might fail. I did an astonishing number of things today, including (but not limited to) making thrifty serendipity cards for selling bottle cap earrings; completing three bottle-cap-and-glass-pebble embellished crosses and starting two more; piecing together two Capri Sun bags; wrapping up a special thank-you project; walking with Cassie early this morning; teaching Sunday School; scr...

sylvan \SIL-vuhn\, adjective: 1. Of or pertaining to woods or forest regions. 2. Living or located in a wood or forest. 3. Abounding in forests or trees; wooded. noun: 1. A fabled deity or spirit of the woods. 2. One that lives in or frequents the woods or forest; a rustic. Little of the desert experience is sylvan. In Arizona pretty much any grove of trees is a mesquite bosque, unless you're in a riparian area, then you've got your cottonwoods. But when we get good spring rains the desert is tranformed for a brief few weeks. Every shade of brown is cloaked with perceptible green. Shoots of green push up through the sand and pebbles underfoot, sometimes boasting tiny flowers of purple, yellow, or coral. Fairy duster brushes the air with its little red bristles. Last year's brittlebush growth crowns itself with fresh green. Soon the sacred datura will open its white flowers. A far cry from sylvan but for Tucson, spectacular.

impecunious \im-pih-KYOO-nee-uhs\, adjective: Not having money; habitually without money; poor. Come on, dictionary(dot)com! Enough with the money words!

lucre \LOO-kuhr\, noun : Monetary gain; profit; riches; money; -- often in a bad sense. Filthy lucre jumps readily to mind. I don't know that I've ever heard the word lucre without the qualifier filthy. So I googled it. It's the name the reformed (!) Sex Pistols used for their 1996 tour; it's got 4 definitions on Urban Dictionary; it's the title of a book (subtitled Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism ) available on Amazon; it's the name of a band featuring L.A. Guns vocalist Phil Lewis. And it's origins are from the Bible, Titus 1:11, American Standard Version: whose mouths must be stopped; men who overthrow whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre's sake. and 1 Timothy 3:3, King James Bible: Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous; Filthy lucre. I sure would love to have my financial woes easily remedied, but I won't teach what I ought not just for mo...

defenestrate \dee-FEN-uh-strayt\, transitive verb: To throw out of a window. I don't know why I thought this word was synonymous with defoliate, but I did. Now to find that this big word means "chuck it out the window," why, that just tickles my funny bone. I have a few stories involving defenestration, but I might need some help: something from my friend gnightgirl involving her mother, an apple core, a garbage can, and a pimp. And there was this one time when I was talking to my sister on the cell phone while I drove home (I know, I know) when the passenger in the car ahead of me defenestrated a whole pumpkin. That was something to see. Here's something else to see. Sweet.

exiguous \ig-ZIG-yoo-us\, adjective: 1. Extremely scanty; meager. There's the obvious, of course, in "this current economic climate." I'll be so happy when that phrase falls out of standard usage. The market is on the upswing, I've learned. How long that takes to trickle down to commercial real estate brokerage I can't say. After a meeting with our financial advisor about The Plan, I'm comforted to realize that our income, though exiguous, doesn't drive our Financial Picture. All those years we saved in various forms---Roth IRA, nonqualified accounts, Coverdell IRA---can be turned to our advantage now to pull us up by our bootstraps. The Plan has been modified, subject to future tweaking after we dig ourselves out of this hole. Beans and rice. It's what's for dinner.

cacophony \kuh-KAH-fuh-nee\, noun: 1. Harsh or discordant sound; dissonance. 2. The use of harsh or discordant sounds in literary composition. When I was emerging through college into young adulthood and marriage, I couldn't bear more than one noise going on at a time. If I was talking on the phone I couldn't have the radio on; if the radio was on I couldn't have the TV on; if the TV was on I couldn't be talking on the phone; and around it goes. I don't know what switch flipped for me, but I can filter all those sounds now and concentrate on just one. I can listen to an audiobook in the same room with Dave watching FlashForward on hulu and Jack playing Super Mario Bros. on the Wii. Cassie starts barking, adding to the cacophony, and I listen blissfully as Lyra and Will cross the river into the land of the dead in The Amber Spyglass. Multiple discordant noise doesn't bother me anymore.

fatidic \fuh-TID-ik\, adjective : Of, relating to, or characterized by prophecy; prophetic. Since the beginning of 2010 I've been immersed in this excellent performance of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy. I've been able to relate nearly every wotd post to the stories. They are not pablum. They are, in fact, dynamic and didactic tales that entertain as well as educate. My favorite character, the hirsute armored bear Iorek Byrnison, pledges fealty first to the bears, then to the child Lyra Belacqua, whom he's given the name Silvertongue, then to the aeronaut Lee Scoresby, to whom Iorek pays the highest tribute after Lee's death by systematically masticating his body. Just like Iorek, I have come to love Lyra, the story's fatidic protagonist. She's a fine and fierce character.

my submissions for the simultaneous photography project known as A Minute in the Life: II. My friend Lori encouraged the readers of her blog to participate. So I did. I was at St. Vinnie's trying on my dollar clothing finds. I scored a red Caslon sweater, a turquoise Coldwater Creek ribbon yarn sweater, a pair of American Eagle khakis, a slinky black Michael Kors dress, and a pair of Christopher Blue jeans that fit perfectly. Five bucks, baby. Five bucks.

garrulous \GAIR-uh-lus; GAIR-yuh-\, adjective: 1. Talking much, especially about commonplace or trivial things; talkative. 2. Wordy. Yeah. I'm married to that garrulous someone.

matutinal \muh-TOOT-n-uhl\, adjective: 1. Relating to or occurring in the morning; early. It's an interesting word; latinate and clinical; it's opposite is vespertine. I take my walk in the morning. I don't say "my matutinal constitutional," though I rather like the alliteration.

cozen \KUZ-un\, transitive verb : 1. To cheat; to defraud; to deceive, usually by petty tricks. 2. To obtain by deceit. intransitive verb: 1. To act deceitfully. Inexplicably, cozen is proving a difficult word for me to write about. Maybe it's because in my world there's no room for one to cozen another, or if I feel cozened I can usually find a way to rationalize it. At the end of the last school year, the one I'd spent co-leading with that Teacher from a Totally Different Philosophy, if I were an external locus of control person I may have felt cozened (though strong-armed would be more descriptive). At the end of that year, though, when I accepted a contract to return to my position as an assistant in the younger threes, the rector at my church (head of the preschool's governing board) and the preschool director both apologized, indicating they felt I'd been coerced into the position. I accepted those apologies, forgave myself for the rough time I made even rou...

potable \POH-tuh-buhl\, adjective : 1. Fit to drink; suitable for drinking; drinkable. noun: 1. A potable liquid; a beverage, especially an alcoholic beverage. These signs are all over in Tucson: in public parks, along landscaped medians, at golf courses. I suppose, if you'd been outside for a long enough time on a hot summer's day, you might consider drinking from the irrigation system, but if you live in Tucson you carry potable water with you pretty much everywhere you go. If you're a dog, though, you can't read, and you can't carry your own water, and if it's hot and your master has you on a long walk, you might just drink from the irrigation system, despite the written warning. Cassie did just that one warm summer morning, halfway through our walk around Udall Park. A woman walking toward us saw Cassie drinking from a puddle that had formed around a sprinkler head. "That's reclaimed water," she was sure to tell me. At first I didn't unde...

hirsute \HUR-soot; HIR-soot; hur-SOOT; hir-SOOT\, adjective 1. Covered with hair; set with bristles; shaggy; hairy. In my class I have a little girl so petite and cherubic that the other kids call her "baby." She's extremely capable, though, and fascinated with women and women's bodies. She's often asked me about my boobies and observed that my boobies aren't as big as her mommy's. Today I heard her talking about "when I'm grown up and have a baby in my tummy." It reminded me of when I was grown up and had a baby in my tummy. When Jack was born I was prepared for the fluids and the lopsided skull and the blotchy skin and hoping he wouldn't be vernixed, but I'd somehow convinced myself there'd be no lanugo. But when my baby was born he was incredibly hirsute, with downy hair covering his tiny rounded shoulders and back, and mutton chops as intense as Elvis Presley's. The lanugo was soon replaced by jaundice. I think I would h...

gravitas \GRAV-uh-tahs\, noun : High seriousness (as in a person's bearing or in the treatment of a subject). Gravitas In Three Movements In memory of Fred Fine I. In the immortal mind of this Worldchanger bottom line was humanity, heart. Breadlines for subsistence not enough without beauty riveted into the beams of our being offered to all in reach of his brilliant, encompassing, light where would-be Worldchangers were taught to slay the golem of cyclical crisis. II. Firebird soaring underground. Entrenched scholar on frontlines. Bronze-Star soldier, profound. Mobilizer of each one of us. Gardener of consciousness. Scientific shaman. Maven. Mentor to masses. Agitator. Code Breaker. Mensch. Papillon. Frail enough to fly. III. Freedom Fighter. Father. Ideamonger. Immense enough to leave an imprint on our communal stone. Today the theory of chaos is true. The flutter of a butterfly’s wing can equal the force of a hurricane. © 2005, Michael Warr

La Reina herself, the Crafty Chica of Glitter fame, included me and my shrine in her flicker photostream, seen here. And she commented on my last post. I'm positively giddy!

fulminate \FUL-muh-nayt\, intransitive verb: 1. To issue or utter verbal attacks or censures authoritatively or menacingly. 2. To explode; to detonate. transitive verb: 1. To utter or send out with denunciations or censures. 2. To cause to explode. Explosions often crack me up, as does the phrase, "Fire in the hole!" Occasionally Mandy and I will reminisce about the time our cousin Jay first fulminated a french fry with a snap bomb, then tantrummed when a red pepper didn't explode in the same satisfying fashion. And once, when we were expecting Mandy for dinner, I mistook the sound of an unpricked potato exploding in the oven for her rear-ending my parked car in the driveway. Honestly, I have better faith than that in her driving ability. And I didn't really believe a potato would explode in the oven if you don't pierce the skin with a fork, but it will.