:TESTO:I'm in Cincinnati, enjoying a quiet morning to the sounds of Chanticleer and the smells of a magnificent slow-cooking chili, from the crock of my father. I'll be singing carols with my mom this evening, and having dinner with both of them (!) on Christmas day.

Take a gander at the festive fruit of my school's media production students (here *), should you choose to see Mr. Adamson making a grand fool of himself, in good company.

I'm not sure I've mentioned my sister's tattoo-design project yet -- I've been invited to design a tattoo (of a Dragon and a Phoenix) for my sister's belly. The ideas-so-far are up at http://cs.oberlin.edu/~dadamson/art/Tattoo/

I'm quite glad to notice that I'm not depressed -- I'm heading back to Baltimore on Thursday, looking forward to designing a midterm exam and returning to school. Ha! Take that, last-year's-David!

Bridges ice before roadways. Remember this always, especially on bicycles.



*using a nice service called "yousendit", at www.yousendit.com. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I've been as giddy as a schoolboy in anticipation of today's snow day. I didn't mean to leave progress report bubble-sheets and all my schoolwork at school, and I think that makes the day off that much sweeter -- enforced time off.

The kids' hope and drive for a snow day is contagious, and a great kick in the flashback gland. Fond memories of waking up to unexpected whiteness, hovering over the kitchen TV, and snuggling back to sleep.

But no sleep for this boy's second childhood -- I was up at 1:30, and the snow hadn't begun, and again at 3, and happily I saw the stuff stick to the roads. Now it's 5:55, minutes before I would normally wake up, and I haven't been able to sleep for the last hour, bubbling with the joy of the 5:00 email-announcement of a snow day!

I feel I really ought to stick in some weather-related poetry, but no such thing is offered to my sleep-jostled mind.

So here's something else: hrim is an Anglo-Saxon word for frost, which we keep as "rime" - a very particular kind of ice, to be differentiated from hoar-frost.

I've always liked it because of its connotations of "rimmed": a hrim-cealde sae is literally a frosty-cold sea, but it evokes images of an ice-rimmed lake, frozen on the edges, with floaty bits of ice. "hrim" (frost) and "rima" (edge, lip, caul) have no apparent etymological connection, however much I'd like them to. While they'd sound somewhat different from each other in Old English, I can't help but think that the hrim-writer banked on the same connotation in writing that line of the Wanderer.

In honor of lonely journeys along the icy water's rim (today withheld by our lord and ring-giver, Superintendent Bonnie Copland), here's the full text of the poem in question.

The Wanderer
other favorite words:
anhaga - literally one-goer, usually read as "exile"
eardstapa - earth-stepper, "wanderer"
gebind - bound, meaning "frozen" in context.
snottor - wise, of (apparently) unrelated etymology to ge-snot, which gives us our modern mucus-word. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Mounds of road salt, brushed aside by wind and cars after our first 1.5-inch snow, confuse and amuse me.
Easily 6 inches high, these sodium dunes suggest either a nasty tendency towards ice around the harbor, or a paranoid snowver-reaction in line with what I've witnessed in the rest of Baltimore City.

I'm looking forward to battling the weather to get to work. Oft him anhaga, and all that. More inclined to walk than bike when the footing is treasonous, but it'll be a cold day at the harbor before I decide to beg a ride this year.

Yarr.
, :ENDTESTO: