Prayerful Attitude

We came upon this wonderful visitor this afternoon. We are well-pleased to have her in the garden

because she is a hunter. She is the barn cat of insects, dining on pests with whom we’d just as soon not share space. Often, this time of year, we find her egg cases attached to fence posts and barn walls. It’s OK. They will ripen and hatch in their own time. Meanwhile, these elegant hunters are usually only seen when they turn up on the side of the house or some other exposed, flat surface. In other settings they are practically invisible in their stick-like camouflage. This one disappeared a few minutes after I photographed her. I was sure she was still there, but I couldn’t make out where.

In looking up some details about mantids, I came on this interesting sidebar: While the common name of the broad category of mantids is “Praying Mantis,” for its posture, it is often spelled “Preying Mantis,” for its obvious carnivorous habits. Either makes perfect sense, but this kind of confusion of one word for another, similar sounding word with a distinct meaning that would be also appropriate, has a name: it’s known as an Eggcorn. Linguist Geoffrey Pullum coined the term in 2003, to give standing to a phenomenon with no other name. Pullum, presently at the University of Edinburgh, created the word from the example of a woman who referred to acorns as egg corns.

Pullum maintains the eggcorn phenomenon is unique and deserves its own name. Below are some Wikipedia links to similar, but different, language slips.

• It is not a folk etymology: it is an error made by one person instead of a community.
• It is not a malapropism: egg corn and acorn are homophonous in the dialect in question.
• It is not a mondegreen: it is an error of misinterpretation from common speech and does not acquire a new meaning.

In any case, the Praying Mantis may be doubly praying, as the name Mantis derives from the Greek for “fortune teller” or “prophet.”

The things I didn’t know this morning!

Juxtaposition

“Found Cat

Brown & Tan

here”

This makes me think too hard.

OFFF!

OFFF: It’s the Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival. We are still farm-focussed enough here in the Willamette Valley to celebrate several flock festivals through the year. OFFF always seems a fit match to the season, to me. Autumn is coming on. It’s a traditional time of year to come together after the harvest and show off your livestock, and exchange goods with others of like interests. Nothing engages a shepherd more than a good conversation about foot rot or occipital condylar displasia. And hardly anything is more fun than a festival of selling and buying and learning.

Here is me in my vendor’s booth on Saturday:

If it looks like I have red hair, you might take that up with my friend Betty over at Musings of a Vermont Shepherd).

I wish I could describe well the variety of people who pass by a booth in two days. There are Earth Mothers and Cowgirls with their Cowboys in tow, a Trucker Mama in a tee-shirt with, given the folksy nature of the event, a strangely chosen slogan (”Hamm’s Beer! Proud to be an American!”), teenagers in pink tube shirts, grandmas with blue hair, sports team mothers in team color caps, an earnest young couple in Goth spikes who wanted to learn to spin, several inexorably aging hippie womyn in floaty silk floor-length cloaks and more gracefully aging hippie myn with their beards spread upon their chests, their hair tied back, and their delicate silver earrings glinting in the September sun. There was a genuine Holly Hobby in heavy shoes and a flower-printed dress and a straw hat pulled down far. There was a man who must have stepped straight from his tintype print and found himself wandering a fairgrounds full of fiber sellers and buyers, still wearing his working clothes of vest, cap, and broadfall trousers. He seemed oddly at home. A family of Russian Old Believers came by, and stood next to a woman with tattoos and a leather halter top. Such an array of body types: the slender, the melon-shaped, the tall, the scrunched: turnips next to broomsticks. Colors: earth tones and natural fibers, space-dyed silks, dipped and dabbed, natural indigo and cellophane cerise, a colorbox poured out across the fairgrounds. Crayola never imagined such a variety. If you ever wondered at the difference between red violet and violet red, here is the place to see it! And such a display of woven and knitted and felted garments! Wonderful things! And a few truly odd things, too, but all of them in joyful abundance, all in one place. (Face it, many of us are well above 30 by now, though we once thought that might never happen. And we probably ought not to be wearing midriff-exposing tops, even if they are exquisitely knitted of hand-spun, hand-dyed, rare-breed wool.)

I wanted to photograph them all, but it would have been unacceptably rude.

I conclude with a little item seen at the show:

Sheep wool Boarder Lester:

(For our non-sheep-culturing readers, the breed in reference is Border Leicester. Perhaps Lester was staying on?)

Construction Report: Burning the Midnight Oil

This is real dedication to meeting the construction schedule:

Here is Richard at work on the piping layout for the radiant heating grid that will lie beneath the floor of the workshop. How nice it will be to stand on warm concrete through winter evenings! To be able to work in socks instead of mukluks! Do you know how cold my feet get? (Richard does.) But before such pleasant work times, must come the building times. At midnight last night we looked down upon our work and smiled. All the pipes were connected and glued, all the loops of the grid lay beneath the reinforcing wire that will support the concrete floor, all the pipe was tied to the grid with little zippies every 3 feet. We were unable to stand up and walk normally, but the grid was finished, and in time for the inspector to look at it in daylight. Magnificent, isn’t it?

Lest you wonder why we were doing this in the dark, let me elaborate. The mechanical inspection had been ordered in concert with the concrete-pouring schedule in the confidence that it wouldn’t take all that long to make up the loops of CPVC pipe and set them in place. And while that was true who could know that, first, the supply line would have to be dug out of its bed of gravel and sand and foundation work two feet deep and replaced because of, let us say, specification errors? Who could know it would take a statewide search to find correct reducing tees and couplings? And who knew they would arrive in the early evening of the day before the inspection? Who even imagined?

So here we were, happily sharing the night with the hoot owls and coyotes, and Yellowcat who carefully supervised the whole matter.

BREAKING NEWS

SALLY FIELD SAYS “GODDAMN WAR” ON AIR: DOZENS PERISH FROM SHOCK!

Was there ever a subject more worthy of profanity?

Old Ones

If you don’t think the Old Ones are still out there, look around you in the woods.

No, we did not alter this aging stump, or the picture of it. The old giant lived in our woods long ago. When the lumbermen came to fell it, they cut notches in the tree to support their springboards. Stumps with springboard slots cut into the sides are still common in the woods, though these days loggers start their cut much closer to the ground.

This photo of loggers using springboards comes from the website of the Canyon Life Museum, located in Mill City, Oregon. The museum is maintained by the North Santiam Historical Society: http://www.linncountyroots.com/canyon_life_museum.htm

But note that their springboards are level with the ground. How could you stand on them to work the tree if they were not?

I’m not prepared to say too much regarding this old soul in our woods… Maybe some logger cut slanty springboard notches. But how long, I wonder, does it take a tree to die when it’s cut? Is it possible for this to happen after it’s cut?

When I come on a monument such as this, I imagine memories older than mine.

Have you known that feeling of eyes upon you when you’re quiet in the woods?

Recall, then, the Old Ones who used to live here.

They might live here still.

Variable Winds

As we near the autumnal equinox, we always find the weather a little unsettled. Indeed, today the wind was up in a way we haven’t seen since March. As a child, without making a connection to the changing of the seasons, I always thought of March and September as kite weather. This morning we woke to blustery winds, helter-skelter winds, winds like witches in the trees. So we brought out the kites!As always, it’s hard to find a place without trees, barns or wires in the way of a good flight. Today we crossed the road to use the neighbor’s plot of young trees.

In truth, this was not the best of flying days. The Butte to the north seems to give the wind a whirly temperament that makes it hard to keep a kite aloft unless you can grab a sustained blow long enough to get above the disturbance. This was a gusty day, with lots of rises and drops. High as the treetops isn’t bad, though. Besides, with the miracle of photo cropping, you can’t actually tell how high we flew.

An Exultation of Dahlias

Though I’d happily claim it, this is not my garden.

I get to enjoy it every morning on my way to work, however, and I don’t have to even turn a trowel for the pleasure. Click the image to make it a little wider.

(We sometimes alternate guy-posts and chick-posts around here. This is a chick-post.)

From the Ground Up!

A mere memory now, here is the last of the old studio-workshop, on its way away:

And here is the beginning of the new:

The round black things are water tanks. We installed those several years ago. They are useful in the times when the power goes out (a regular event in winter), when they can provide water to the stock areas. They also make available 7500 gallons of firefighting water if it should be needed. The Fire Department put one of their 4″ red valves on the tanks, making the water hose ready.

This is Richard, washing down the foundation wall. It was not strictly necessary to wash it… We had the idea we would stain the exposed concrete with earth, and the oil used to release the concrete from the forms (peanut oil, according to the contractor) made the earth not stick. As it turns out, the whole idea went south since that wall will be mostly buried anyway and we may have a more imaginative treatment in mind for the exposed portions. More on that later.Spinners and fiber handlers: here is fiber content:

This is the concrete used in the foundation wall. You can see bits of fiber sticking out of the clumps. Okay, so I misled you. This is not spinning fiber. I’m told it’s recycled plastic, used to strengthen the wall. A good use for something otherwise thrown away.