Dad's Dictionary...

As you may have noticed I haven't been blogging for a looooong time, but I will try from now on to post a little more often. I like blogging. It's just finding the time. All my children but one have almost or completely 'flown the nest' and I now find myself in a totally different situation. Whereas before everybody had their jobs to do around the house and garden, now guess who has to do it.

So, in keeping with tradition of a word for Wednesday, I am now going to introduce you all to another of me Dad's favourites:

ARGY-BARGY

This expression remains all too clear for me even now, probably because I was almost always the one on the receiving end! Dad would give me something to do and would invariably add "now, I don't want no argy-bargy, you hear me?" If that particular something involved my brother or sister then my guess is that he felt he had even more reason for adding it!

Argy-bargy was a late nineteenth-century modification of a Scots phrase, which appeared early in the same century in the form argle-bargle.  The second part of the two forms, in fact, is no more than a nonsense rhyming repetition of which the English language is full. The technical word for such doublets is reduplication. Think easy-peasy, hoity-toity, super-duper, etc.

So what does argy-bargy mean. In most webs I've looked at it means 'a lively discussion, argument, dispute, perhaps one which becomes bad tempered enough to produce a spat or minor quarrel'

Shall we call it a day?

Liked this poster...

Friday fun fact #10: Chestnuts and conkers

Just two names for the same thing? No, there's a difference. There is one huge difference. Simply speaking, one is edible and the other is not. Take a look at the photographs, both from Google images:

Chestnuts

Conkers

Indeed, they have only two things in common as far as I know - their colour and the fact that they are around at the same time of the year, namely late September through to the end of November, depending on the weather and where you live.

Now the reason for the confusion could be put down to the fact that conkers are also called horse chestnuts. This name probably derived from the fact that, although the fruit is poisonous to humans, due to saponins, it can be given to deer, cattle and horses. Apparently, it gives a horse a lovely shiny coat.

When I was a little girl in short, white socks we used to wait with impatience for conker time to come around. On my way home from school there were a good few conker trees and I managed every year to fill my school bag, day after day, with these lovely, shiny treasures.

What would I want them for, you may be asking. Well, it pleased me simply to admire their beautiful colour and handle them. I used to take a tissue or a clean hanky and 'puff and shine'. Most of all I liked to find the unopened ones and be the first to discover their simple beauty.

But above all, I picked them to have conker contests with the boys in the playground and sometimes even with my brother. I wasn't much of a 'girlie' girl to be honest and this was something I was good at.

To prepare a conker for the fight one had to string it - make a hole through the middle, thread a string and tie a strong knot. You then wound a good part of the other end round your fingers and you were ready for the battle. The opponent had to simply let his conker dangle at the end of the string and inwardly squirm at every hit!

The contest consisted of taking turns in bashing your opponents conker to smithereens. If you missed the opponents conker then it was his turn to bash yours and so on till one or t'other would completely break apart and fall from the string.

If your conker won two battles it was classed as a two-er, if five battles, then you had a five-er, etc.

How did you know if the conker was a good one. Well, before the hole was made one could tell by the weight. The heavier they were the more solid they would be inside. If in doubt, you put it in a bowl of water. If it floated it was no good. Next, if when you made the hole, the skewer went through too easily, then that one was also discarded. Obviously, the best conkers were the heavy, solid ones.

So far this article consisted of refreshing my girlhood memories. But now if you care to look here you will find more information about conkers. If you look here you will find out more about sweet chestnuts, sometimes called Spanish or Portuguese chestnuts (I didn't know that!). Although their names are similar, the two varieties of tree are only very distantly related.

Have a good Friday and a pleasant weekend.

Many a true word is spoken in jest!

My daughter sent me this earlier today. We laughed so much I thought I would share it!

Play dough

This week we made some play dough using the instructions from this video.

It's the best recipe I've ever done. The dough came out perfect but I will add that we had to juggle a little at the end with the water and the flour quantities.

If you have little ones who just want to manipulate, squidge, or at the most make a ball or a sausage, then you need to add a little more water to your dough. If you want a stiffer dough for modelling, I still found I needed to add a little more water but not quite so much.

I also found that, although the recipe is initially for four different colours, you can actually get five. The recipe calls for four cups of flour, but then you add one and a half cups of salt, mix and distribute between the four bowls. This leaves you with at least one more cup of mixture. We made purple.

Bean bags

I haven't done anything crafty in ages but this morning I found a few minutes to quickly whip up eight little bean bags. Sewn in a jiffy, they were.

Jiffy = a bit more than an hour!

If you want the pattern and very clear, simple instructions then just pop over to this web.

Just a note: when you reach the part where it explains that you "turn the fabric to the right way out, then sew the top edge in by about 1/2 inch", do this sewing over before you turn the bag the right way out. You will find it loads easier.

Oh, and by the way, I didn't use beans. I used little plastic pellets which I bought for a fair price via internet. This way the little bags can be washed.

Worth thinking about...

Selective Attention video

Please enlarge for better results.

Have a good weekend everybody.

Another poem

Time for T.

It's 10 o'clock

So time to stop

For a deliciously cheerful

Cup of T.

Boil the water

Choose the mug

(It has to be Pooh

If the T. is for me!)

Temptation fruits

Or acai berries.

Make T. for two,

Even better for three!

S.J.

Just over a year ago...

...I was travelling back from Barcelona, on the train. My daughter had her eyes closed and was trying to rest a little, I was looking around at my fellow passengers. I was struck once again by... Well, I suppose I must call it 'reality'. What kind of society were we living in? Some words came to mind, not because I was witness to anyone showing signs of their existence, precisely.

FEMININITY

RESPONSIBILITY

DIGNITY

POLITENESS

RESPECTFULNESS

GRACEFULNESS

SUBMISSION
DISCRETION

HUMBLENESS

KINDNESS

GENTLENESS

CAREFULNESS

ELEGANCE

HONESTY

SELFLESSNESS

 RELIABILITY
ELOQUENCE

TRUSTWORTHINESS

GENTLENESS

INDUSTRIOUS

...

As a friend said just a few days ago - we are losing the human touch. Worse - we are expected to swallow it as a sign of the times.

How to learn effectively

Here is another very interesting video of a lecture about learning techniques:

 

Languages - an interesting lecture

Another couple of wriggley photos!

I'm afraid that this is all I have time for these days. What with extra English lessons and the exams which inevitably follow, the garden, the summer clothes to dig out for everyone, normal housework and deep cleaning, weddings to attend, people to fetch from the airport, barbecues, suitcases to make up, shopping, visits to the city, little girls to look after, friends to visit, bla bla bla...

I took this photo because I liked the way the silkworms were over the stem. They are so big, I can't believe they were just a couple of millimetres long just six weeks ago! Here's Humperdink with a two euro coin for scale:

I suppose that within the next few days they will start making cocoons.

Hope you all have a great weekend.

Wrigglies!

Just thought you would like to see once more, how much my baby Wrigglies have grown! There are twenty-two in the end. One was 'mislaid' whilst changing the leaves a couple of weeks ago!

Yet another wriggley update!

I'm terribly sorry but this will never cease to fascinate me. Look how they have grown in just a few days. Humperdink is already a centimetre long!

Here is a photo of a hatching wriggley (right in the middle of the 'web'):

I now have a total of eighteen.

Wriggley update

There are now 12 wrigglies with an average of two hatching just about every night. Here you can see clearly who Humperdink and Kori are.

Yoohoo!

I am so happy. Today I checked on the silkworm eggs from last year and guess what I found, desperately looking for something to eat. Yes. A silkworm.

Meet Humperdink, the first silkworm to hatch.

Humperdink is that little black, wiggley looking line at the tip of the leaf.

I will be updating periodically, so keep your eyes peeled...

Pi!

Hi, blog followers from all over the world! This day is unique, like all others, I suppose. But today is the day that the first numbers of Pi coincide -  if, of course, you write the date the American way...

E.g.     3 - 14 - 15

Then at 09:26 and 53 seconds this morning it was:

3 - 14 - 15 - 926 - 53

Here you have the first ten digits if the number PI.

This doesn't happen very often. In fact, just once a century. To celebrate, I am going to try and make a lemon meringue PI. My daughter informed me that she was already busy with a PI pizza for their lunch!

I hope you all have the freakiest day possible.

Said pie:

A poem I found...

...whilst sorting out our homeschooling material. This was first to be copied, then to be learnt. I remember it well. It was part of a project about snails that one of my boys did one spring.

THE SNAIL

Where he goes he leaves a trail

When he goes where he shouldn't be

His trail is there for all to see.

Our life is like the little snail,

Where we go we leave a trail.

The things we do and the things we say,

Are the trail we leave from day to day.

Oh, for some rain...

                              

...then I could do the same as this little guy.