Author Archives: gmcdavid

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About gmcdavid

Retired IT professional with a wide range of interests. Married. Three sons, two with autistic-spectrum disorders and the third being transgender with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. From Chicago but now living in the Twin Cities metro, Minnesota. Episcopalian. Carleton College (BA 1972, physics) and Stanford University (MS 1974, Applied Physics; MS 1976 Statistics).

Wood from the front yard

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A crew from the city came by a few weeks ago and trimmed our front yard tree–the branches were hanging way out over the street. We saved the branches to see if I could make anything out of them with green woodworking techniques using only hand (non-electric) tools. After a couple hours of hard work with saws, splitting wedges and a maul, and other tools, the answer is yes: Firewood (if we let it dry for a couple years). The branches were just too knotty and bent to get any useful length of straight-grained wood. Perhaps I will be able to carve a few spoons. This was about what I expected from the literature; you really need wood from the tree’s trunk, and from the trunk of the right tree. My selection here in a first ring suburb is limited.

I kept trying for quite a while, and it was with some difficulty I tore myself away from the effort. However, that was the right thing to do. I was tired, and might have made a mistake. So I quit while I still had ten fingers, and all of my blood was still inside my body. Well, I certainly got my exercise today.

Tom Update

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We saw Tom yesterday. We decided to treat this like our regular visits since he moved out of our house back in 2006. So we picked him up from where he is now staying, the crisis center in West St, Paul, and took him to lunch at the Highland Grill. This worked out very well, although Tom was very hungry. We saw once again that Tom likes quite spicy food, and despite his food allergies, has a much wide range of taste than his brother. Afterwards we took a walk around the neighborhood, a very pleasant part of St. Paul. It had a delightful sense of normalcy. Tom was in good spirits and seems to be doing very well at the Crisis Center.

Monday night Irish Class, February 25, 2008

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February 25, 2008

Irish Class, February 25, 2008.

<!–Checked
against Nick’s
Official Version. –>

We started with some number drills–
counting objects.
This was a review of material from <!– 9/24 –>
9/24 and
<!– 10/1–>
10/1.

When you use plural forms for counting you start at three, not two. In
Irish two takes the singular.

Some notes
aon bhád amháin one boat [or]
bád amháin one boat
uan lamb m1
naoi n-uan nine lambs n- eclipses a vowel
capall horse m1
  • m1 nouns use the same form for the genitive singular and the nominative
    plural (slenderize the final consonant).
  • In Munster initial bh- is pronounced /v/ even as a broad consonant,
    instead of /w-/.

<!–

–>

Next was a review of
body parts
from <!–
11/12/2007–>11/12/2007.

There was some discussion of on-line resources.
Beo was particularly recommended.

With four students in the class, we split into two pairs. Each pair was given a theme for a dialog to compose. We then read them and the other pair had to figure out who we were and what we were talking about. My partner was JS, who had her notes from last September’s all class exercise on curses to add some spice to our contribution, a scene in a restaurant between a waiter and a customer.

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Archaeology and the Druids

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Possible Druid Grave Enchants Archaeologists. Via Archaeology in Europe

Unlike a lot of sensational reports, this one is properly cautious about the dangers of interpreting a society from physical evidence alone:

There’s a joke among archaeologists: Two of their kind, in the future, find a present-day public toilet. “We’ve discovered a holy site!” cries one. “Look, it has two separate entrances,” says the other. “This here,” he says, pointing to the door with a pictogram of a woman, “was for priests. This is evident by the figure wearing a long garment.”

This reminded me of Digging the Weans (excerpt here), and Motel of the Mysteries.