Chartroose tagged me for a meme and against all odds, past practice and fate, I'm actually going to do this within a 24 hour time frame. Shocking, ain't it?
Well, it would have been.
The Rules: The rules are simple: choose 10 favorite things beginning with a single letter of the alphabet and explain why you like them. The only catch is that the letter is assigned to you by the person who wrote the post you’ve just read.
Uh oh. Let's see how quick I am to assign the letters.
My letter is T (because I am Terrific. Chartroose said so.)
T: Ten things? Geez. Hey! 1. Ten. 10. 
That's one of ten. What's not to like about ten? Ten fingers to knit with, to turn pages, ten toes to count when ten fingers arent enough. Ten helps to scale unweighable options, as in on a scale of one to ten, a way to combat the homicide rate by counting to ten first, ranks everything from authors to hot guys to zoos in the Top Ten. Image taken from Lil Fingers Storybook Coloring site.
Poem found at The International Virtual Institute for Historical studies of Mathematics.
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Ode to the Numbers
by Pablo Neruda
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Such thirst
to know how much!
Such hunger
to know
how many stars in the sky!
We pass
our infancies
counting stones, plants,
fingers, sand grains, teeth,
pass our youths counting
petals, hairs.
We count
the color and the years,
the lives and kisses,
bulls
in the fields, waves
in the sea. The ships
made ciphers which multiplied.
The numbers spawned.
The cities
were thousands, millions,
and the wheat came in hundreds
of units
each holding other integers
tinier than a single grain.
Time became a number.
Light became numbered
and however much it raced with sound
it had a velocity of 37.
Numbers surround us,
At night we would
lock the door, exhausted,
approaching 800;
below
having come to bed with us
in that sleep
the 4,000 and the 77
goaded our foreheads
with their wrenches and hammers.
The 5
would compound itself
until it entered the sea or the delirium
where the sun might greet it with steel
and we co racing
to the office,
the mill,
the factory,
to start fresh with the infinite
number 1 of each day.
Friend, we had the time
so our thirst could be satisfied,
the ancestral longing
to enumerate things
and total them,
reducing them
until rendering them dust,
dunes of numbers.
We are papering
the world
with figures and ciphers,
but
the things existed
nonetheless, fleeing
all tallies,
becoming dehydrated
by such quantities, leaving
their fragrance and memories,
and the empty numbers remained.
For that reason,
for you
I love the things.
The numbers
which go to jail,
move
in closed columns
procreating
until they give us the sum
for the whole of infinity.
For your sake I want
some
numbers of the way
to defend you
and you to defend them.
May your weekly wages increase
and grow chest-deep!
And out of the number 2 that binds
your body and your beloved wife's
emerge the matches eyes of your sons
to tally yet again
the ancient stars
and innumerable
spikes of wheat
which shall fulfill the transfigured earth.
(Trans. William Pitt Root) from NUMBERS AND FACES, Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal, Issue # 24, June 2001, pp. 23 - 25. |
2. Taxes. I don't love paying taxes and I wish there was a dollar for dollar acounting for where exactly the tax dollars go but tax returns? Are fun. The deductions, the credits, there's a story behind how each one landed on your tax return and the little social tweaking that goes on.
3. Traffic: Techically I loathe and despise traffic. I've been known to go miles out of my way just to drive at a snail's pace so I don't SIT on the freeway. (Now if I was at a stop light, I'd probably pull out my knitting or a book. But on the freeway? I just fume.) But the last few months, there has been an eerie and somewhat terrifying dearth of traffic. Please tell me all those folks time shifted their work hours, moved out of state or are working from home, as opposed to, say, mass unemployment. Pretty please?
Side note: Last night when driving out to Berkeley to meet up with Birdsong - who is as fabulous as you'd think, if not more so - check out the Triina she's knitting, that yarn is so soft. Also nupps are pronounced noops evidently just because Nancy Bush says so - there was plenty of traffic, particularly when I was on the frontage road by the Berkeley Marina with oncoming traffic on both sides of me. Yowza.
4. Tuna: Technically Sheba was the one that loved tuna but I must include it. She loved Bumblebee water packed tuna the best. Actually she loved the juice the best, the rest of it I could toss. 
Hezekiah has not really hopped on the Tuna Love train (although she'll eat it, if it's fresh.) What she really likes are my spinach souffles but those are S's, not T's.
5. Trees. I LOVE trees. Look at my late lamented poor ghost pine trees. They were viciously attacked by pine beetles (who are currently working on the rest of the pine trees in the neighborhood -sob). To this day, the bluejay will occasionally hop around disconsolantly where his pine tree was and complain bitterly about its loss. We are in complete agreement.
There seems to be this dreadful conspiracy against trees lately. They're being lopped out of yards, shopping malls (the to better "see" the shops - any shop that felled trees, I don't frequent anymore).
And, at times, I can't see the forest for the trees.
6. Tomatos. There is no more glorious food than a tomato freshly plucked from your garden.
7. Tomorrow. My favorite time to do something. Which is one reason why this post is so darn long.
8. Time. No time left for me! On my way to better things........What's not to love about time? I just wish they'd perfect Time Travel.
9. The Tudors. No list of T's would be complete without the Tudors. Now that's what I call a fun family. Glenda Jackson's Elizabeth R PBS miniseries began a fascination with British royalty. Wow, Glenda Jackson is an MP now? And that series was shown in 1971? Huh.
10. Think. Think, think, think. What else starts with a "T"?
Miss T, of the Mystery House of Yarn & Horrors, who graciously awarded me with the Kreativ Blogger Award.
I'd be happy to give out a letter to anyone who's interested! But I warn you, this is harder than it looks. Just me? That figures. :)
