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.
|
Ode to the Numbers
by Pablo Neruda |
|
|
|
|
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. :)