Today’s Forgotten English is “bag of nails,” meaning:
American thieves’ cant. Confusion; topsy-turveydom; from “bacchanals.”
Yet today was remarkably unremarkable. Not a bag of nails to be seen.
For want of a bag of nails, the kingdom was lost.
personal
Just an average Tuesday
Today was the quintessential Tuesday, if such a thing can be said to exist.
It turns out those stock photos I worried hadn’t been downloaded before they became unavailable…hadn’t been downloaded, and are no longer available. But I managed to track down one of them at another stock photo website, where we also have account, and a replacement for the other from the same artist. And, wonder of wonders, the author who needed to approve the replacement pretty quickly replied to my e-mail — almost immediately, in fact — so that headache appears to have been cleared up. I’m still a little annoyed that this was a headache, however temporarily, since it really should not have been, but what’s done is done, and a solution has been found.
Otherwise, just a normal day.
Back to work we me
I went back to work today. I was away from the office long enough that it felt a little weird being back, but not long enough that anything really weird had happened while I was out. And, overall, it was really just a normal day at work. There’s a little panic that a couple of the stock photos we thought we’d licensed for a book right before I left for the holidays were not, in fact, purchased, and the images are no longer available. And of course this happens when the authors are unavailable, incommunicado for at least a couple more weeks. And with photos that were particularly tough to select the first time around. I’m hoping it will just turn out to be a mistake, that we have the files licensed but they weren’t uploaded by the art department with the rest.
Beyond that, though, just a typical Monday.
Here endeth the vacation
I go back to work tomorrow. On the one hand, it seems much too soon; on the other, though, I suppose I have been away for two whole weeks. I’m not entirely sure what I did over those weeks — I know a couple of holidays were thrown in, but otherwise? It’s all kind of a blur. So maybe it’s just as well that I’m going back to the regular grind in the morning.
That’s what I’m going to keep telling myself, anyway.
Today, I helped my father take down the Christmas lights, and then I joined friends for our weekly writing group. (We didn’t meet last week, thanks to the holiday and the already very melted snow.) And that’s really about it. I read a little, didn’t quite finish the Sunday crossword — though I got the theme answers — and hung about the house on a cold and rainy day.
A whole new year
A brand new year means a brand new “Forgotten English” desk calendar, and the delightfully archaic word for today is “scurryfunge,” which reportedly means:
A hasty tidying of the house between the time you see a neighbor and the time she knocks on the door.
Overall, today was enough like yesterday, and many of the other days before it, frankly, to make me think this whole “new year” thing is perhaps just some kind of arbitrary social construction. Last night, I had dinner out with my parents, then spent some time watching the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode The Final Sacrifice. I don’t know that it actually is, as they claimed, “the worst thing to ever come out of Canada,” but it was a terrible, terrible movie. Yet they were in fine form riffing on it, and it’s easily one of the funniest episodes of the show I’ve seen. Canada takes a lot of good-natured ribbing throughout — “Bobo ate a bad can of Canadian bacon and he came down with hockey hair…” — but in the DVD extras, Zap Rowsdower himself, Bruce J. Mitchell, comes across as a really likable guy with no hard feelings towards Mike and the bots.
Today, I spent a little time writing and a little time reading — not as much as I’d have liked to of either, but enough to get hopefully get me back into the swing of things. I did precious little of either — of anything, now that I think about it — over this two-week vacation.
And then this evening, I watched the 1985 horror movie Fright Night, which I guess was okay. I think if I’d seen it in the ’80s or shortly thereafter, when I was younger (and effects were not perhaps significantly better), I might have liked it more. Roddy MacDowall’s quite good in it, though, and it has its moments.
And that was Saturday. Tomorrow’s the last day of my vacation before I head back to work. Yay?