Friday’s page from my Forgotten English calendar was “our muttons” meaning…well:
The farming community has given us another useful expression in our muttons. When we speak of something being our muttons, we mean that we like it especially well.
This according to Sydney Baker’s 1941 New Zealand Slang: A Dictionary of Colloquialisms, and if you can’t trust that, what can you trust?
I had a pretty our muttons-y sort of weekend, all things considered; a pretty late night of it yesterday meant I didn’t get a chance to post about it until now, but overall I liked the weekend quite a lot.
I got a haircut, went to the library, and saw my second Broadway show of the week. Not too shabby, eh?
Back on Mother’s Day, we bought my mom tickets to see Mary Chapin Carpenter, since she’s long been a fan but never seen the singer in concert. The show was this weekend in Manhattan, and so to coincide with that (and last week’s Father’s Day), my sister and her husband drove to New York from Maryland. They brought their dog Chloe with them, which was an interesting experience, I think mostly for Chloe and for our much older — and much less interested in rambunctiousness — dog Tucker. We left the dogs at home (Chloe in her crate, Tucker in his pen) and drove into the city for a very nice dinner out. Then we split up, my father and mother off to see Carpenter at the New York School of Ethical Culture, and the other three of us to see American Idiot on Broadway.
I was a little worried about not liking the show. I like some Green Day songs well enough, and even have a few from the album on which the Broadway show is based in my iTunes catalog, but I’m not exactly what you’d call a huge fan. But the show was quite entertaining. It’s very loud and very bright, and if you blink you could miss the story, but the cast is undeniably talented and there’s a kind of pulse-pounding poetry to the whole thing. It’s a little like being inside a music video, with all the good and the bad that that suggests. It’s a breakneck ninety minutes, and it’s not without its faults, but it was hard not to be impressed by the end.
Since our show was over around 9:30, the three of us caught a train home instead of meeting back uptown with my parents. It’s maybe good that we didn’t stay in Manhattan, like we originally thought we might, since when we got home we discovered that Chloe had soiled her crate, her bedding, and herself while we were gone. Wet food and too much water earlier in the day had apparently not agreed with her. Catherine and Brian spent the next hour or so giving Chloe a bath on the front lawn — thank goodness it’s summer — and cleaning up the mess, while I tried to offer whatever help I could and look after Tucker. It was well after midnight before everyone was settled down — Chloe bathed, Tucker calmed, and my parents home.
Today was relatively calm and uneventful by comparison. I watched this week’s season finale of Doctor Who and thoroughly enjoyed it. As Betty says:
I’m not sure how much sense the finale actually made, but, oh, what wonderful, wonderful nonsense it was.
And I went for a short walk, despite the pretty oppressive heat. I worked on some fake horoscopes for Kaleidotrope‘s next issue — it’s a continuing feature, and the issue comes out next month — and on the Sunday crossword puzzle, which I have yet to finish.
Now I think I’m just going to watch a little TV and retire for the evening. Hopefully there will be more our muttons in the week to come.
