blogging | Saying nothing in particular

I didn’t get much done this year and so I’m not sorry to see it end. According to my first blog (“The Celestial Smooth”) I began the year watching “The Full Monty,” a dark comedy about a group of unemployed steel workers who become strippers. The movie ends with the men exposing themselves to an audience filled with cheering women as a line of policemen prepare to arrest them.

For just one moment they are triumphant. But you know … there could never be a believable sequel. These are ordinary men, not Chippendale models.

In all, I managed to post 65 times this year. I’d say half of the posts are rather short on words and long on photos. My most “liked” post was about the raccoon who had her babies in a drain under the deck. That’s the second time raccoons and their shenanigans have taken over my blog.

February and March were lost months blog-wise. Family came to visit and their stay was stressful. My most viewed post during those months was about obituaries. I see a lot of dead people these days.

In April I shattered a filling on a Jordan Almond requiring an emergency visit to the dentist. His first question was: “How are you other than falling apart?”

In August I decided to post snippets from the sequel to Flipka, my first novel. Eleven posts which only a few of you were kind enough to comment on. I was sad but perhaps, like “The Full Monty,” that book could have no believable sequel.

September rolled along and with it the long lost contractor we’d hired back in March to fix the retaining wall and drainage in the front of our house. A job projected to take a week took over a month and, despite repeated assurances, his men managed to find and break both the water and gas lines. Imagine that? They could handle the water line but the gas line breakage required visits from the fire department, sirens blaring, and the gas company. A new gas line, a new gas meter. Road blocked for gigantic gas truck. Neighbors upset. And what did the sheepish contractor say: yadiyadi, yadiyadi, whine, whine, I have to pay a fine, whine whine.

In October I took a break and flew to Hawaii. Oahu seems to be getting more and more crowded which is sad but there’s something eternal about the South Pacific, isn’t there?

Let’s not talk about November and here we are in December, trying to be merry and bright. Me, mostly failing. So, I’ve decided on New Year’s Day I’m going to watch a movie with a believable sequel. Any suggestions? The only one I can think of is “The Return of the King” (part three of “The Lord of the Rings”). Good prevails and the evil ring of power is thrown into the fires of Mordor.

Ah, if we could be so lucky!

Happy Holidays Everyone!

Many of my blogging buddies have hung up “Gone Fishing” signs and closed comments until September which means they had the good sense to shut down for the month and either work on a novel that’s been suffering from terminal bloggerhea, or maybe, just maybe, they’re actually on vacation.

I wish I’d done the same but alas my head got stuck on another planet. I decided since I’d spent three whole years studying German, which shares its roots with Swedish, it would be no sweat to translate The Letters from Sweden, sender unknown that I talked about in a post a few weeks back. All I needed was a Swedish/English dictionary! Easy Peasy, hey?

Inte satsa på det ! (Don’t bet on it)

At the library I was disappointed to learn there aren’t many people in my small town with the urge to learn Swedish. There was only one Swedish/English dictionary. One! However there were books on Amharic, Gujarati, and Slovene – languages I’ve never heard of, have you?

Undaunted I checked out the one book and hurried home, confident that the secrets of the letters were about to be revealed.

Ha!

Lovely lettering but what does it say?

The problem, as you can probably tell, is deciphering the handwriting. The letters were probably written by three different people – all of whom undoubtedly received straight A’s in penmanship two hundred years ago – but I couldn’t tell their a’s from their e’s which meant I had to guess. And I’m not very good at guessing.

After several word by word attempts I realized you can’t translate word by word because the meaning of so many words changes depending on how they’re being used. So I decided to attempt an entire passage and see if Google could make any sense out of it. This method is rather like speaking in tongues but I was getting desperate.

The letter below had the clearest handwriting and so I selected the second sentence, the one that begins “Du skribner,” for my little experiment. I chose this one because I knew the word “skrib” meant “write” so at least I had some idea what the sentence was about.

Here’s the result of my effort:


Du skribner att ni amnar att visa fron den platoon fom vi ar men vi tysken att mikar gerna blifrader mi an ack inte olag ga negra . . .

Here’s what Google came up with:

You write that you intend to display from 
Pluto we are but we German to pickups 
willingly and not illegally.

“What does it say?” My mother (who’d been waiting anxiously for proof of her oldest child’s brilliance) asked.

“Well, I think your grandfather asked his in-laws to do something illegal so that he could display evidence that the family was from Pluto. Apparently it is illegal in Sweden to reveal that you’re a Plutonian.”

“Don’t you go writing anything nasty about the family!”

“Who me? Nah!”

My next brilliant idea was to “read” through the other letters looking for proper nouns that might reveal at least where they were from. A couple of the letters contained the word “Herran,” so I googled “Herran Sweden.”

“Do you mean Herrang?” was the response.

WTF I thought. Maybe I meant Herrang.

According to Wikipedia Herrang is a town with a history of industry and mining located on the northern coast of the county of Stockholm. Although the population is only in the 400s, it does have one claim to fame. It’s the site of the largest Lindy Hop dance camp in the world. The Herrang Dance Camp.

I must confess I had no idea what Lindy Hop was so I hopped back to Wiki and asked. Here goes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQrQhdJH4tM

Pretty wild, hey? Apparently this dance is a cousin of the breakaway, the Charleston and the Texas Tommy and got its start in Harlem, New York in the late 1920s or early 1930s. It was apparently named after Lucky Lindy (Charles Lindberg). I must admit it looks like fun.