Oh. . . ONE more vaguely interesting thing to write about before sleeping. . .

This morning, as I was driving Lis to work, we were talking about the word "fish." I mentioned that I was surprised that there wasn't anything in English like "fisk" from the same root, except maybe a surname. (In Old English "sc" is pronounced as "sh" is in Modern English, so there are lots of words in English which came down as both "sh" and "sk" variations -- "shirt" and "skirt", "dish" and "disk", a "skipper" is one who runs a "ship", stuff like that. Since "fisc" is "fish" in OE, I was surprised that there isn't a "fisk" word of which I was aware).

Lis mentioned that, because of the f<-->p shift, "fisc" and "pisc" were the same word, which is neat. I don't know WHY f and p change into each other -- or b and v change into each other -- but they do. You can see it really obviously in Hebrew, but it's common among other Indo-European langages, too.

This evening, Lis looked up some of those words in the OED, and we found that "fiscal" comes from a word for a rush basket. I don't know that it has anything to do with fish.

Blogging as a medium for Lovecraftian horror stories

It starts here. And continues on LJ and Blogger

I don't want to say too much, before y'all read it, so I'll just ( put an LJ cut here. )

Well, the garage just called

It's the transmission of our car that went. They need to hand it off to their transmission specialist to figure out exactly WHAT it is that broke. Worst case, of course, is that we'll need an entirely new transmission -- three grand. It could be somewhat less than that, if it's less b0rked.

Lis and I are now wondering whether we should be thinking about replacing rather than reparing the car.

Any opinions, advice, etc? What do y'all know about transmissions?

Dinner tonight

We had some pizza dough left over from the last time I made pizza (I tend to buy pizza dough at the grocery store rather than making my own), and I'd bought some cheese for pizzas, so I rolled out the dough, put it in the stone pizza dish, sauteed an onion, opened a can of artichoke hearts, and made a white pizza.

I like easy, yummy food.

I am Experimenting. . . .

So, some friends are throwing a hot foods party in a couple days. It's the same day as the party that my student invited me to, where she instructed me to bring my Chocolate Pie.

Now, I love making chocolate pie, so I've been experimenting to see if I can make a hot version, as well. I just made some chocolate mousse with cinnamon, ginger, and cayenne, and it's pretty good.

The thing which I'm going to have to be REAL CAREFUL about is to not get the two pies mixed up. I mean, if I brought a non-hot chocolate pie to the hot foods party, that wouldn't be a big deal -- people would still eat it. But if I gave a cayenne chocolate pie to an eight-year old, I think she'd be justifiably upset at me.