Loose Leaf Notes

1. Some of the strangest vintage valentine cards that you’re likely to see are HERE.

2. Valentine cards for repressed British people HERE and awkward Valentine Day cards for your confusing modern relationships are  HERE.

3. Have you ever, like me, questioned the accuracy of the past tense of dream, wrote or typed it and thought it must be wrong?  Dreamt.   I recently came across this at dictionary.com: A poet would appreciate how the past tense of dream possesses such a special quality — the only word in regular English usage to end with -mt. We hear from people constantly who swear there must be another term ending in -mt. No one has ever actually offered a second example, however. Perhaps it exists in a dream.

4. Also from dictionary.com: Amazingly, the only English word with three Ys also happens to describe a rare astronomical event involving three heavenly bodies. A syzygy is the alignment of three celestial bodies in a straight line, commonly the Earth, the Sun and the Moon.

5. Recently seen forecast: Yes, it will snow but how much is still up in the air.

6. It makes good sense that that the word pun rhymes with fun.

7. I had a dream that the chicken coop was surrounding by predator dogs.  I called Joe for help but then later found out the dogs were involved in training exercise on how not to kill chickens.

8. Yesterday my 3 year-old grandson Liam was singing theme song to Ghostbusters.  He sang ‘There’s something wrong in the neighborhood’ and then he said, “The neighborhood is Red Riding Hood and what’s wrong is the wolf.”

9. Today’s “I’m toast” is yesterday’s “I’m dead meat”

10. I think its fitting that the word oops is in bloopers.

11. I was recently reading about a journalist who was writing a story on microbiology medicine and sent his stool off to be analyzed.  I had to read this sentence – In the future, such techniques could help assess our susceptibility to conditions from diabetes, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s to autism, depression and cancer –  more than once before I realized that the word assess was not asses.

12. My Asheville potter son, Josh, is a self-confessed brick geek. He collects found bricks, recycles old bricks, makes his own bricks, and builds wood fire kilns with bricks.  It’s been more than three years since he harvested a lifetime supply of clay from a tobacco farmer’s field, and more than two years since his UNCA thesis show that featured his wild clay pottery and several art installations made from his handcrafted bricks.  ~ Finish reading He Gets a Kick out of Bricks, a blog post from 2009, HERE.  Josh’s work will be included in The Great Road: Contemporary Wood-fired Ceramics show at the Taubman Museum, opening on February 15.

13. Valentine Candy Sweethearts now has a line called  Tweethearts and HERE is an updated Valentine candy conversation heart message.

Post Notes:  The above photo was taken at the Roanoke Market.  Visit other 13 Thursday bloggers HERE.