Hail-y enough for you?

My neighbor, Patrick Kelley, has a webcam and has posted a time-lapse version of Thursday's storms. The big stuff starts to fall around 11:20. The evening storm part is also pretty cool.

You can see my car at 1:10:41 and 4:42:35 - going to and returning from my auto body repair estimate. While I was in the Cities, I took my grandfather's baritone ukelele to Hoffman Guitars to see if they could repair a crack in the body which has been there for a couple of years. Signs point to said crack arising from child-initiated trauma, but so far no one has copped to the charge.

I was inspired by this video, which Lobachevsky (or Tromvestite, as Bleeet has dubbed him) posted on his blog. Amazing. The young man's name is Jake Shimabukuro, and he is a rising superstar in the ukelele world, if there is such a thing.

And superstars love hail. Hey, speaking of hail, it occurred to me on Thursday that estimating hail size is a little tricky. First of all, hailstones have a tendency to deform or explode on impact. And since you don't want to go traipsing out into the storm and risk getting nailed with one of those puppies, some meltage must occur before an accurate measurement can be taken. Looking out my window, I would swear some of those hailstones were bigger than baseballs. Hitting my roof, they sounded like medicine balls. But the largest one (mostly undeformed) from my freezer is 2.5 inches in diameter. Technically tennis ball sized. Or between raw oyster and stink bomb sized, depending on your scale.

The Mini and the house got dented. A window got broken. Our insurance agent got a headache. We got to spend some quality time as a family in the basement, burning candles, playing a board game, and listening to the radio. No one got seriously hurt. Blessings got counted.

I looked hard to find a website with hail-related maladies, principally trauma, I assumed. There is this, which, frankly, isn't very impressive. There are plenty of sites that focus on crop damage from hail, but this is not a horticultural blog. Yet.

In honor of our recent visitation with hailstones, let's go with chilblains for our Malady of the Month. It's almost got "chill" right in the name.

Blog-stortion

...as in, "What is the word for forced blogging?" Runners-up include: blog-beaten & black-blogged. You would think, what with writing a whole play-a-day and all, Bleeet would have plenty to keep him otherwise engaged. Apparently not.

Kudos to Circe for getting quoted in another blog (page down to January 19). Also, nice work on Cinderella! We hope to be able to catch the FACT version of West Side Story.

Bleeet was positively charming as a wicked stepsister in the aforementioned Cinderella. He was too sexy for his, uh, frock.

Okay, so, Malady of the Month...Black Hairy Tongue. Enjoy!

(and check this out, for some tongue-tastic fun)

bor-bo-ryg-mus (n.)

"A rumbling sound produced by the movement of gas through the intestines."

See what Cecil has to say about it here.


blog-bo-ryg-mus (n.)

"The name a desperate man comes up with (after trying a half-dozen others, rejected as previously taken) when he thinks too long about the word B-L-O-G and his synapses misfire in just the right way, connecting to one of his favorite words from med school (when all he really wanted to do was post a comment on bleeet's blog)."


The linguists will note that that I did not choose blogborygmi, the plural form. There will be no play-a-day to be had here. Perhaps a malady-a-month? June smells like podagra.

Many thanks to bleeet for posting his comment on my picture. I was deeply moved, man.

Many thanks to Tromvestite for mentioning me in his blog. Twice! Rock on, trombone guy.

Of course I attended bleeet and Mrs. bleeet's shindig yesterday. Lovely house. Lovely lake. Bamboo flooring? Nice! I like the grass in front, too - beats the dirt you had there before by a long shot.

So, at the second party (there's always a second party!) I asked Tromvestite where he worked. You see, I knew what he did...but I couldn't remember if he'd gone to work for the giant nonprofit corporation that ate his previous place of employment or if he'd gone somewhere else.

Gamely, he answered my question, and this led to a stimulating discussion of how we see ourselves: are we best represented by our vocations or our avocations? Good, thought-provoking stuff.

Then I went down the rabbit hole and read Tromvestite's post from 6/13, a full 4 days before, which nicely prophesied our conversation. No fair, man! Preconversing like that is just gonna throw off the witty repartee curve for the rest of us!

So, that's my post. It only took me an hour. And it is very late.

Your tummy has spoken.