Amaryllis sillyramA

Last night at the grocery store I remembered that I’ve been wanting to cook a big pot of beans. So I got some bulk pinto beans. Pinto beans are the best because they remind me of Mama, my Dad’s mother. She would have been 107 this year. She had a funny story involving pinto beans, according to one of her daughters, but I never heard the story. Maybe I’ll ask my Dad if he knows.

Later I dreamt about the beans. Someone had decided to cook them, but there wasn’t time enough. Luckily they didn’t use them all up.

I haven’t cooked the beans yet but I did finally do the beets last night. Suddenly I love beets, don’t know why, always was repulsed by them before. So I cooked some for the first time, and they turned out beautifully. Beautiful beets.

Then I saved the beautiful beet water and I’m dying a pair of white undies. I’d forgotten about them until just now. They’re still sitting in the beet water on the kitchen counter. They ought to be pretty darn pink by now.

Our apple tree is getting a major haircut. All the highest branches are going, and it is bound to be funny-looking.

Here are some of those high vertical branches on a dramatic spring backdrop.

They’re immortal now. And famous.

New digs! Thanks to M. for the fancy upgrade and useful advice on how to meddle with it. The header is a picture I took two weeks ago — the Cascades at sunrise from upstairs. (Easy to see why we wanted the deck!)

WordPress rocks.

The word swarthy is excellent, no? But did you know swart is a word? Adventuring along in KOL (in the Obligatory Pirate’s Cove) this comes up:

This is a very swarthy pirate. His swart knows no bounds. That’s actually what swarthy means: full of swart. Seriously. Look it up.

And, for real, it does.

How about that!

STOCHASTIC

Here’s a word I’ve been practically surrounded by here in the library for the last ten years, and never looked it up before. It is an excellent word.

According to OED:

1. Pertaining to conjecture. Now rare or Obs.

2. a. Randomly determined; that follows some random probability distribution or pattern, so that its behaviour may be analysed statistically but not predicted precisely; stochastic process = random process s.v. RANDOM a. 1b.

etc.

Style points to anyone who can find an everyday usage outside the context of math or computing.

Runner-up: coyoteo. Coyoteo is fun to say.