marmota_b

 I've just kind of spontaneously left a Facebook group that used to be a source of joy and inspiration and whimsy because it's been increasingly becoming a source of frustration. It now officially has a "controversy" and, you now, ain't nobody got time for that.
I think that's often the problem when groups with too wide a focus become too big. People start using them to vent, for one.
I began doubting myself over that move pretty much immediately - night shifts this week, I'm not at my best - but, well, night shifts are a fact of my life now and if that group that used to give me a mood boost is ceasing to do so, I really do have better things to do with the free hours of my day than to keep filtering that out.

I think it was also brought into sharp focus because I had been previously browsing vintage knitting patterns online that people have generously shared for free and... THAT is the sort of online experience I want to be a part of (even actively, if I can). And I think that group has become too big for its shoes and for that sort of thing; individual voices are beginning to get lost unless they're loud, and the loudest people now are the disgruntled ones.

And since that's been my experience, that's the end of my venting in this post, and instead I shall excitedly share what I might have once shared in that group: that I started knitting a gauge sample from a cone yarn I got for free at work and I think it's going to be a perfect match for vintage 3-ply yarns from 1930s & 1940s patterns. As per Retro Claude's video youtu.be/pH1aT8ab91w. And I think if I triple some thin yarns from the same work-related yarn haul, I may get similar results.

It's not what I had once planned to write about on this blog, but whatever. Creativity is creativity.


P.S. Also, I now finally have a digital scale which makes planning knitting projects so much easier. The old kitchen scale is hugely imprecise. (It was equally frustrating for baking, but at least there I can do it by the ear to an extent.)

 This: youtu.be/eVzfcfyWIQA

I took the long weekend of 5th and 6th (two Czech state holidays) off. As in, I allowed myself to do pretty much nothing. I'm feeling a lot better, also now that I told myself that I'm absolutely not doing anything with deadlines that I don't have to.

Eating quark ice creams. And vegetable meals.

The newest bad news from that last post is that my sister has Lyme disease. But fortunately she caught it early, immediately got medication, and also feels a lot better. Turns out part of the previous stress was also the fact that the thing was already eating away at her, tiring her out and making her act more erratically than she normally would. I guess it's a sign of the times that we both just put it up to the stress of the tmes.

Right now I'm also tired, but that has to do with the fact it is hot today. Amazingly, that's not a common everyday occurrence the way it was for several years in the recent past. In the space of the terrible week from the previous post, I also managed to go on two fantastic trips with mom in perfect warm but not hot weather. So. It's not all terrible. I just needed a much longer stretch of "nothing in particular" than I had been getting to be able to process things.

And it makes me rather giddy both because I like that gardening implement, and because I like the fact that English has a special word for it. Aaaand I named a dwarf character in The Peridan Chronicles that for both those reasons.


In other news regarding English and my language nerddom, I took a random test that purports to assess the size of your English vocabulary and to my surprise it landed me in "Top 0.14%, You are Shakespeare! You can even create new words that will expand the English dictionary."
It calculates, in a process I have no idea about, my vocabulary size at 29886. Why that particular number, I also have no idea.

Which is all quite funny to me as a native Czech speaker, and can probably be entirely laid at the door of:
A) My language nerddom and my family's language nerddom.
B) The fact I probably read a lot of writers (both "official" and in fanfiction) who use big words well.
C) Okay, and the fact I studied English and read a lot of big word books for school I never would have read otherwise.

I ended up not really "using" my studies (I work in the textile industry now which never occurred to me as a possible career path at the usual decision-making times of life but I love it because it combines lots of things I like in a productive whole AND challenges me and pushes me to keep learning). But... I also did end up using them because at my previous job they specifically hired me also because I had good English and could play occasional interpretter and translator.
So, yeah. I suppose it is possible I have a really big vocabulary in English also because I can tell you, for example, what a heddle is...?
(It's this implement in a weaving loom - kind of a wire, can be made of wire in simpler looms but modern power looms have specifically made heddles - that the warp yarns go through, and it's part of the mechanism that moves the warp yarns up and down, so that the weft yarn can be inserted, and then the warp yarns go over and under the weft yarns and that creates the fabric.)

And I'm a language nerd so I also know what a dibble is.

But also I'm a lazy English user in a way and don't use my presumably large vocabulary all that much, actively. It mostly manifests in the way that... I will casually throw words like "manifest" into a rambling post about my life where others would probably say "show"...


Father sends us daily e-mail updates on his life. Just little tidbits, just so we can be sure he's okay and hasn't fallen down from a tree or something. (It was my sister's idea about two years ago, and in this whole coronavirus mess it's become a pretty nice feature because he often sends us news about ships in the Baltic, and videos of locomotives in Wales, and stuff like that.)

And sometimes language nerddom manifests. So this one time recently he goes:

"Cymraeg (he actually used the bohemised Czech word for it but I need to press the point he pointedly uses that language's word for itself, not the English word for it) usually puts adjectives behind the noun except for the word for old so:

hen tŷ - old house
tŷ newydd - new house

But then I realised that just like "haul" is "salt", "hen" is "sen"."

And I go, wait, what? (Because "sen" is "dream" in Czech.)
And father goes "like senior".
Me: Oh, right. I actually don't speak Latin and the Italian word is different, so it didn't click.
Father: I don't speak Latin, either.
Then he proceeds to give me a rundown of the two Latin words for "old" and various words in other languages they are related to.

I present to you: My father who claims he's not good at languages.

Father also:

• Visited Wales on a holiday with friends and then went and bought himself a Welsh textbook in London on the way home. That's the souvenir he brought home. That, and a picture children's dictionary for us. Like it never even occurred to him to think the way some other parents might, that maybe he should bring us an English dictionary from Britain since that's definitely the language we'll get more practical use out of? (I believe the only other souvenir he brought was a bunch of pieces of slate.)
• Come to think of it, the thing he brought us from his first trip to Germany immediately after the Velver Revolution was, you guessed it, a picture dictionary. It never occurred to me until now but, folks, this was the time when everyone was bringing all the cool stuff we could not have behind the Iron Curtain, and he bought us a dictionary. It says a lot about the collective language nerddom in this family that we loved that book and never once questioned that choice.
• Many years ago bought a classic etymological dictionary of the Czech language when it was published anew, and then would reach for it a lot when I was growing up to read up on the etymology of random words. (We still reach for it, and one of my regrets in life is that I don't have my own copy.)
• Studied Tibetan for about 14 years (the crazy amount of years was a recent discovery of mine) basically just for the kicks. And because a Czech authority on Tibetan was kicked out of his job because Communists, so a group of friends got together to take private lessons in Tibetan from him to support him, and invited father along, and father's reaction to said invitation was basically "yeah, sure, sounds like fun". I cannot vouch for this, but I have a strong suspicion that he may have stuck to it the longest in the end. (It's now been nearly thirty years since father did anything with the language, but he can still write in it at the drop of a pen.)
• Happens to own a Greek grammar textbook for no particular reason.
• Read the entirety of Pan Tadeusz in the original Polish. (I mean, I own the book in the original Polish because why should I read my favourite book in a translation when I found the original in a secondhand bookshop, eh? But this is my father who doesn't really read fiction we're talking about here.)
• Will also read me passages from Latvian news (usually something pertaining to his interest in trains or trams) and be surprised that I have zero idea what he's talking about.
• Can read English Wikipedia articles with no big difficulty.
• Will point out the various words for "heart" that can be found in popular songs in different languages.

:D


... there was this one time during our Grammar School years when my sister and her friends threw an "egg party" over the Easter holidays, and my sister's contribution was to look up the word for "egg" in all sorts of languages and make up a game of matching the word to the language.

This is the sort of stuff it never occurred to me to question before an online test told me I have a bigger vocabulary in my second language than most native speakers.

I knew I was a language nerd because it's a sure-fire way to get me going and also it annoys me to no end when people use Tolkien's Elvish plurals for individuals.
I also knew I came from a family of language nerds because yeah, it kind of gets us all going.

But this trip down the memory lane suddenly made very clear to me how much it's just part of life for me and how weird it probably would be for a lot of other people.
The other thing I turn out to be good at, and have known for some time I'm good at, is colour differentiation.

It was, in fact, one of the things I did in my previous jobs, and one of the things I miss about it in my current one. (The current one wins on many other fronts, though.)

It suddenly occurred to me now that I use colour differentiation (or, rather, the lack of it) as a method of recognising Photoshop (colour) jobs. I thought other people can be more susceptible for taking Photoshop jobs for the real thing because they'd never tried their hand at it themselves (which I have, mostly for fun), and don't have any background in art and no experience with how colours change in shadows or with distance, and thus don't have my eyes for it. I can spot where someone just coloured a whole area, by how it's the same hue, and how at the edges of said area there will often be these sharp delineations where in a real photo it would be more of a colour gradation. But it suddenly occurred to me now that maybe one of the reasons could simply be because they literally don't have my eyes for it. Huh.

 I've just had a lightbulb moment of realising that maybe one of the reasons I'm so into Found Family elements in stories is because it happened in my own family.

I grew up with mom's stories of Grandma Š. who was a bit of a touchstone - and anecdote - for old-fashioned femininity in the stories of my childhood. Grandma Š. was the one with ideas of how a proper lady behaved. We have vintage linens from Grandma Š.  that have that quality of really proper vintage linens. (Finding a duvet cover with the respective initials in my stack of old torn linens to possibly turn into costumes is what jumpstarted this train of thought and I suddenly realize that duvet cover may be getting close to around 80 or 90 years old... and is still of better quality than many a newer one.) Grandma Š. was the one wearing old-fashioned underwear that years later my mom would tell me about to paint a picture of the past. I have a vague suspicion that some of the antique sewing supplies I got from my grandma originally came from Grandma Š.

Over the years, I gradually pieced together the story of my Great-Grandma Š. who, it turns out, was not a blood relative at all.

The bare bones of the story are roughly this:

Mrs Š. lost her daughter when her daughter was about twenty and about to get married.

My grandma lost her mother when she was young.

Years later, when Mrs Š. was a lonely old lady with a fairly large house with a garden she had no one to bequeath to, and she was getting frail, there was (I think in the same church?) this young motherless girl just getting married who didn't really yet have any proper place to live and to raise the family she wanted. So Mrs Š. had a proposal: The young couple could move in with her, and take care of her in her waning days, and they could keep the house and basically become Mrs Š.'s sole beneficiaries. And Mrs Š. would spend her last days with a young family instead of lonely.

Her last days turned out to be quite a number of years, and it's not difficult to imagine having young people and children around her had something to do with that. (Also, my grandma was a nurse - well, pediatric nurse, but still a nurse - and my grandpa was a dental technician so Mrs Š. was definitely a clever old lady.)

It's a rather weird arrangement on one hand, but on the other hand that's how my mom grew up with two grandmas after all.

It's one of those things that are par for the course for you when you're a child and that only slowly sink in as you grow up.

So... yeah. I guess I'm into Found Family and Mandalorian concepts of family and I am writing that odd but very real family arrangement Frank and Methos and my OC Ondra have because... to me, it's par for the course to have a Great-Grandma who wasn't a blood relative  and to thus have heirlooms from someone who wasn't a blood relative so... duh.