May 14, 2010. Friday.
Situation: I have to work both day and night today, from about 1:30 to 4:30 on one job, then from 5:00 to 10 on the second. I also have to pay my fine at the courthouse today. But I make some time to take Mway for a walk today, around noon. Since Moi has taken her out this morning, and will take her out again tonight, this amounts to a bonus walk for Mway.
State of the Path: See blossoms on the black raspberries by the old orchard. Some of the fleabane by the hedgerow has pink flowers. Despite my “worries,” see plenty of blackberry shoots coming up between the dead cane from last year. Note how the path over the seeps in bug land is still brown and muddy, despite grass coming up on either side of it. See new flower near the honeysuckle I cut down the other day? – kind of a cross between a cheese and a fleabane? Note another honeysuckle with pink flowers, growing up on the creek bank. Almost fall jumping the feed channel to the skating pond, saved by clutching the branches of the honeysuckle that I cut back the other day.
State of the Creek: Hear a few frogs jumping into the water, but mostly it’s into the feed channel. Approaching the ashes and the big oak, hear my radio birds again. I look for, but don’t see any, cardinals. I suddenly see two birds, though I can’t tell what they are, flying through the trees on the other side of the creek; it startles me when I hear them distinctly singing “Over here!” “Over here!”
The Fetch: Bring along “pro-quality” stick. Figure Mway doesn’t need to do a lot of fetching on this walk. After one of the fetches, she tosses the stick at my feet, and it whacks me in the upper part of my foot.
2 comments:
Yes, I was actually wondering about that. If you’re picking out verbs by their frequent occurrence close to a picture, how do you distinguish them from articles and pronouns?
An excellent question! And the simple answer is, because articles and pronouns occur too frequently. Words such as “the,” “he,” and “what” kept popping up on every page, no matter what picture was beside them. And the same thing could be said for conjunctions and prepositions, words such as “and,” “to,” “with.” When words pop up like this all the time, you start to think they have nothing to do with the things in the picture, and you wonder what they could possibly be for. This is especially perplexing to a dog, because the language of scents generally has no separate morphemes for these parts of speech. A scent can mean “a dog,” “the dog,” “Atlas,” and “he” all at once. But after a while you start to realize that, unlike the scent of a dog, the word “dog” is incomplete. The word “dog” or “animal” could stand alone next to a picture, but put it among a bunch of other words and it seemed like it had to become “the dog” or “a dog,” “the animal” or “an animal.” So I quickly learned that, whatever these words might mean, they had to be attached to a word for a thing. M.
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