There are four kinds of carats. Carats are a way to measure gemstones while karats are a way to measure the refinements to gold. Carrots are a lovely orange vegetable and a caret is this symbol, ^, which in proofreader's markings means something is missing and this is where you need to add it. I use it often in grading papers. People leave out commas and hyphens and all sorts of marks. Once, a friend said they do not answer my emails because they are scared I will find them lacking grammatically.
I laughed and said do you really think I have time to grade more papers? I don't grade email. We had a lovely brother in Arkansas who was a plumber. He was my book study conductor for awhile and also our WT conductor for a while. He is in fact the brother who said hyper bowl. He would hardly talk to me much, and finally he said something to me in passing about how I had published poems and had all this schooling.
I said yeah, I am sure smart at a lot of things, but none of it is very practical. The minute a toilet doesn't work, nobody is looking for a poet. They call you. Frankly, I'd prefer you too.
He laughed and after that we did fine. I still miss him and his lovely wife. It's really weird, but there are a lot of skunks in Arkansas and a lot of rural territory, so you get that smell frequently. I was with them one day and I caught them inhaling sharply and holding it. I was doing the same thing. And I accused them right then without thinking: You like that smell, don't you! And they admitted they did.
I do too. Carly likes gas, which I don't like, but I don't find it repellant either. But skunk spray is a very complex and layered smell, and is a unique experience among scents. On Hollywood Squares back in the 80's they asked the question one time what percentage of the population secretly likes the smell of skunk, and it was a whopping 10%. So we were all in that 10%.
Useful for field service in Arkansas, and as I admitted that I never saw myself as a traveler, I wondered later trying to sleep if I was a word traveler rather than a world traveler. Who gets tickled by four kinds of carats? I like weird words, but the only time this is really helpful is playing bookworm online which is what I do to settle my nerves when the girls have driven me bonkers (or my boss.) Only I don't do it anymore because I play it too long.
I love the footnotes about words in the reference Bible. What was this in Greek or Hebrew? My favorite comment that I can only give once per congregation is about the word erode. Every now and then we'll have a lesson about how materialism or apathy can erode our faith. The root word there you will see in common with the word rodent. Rodere, in old Latin, to gnaw. Rodents gnaw. You give your hamster a little block of wood and check it everyday and it won't look that much smaller. But ignore it for a month and it disappears down to a nub. It's a gradual process. You don't just one day all of the sudden fall out of the truth over buying things or feeling blah. It's a slow process that can go almost unnoticed.
I am trying to stay stable in my resolve to get through the rest of this system. I have so many things to work on. I still am on Estonia and reading this month's Awake! and I still have not started the new YPA. I have a small reprieve today because the girls did not know they had to reserve passes to the Holocaust Museum in advance. They checked that the admission was free, but they did not realize that "first come first served" combined with internet reservations = no passes for just showing up. So I am about to go grade some papers and get school caught up, then come home and study my WT. But I have found that those moments I used to spend worrying about girls or money or my car are now spent thinking about something nice to say here. Remembering friends who like skunk smells and can fix toilets, thinking about getting through a tribulation even in mismatched shoes, focusing on the girls and how to motivate them, all that is better than what I used to think about, so blogging has become a useful tool for me, and I hope it makes you smile or laugh or focus on your eternity also.
When we weren't smelling skunks in service, we would decide what stores we were going to loot first after Armageddon. That's a caret, #1, because we are inserting ourselves into the new world, visualizing ourselves there (just see yourself, just see me too, see us all in a world that is new). Next, sometimes the Israelites got the spoils of war. First will be the grocery stores because you never hear of anyone being well-fed in tribulation. #2, carrots. Then all the sisters will be at Kay and Zales for carats and karats. I guess the brothers will be test driving Ferrari's or down at Gander Mountain. I'm not sure. I just know they all have to get some khaki pants!
This might seem like a tangent, but it beats grading papers for sure.
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