Delana’s blog

Do you have a nervous habit?
Submitted by Herding Cats.

Yes.

QotD authors:  Never ask a closed-ended question.

Thank you, and good night.

Where do you do your online shopping?

What a boring question.  Various jewelry supply outlets, Amazon, B&N.  That's about it.

OMG what a yawner of a question.

What books did you love as a child? 
Submitted by hearts. 

Of course I loved the Little House books, but two other books are more special to me.

The Odyssey from River Bend by Tom McGowen was a book we got at a weird sale, the kind of sale where you'd think you'd only get crap... and Grammie read it to me.  It was an epic journey in my mind, and the experience of it is tied so strongly to my Grammie that just thinking about it wants to bring tears.

Then, there's The Silver Crown by Richard O'Brien.  This book was recommended by a teacher at a reading event at my grade school.  I remember barely believing that I was the one getting to the counter first to check it out.  Reading it was a completely private experience for me.  Grammie did not read one word of it to me, it was probably the first novel I read silently, all the way through, to myself.  It's a very important book to me.  I got a paperback of it fairly recently, since the copy I read as a child was a library book.

And that was the year I started reading the dictionary on the toilet.

In my twenties, 'twas Roget's thesaurus on my bathroom floor.

Are there any snacks, food or candy that are no longer made that you desperately miss?

I don't know if I miss them "desperately," but I do miss Carnation Breakfast Squares.  They were dense, dry little squares with a sort of core stratum that was... more dense and less dry than the cakey part.  I loved them.  I would be ecstatic if they would do an LE revival of them, but they never will, because they are full of CARBS and no actual nutrituion.  Sest lah vye.

What are your favorite and least favorite words?  Any reasons why?
Question submitted by Byrne.

I dislike many words, because they gross me out or give me a sensation that feels a bit like embarrassment. Sometimes, words drop off the list, or they turn into jokes, because my friends start using them around me as often as possible.  Also, in general, I do not care for cutesy anatomy terms, and I never have.  When I was a child, I said "stomach," never "tummy."  I also said "go to the bathroom," never "wee-wee" or "pee-pee." 

Here are some of my least favorite words:

• Ointment
• Grub
• Meal
• Corn
• Nipple
• Bellybutton
• Tummy
• Tush

As for words I do like, there are many.  I like them because of what they mean, how they look, how they sound or some combination of those.  Sometimes I like words because they crack me up.  Here are some:

• Syzygy
• Sluice
• Storm
• Nudebranch
  
• Gassy
• Contraindicate
• Obsolescence
• Polyploid
  

It has been eons since I lived in a place that had a pool.  Obviously, I was not of the socio-economic bracket that has pools in its back yards, so the pools I have had access to over the years have all been apartment pools, starting with the freaky kidney-shaped pool at Carmel Manor Apartments in Corpus Christi, Texas.  I spent entire days pickling myself in that chlorinated water.  It was virtually impossible to drag me out.  I swam unsupervised there many, many times, but sometimes Donita's grandmother or Karen or someone else we knew would be there or at the club house, smoking, dressed in the most hideous 70s poolside attire you can possibly imagine.

After my mother divorced her second husband, we moved back to Kansas.  This upset me greatly, because there would be no more beach, and because the pools in Kansas do not stay open nearly as long as they do in Corpus Christi.  I cried and cried and cried when we moved "back home."  I turned ten that October (1977).  Our new apartment complex was a dump, but it had a pool.  I didn't burn when I was in Texas, but for some reason, I fried like an egg under the Kansas sun.  I cooked in that pool for one summer.  Then, we moved, to another dump apartment, but with a much better pool.  I spent every possible moment in it.  I can remember "Feels So Good" by Herb Alpert in the air and the Hawaiian Tropic slick that coated the surface of the water.  I remember the oil pooling on one woman's dark-tanned stomach.  I remember thinking it looked like you could make popcorn in it.

After that, we moved to a brand new dumpy townhouse in a 100% Section 8 complex, which made me horribly depressed, because it had no pool.  Occasionally, we'd sneak into the pool at the neighboring complex.  I even babysat a bratty little girl whose mother lived there so I could get at that pool. 

After that, I didn't encounter another apartment complex pool until I moved to Lawrence.  However, it wasn't as much fun as it had been when I was a child, and I felt a sad separation from the swimming pools of the world, and a jealous grief overcame me.

I have decided to put that nonsense behind me and swim in the occasionally murky waters of the pool at my current apartment complex.  I sometimes enjoy little flashbacks of being a child, even of my first moments in the water when I was three, four and five, which are some of my earliest and most vivid memories.