From morning sun till dine

[austin_dern]

One other thing kind of stood out as something different while I was away for the week. My parents had friends of their own over, without even asking me for permission, and the friends stayed in the guest room where I've been camped out. The immediate side effect of this was I felt embarrassed at a distance, even though I didn't see their friends this time around, because I had left a partly used bottle of mouthwash on the bookshelf because I needed to put it somewhere and forgot to bring it with me for house-sitting. The sane part of me knows that they really didn't care about the fixtures of the guest room as long as the bed was clean and comfortable, and in any case it's not like Listerine is a particularly humiliating product to have around, but if I had known my room would be looked at I'd have tried putting it into some more presentable order.

Also along the way my parents laundered and changed the sheets, and somehow they folded the lightest cover -- the one I actually use as a blanket, since the heavier stuff is really inappropriate what with climate control meaning it's not in the lower 40s Fahrenheit -- back and forth over the mattress so that I can't get the lower edge out or unravelled, and I can't get it to lay out straight either. This is going to have to result in my tearing all the sheets off the mattress and re-doing it, but I just haven't been bothered enough until the time I try to go to bed and realize my feet are restrained in awkward ways, when I'm too tired to deal with it.

And a happy year 2000 to Ethiopia! Apparently way back around the 6th century the Roman and the Ethiopian churches came to slightly different conclusions about just when this Christ fellow had appeared on the scene, and both sides have more or less stuck to their answers since then and are reasonably comfortable with the way things have worked out. The Ethiopian calendar is also linked for the new year to the Coptic date, the one based on the annual flooding of the Nile that got the Egyptians so worked up about leap days and Sirius and such.

Trivia: Coptic Christians in Egypt also keep the anni Diocletiani, dating from the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletius. (By that calendar it is 1723.) Source: The Calendar, David Ewing Duncan.

Currently Reading: A History of the United States Weather Bureau, Donald R Whitnah.

Comments

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

wow.. WILD.. I never knew that about Ethiopia!

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Isn't it amazing, really, just how much of a world there is around here?

One could go on for ages about different calendar schemes. Even if you take the basics like a 365-day year with occasional leap day, you get a diversity of choices for when to start it, and for that matter what the counted number should represent.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. There's always the conscious level of 'clean enough for me' and 'clean enough for someone else than me', and the latter is almost always superior to the former. But it's Listerine. had they noticed- and I'm sure they didn't, of course, the natural response is "Hmm. Wonder why that's here and not the bathroom."

This reminds me, it's time to make the Air Conditioner/Quilt swap shortly here. (As one or the other has to live in the bottom-right of my closet, and both don't fit. Luckily, the seasonal conveniences work out.)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Ah, we're able to avoid that swap around here, because the central air conditioning was built into the house, the quilt is far too heavy to sleep under unless you want to sweat to death overnight, and the closet is filled with things which belong to my parents and not me at all (although I've squeezed out a section where I can hang my dress shirts for work). And one of the cats has figured out how to open the hall closet, but oddly has not applied this to the other rooms in the house that could be opened by the same technique.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

The top two feet of my closet is Mom's stuff, here; And I've lived in this room interrupted only by college for 18 years now.

I usually sleep under a quilt as often as possible; the pressure/weight is nice. Since I started paying the electric bill here I get by with a blanket during the summer.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I tend to use as light a set of blankets as I can. That's easy to attribute to living in Singapore for years, where it's just obscene to pay for air conditioning and then cover up for warmth, but I had the habit beforehand. In upstate New York I would use heavier blankets in winter, but I didn't like it, even if sufficiently heavy blankets meant the bed would effectively make itself when I got out because they wouldn't move that much.