Catchy Name Needed

I don't remember signing up for e-mails about Dior makeup (although knowing me, I probably did), but they are sending me e-mails in French and I am highly entertained by that. I did take French classes for several years - from the second half of 7th grade through 11th grade, so, what's that, 4-1/2 years? I was never a good French speaker because we didn't spend enough time on that part, but I was good at it on paper, many years ago. I haven't made any effort to keep up with it over the years so it's sort of fun to try to figure out what the e-mails are saying. Between the pictures and the bits and pieces I remember, I can mostly figure it out.

More or less unrelated to that, I've been doing Spanish language lessons on Babbel for a couple of months now. My sister, who is married to a native Spanish speaker (he grew up mostly in Mexico City) says she can't get the hang of Spanish because it's too much like French, and it confuses her. I don't know if she remembers her French more than I do or what, but that doesn't seem to bother me that much. (Really I regret now not choosing to take Spanish back in 7th grade. I think I thought French was more glamorous, or something.) Anyway, I am trying to go slow and really get it into my head rather than do it all more quickly. I think it's working but it feels very slow. I'm trying to teach some of it to Rob as I go, too.

I stayed at home almost all week out of an abundance of caution because I had a sore throat. I was supposed to go back to the screening job that I talked about last week, but meanwhile they had some sort of kerfluffle about full-time people vs. part-time people, anyway, and the upshot is that I'm probably not going to do screening any more, at least for now, and I'm going to go back to my normal workplace and help my boss work on some projects, three days a week. We're trying to do some database maintenance and stuff like that while we're shut down. It's a big place and there's only a few of us in there, so maintaining a six-foot distance is really not an issue. At this point, getting out of the house some seems like a nice idea!

Because I have mentioned this topic several times this month: I was surprised to see the Crown Princess in port in Galveston today, since I thought Princess Cruises were not coming to Galveston. Maybe wherever they're going to go in LaPorte - which is inland, up the Ship Channel - is not ready yet. But it was definitely here for today. (In fact, if it's on a normal cruise ship schedule it's probably gone by now. They usually leave around 4 or 4:30, far as I've ever been able to tell.)

It's quiet at work today, but not quite as much as I expected. Really not much more so than any Saturday has been lately. (Hospitals do have to keep functioning through the holidays, after all, though, so campus is never completely deserted, even on Christmas.)

I've been going gradually back through my old LJ entries and fixing keywords (and icons, which also got broken somewhere along the line) - it's interesting to read through those old entries. The keyword I was fixing today was "news" and some of those entries are a bit perplexing to read now. I was talking about current events to an audience who presumably knew what I was talking about at the time, and I didn't always bother to explain to any great degree (or sometimes at all). And most of the links don't work now, of course. Most of it I remembered after thinking about it a while, but there were one or two that I had forgotten about completely.

I also found a reference to the movie "Hollywoodland" which I had completely forgotten the existence of. I had to go look it up before I remembered what it was at all. I vaguely remember it now, but only vaguely. The George Reeves thing, yeah, but what actually happened in the movie? Not really. And yet I quite liked it at the time.

Oh, last night I found About a Boy in the $1 section of OnDemand, so I watched that. I remembered that I liked it, although not a lot about it, either - and Rob also wandered through and got interested, so he's going to have to come back & watch it later. It's a 2-day rental, so if he'll remember to do it we don't even have to pay another dollar. It really is a pretty good movie - it holds up better than a lot of Hugh Grant's movies. (Also, the "boy" of the title is one of the mutants of "X-Men: First Class." I would never have figured that one out without IMDb. He doesn't look much the same at all. And Natalia Tena is in it! - she did actually look the same once I stopped and looked at her, although she was 15 or 16 at the time.)

I did finally talk to my aunt. We are having Christmas dinner at my cousin Brittany's new house, which of course I haven't seen. She also has a new baby which I haven't seen either. (I'm pretty sure I never sent a baby gift, either, come to think of it. Darnit.)

(Yes, my cousin is much younger than me. I use "cousin" extremely loosely to refer to a bunch of first cousins and cousins-once-or-twice-removed and people who I have known all my life - or theirs, anyway - and usually don't stop to figure out my actual relation to. They may or may not be actual blood relatives, but they're all cousins as far as I am concerned.)

Come to think of it, I read the book of About a Boy once too - Nick Hornby wrote it. I remember that it was not quite so heart-warming but y'know, Hugh Grant movies of 10 years ago were required to be heartwarming, it was like a law or something. So not surprising.

I read somewhere, a couple of weeks ago, about how the last volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English is (finally) being published - the first volume came out in 1985 - and my latent reference librarian suddenly came to the fore and I ended up buying the first volume from Amazon (used). I should never shop online at 4 in the morning, because I needed a big reference book like that like I needed a hole in my head, but at the time it seemed like a huge bargain, and it was, relatively speaking - it was only $17 when the other volumes were $70 and up. So anyway, I thought I would pass along some interesting words and phrases, when I think of it, like I did for the medical terms earlier. It makes me feel more like I'm getting my money's worth if I share.

Here's one I'd never heard (and I'm condensing a bit - this is written with copious examples, sort of like the OED):

California blanket    n joc
1926 [Hobo lingo] Newspapers when used for sleeping purposes (as a substitute for bedding)

Another nugget of medical history from my anatomy textbook:

I knew about the relationship between "hysterectomy" and "hysterics" - if I hadn't, it was pointed out in my Medical Terminology book as well - but what I hadn't heard before was the part about the indignant wandering womb. (However, the Greeks also believed that the arteries carried air, so it's not that their medical knowledge was otherwise all that sophisticated, in any case.)

edema
abnormal collection of fluid, usually causing swelling


I'm sure a lot of people know this word, but I'm putting it in here anyway because it lets me discuss the mechanisms of edema a little bit, and I thought it was interesting. I like this definition (from the anatomy book) better than the one from the medical terminology book, which was worded the other way around - something on the order of "swelling, usually caused by abnormal collection of fluid in the tissues". The excess fluid arises on a microscopic level, in the interstitium between the capillaries and the cells. Normally the capillaries take out the same volume of fluid that they bring in, keeping things in balance, but when things get out of whack the fluid builds up in the interstitial space and eventually becomes noticeable as swelling. One example the book gave was hypoalbuminemia - a lack of albumin, which is a protein, in the blood. The presence of the proteins in the capillaries - in some mysterious way that I don't entirely understand - draws water back in with them, so a lack of proteins means more water stays in the interstitium.

OK, the page is sort of swimming so I think that means it's my bedtime. Hope this makes a reasonable amount of sense!

columbina  is confused about the class business, and if he is, I figure somebody else is too, so let me clarify. I'm now taking two, count 'em, two classes:
1. Medical Terminology - I'm about halfway through this one.
2. Anatomy - I'm just starting this one.

They're both online, and there's a lot of overlap between the two, which is good - not only because it makes it easier, but because there's a heck of a lot of new material (to me, anyway) contained therein, so by the time I go over a lot of it twice I'm more likely to actually remember it.

Col and I also spent a bunch of WoW time, between fights, geeking out over vocabulary. Here's one bit I've been having trouble with that I was telling him about, and I'll repeat it all again because the more times I repeat it the more likely I am to remember it, and there are still a couple of these that I tend to forget. Some you'll know, some you probably won't unless you have a background in this stuff.

Suffixes for surgery:
-centesis - puncture, tap (like amniocentesis)
-desis - binding, fusion
-ectomy - excision, surgical removal
-pexy - surgical fixation
-plasty - reconstruction, plastic repair
-rhaphy - surgical repair, suture
-stomy - surgical creation of an opening (colostomy is probably the most common)
-tome - instrument for cutting (incising)
-tomy - incision
-tripsy - crushing (as in a gallstone; lithotripsy is a general term for crushing of a stone)

(Maybe later I'll tell you about the intestines. Right now I'm not in the mood for the ick factor of that one.)