WotD: scab over

1. verschorfen
2. roof vormen
3. encostrarse
4. s'encrostar
5. former une croûte
6. crawennu
7. gearbáil
8. 딱지 앉다
9. 結痂 jié jiā

A Chamshroin, mo luichín

Níl dúil agam
I n-aon duine eile
Nuair a chuimhním ortsa
Tadhlaímse féin!

All about me

Between the last-minute packing (which always ends up being more than you anticipated, no matter how far in advance you start) and the one-and-a-half-hour delay getting started (what kind of commercial driver leaves his house in the morning without his driver's license?), poor monshu was barely left with enough energy to make it through my birthday dinner. You wouldn't have guessed it from the aplomb with which he comported himself; it was only afterwards, making that one last trip back from the empty old house that I thought I would have to prop him up.

We were stuck for a place to eat until I suggested Marigold, which has been a favourite splurge spot since they opened two years ago almost to the day. (They had a special menu in honour of their second anniversary while we were there.) monshu had the beet salad and the grilled halibut with chana masala, I had a Goan caldo verde (like a green Indian gazpacho) and the kalonji chicken, and we both shared the mussels to start and ginger crème brûlée for dessert. (That is, we each had our own crème brûlée; I'm not sure either of us could be convinced to share one.) Washing it all down was a tasty domestic Gewürztraminer.

The next day, bunj and e. picked us up to look for furnishings. It's an ideal pairing in some ways: monshu and e. could talk patterns while bunj is the only other person I know who finds the used books on display one of the most interesting parts of visiting a furniture store. In particular, we were intrigued by a hardbound copy of Conversational German in 20 lessons, which caught my eye because it was an earlier edition of the first book I ever tried to teach myself a language from. Inside were a ticket stub for a Broadway production of Tamburlaine and $34 receipt for a YMCA in Chelsea (dated, but no year); we couldn't help but wonder about this young man who was visiting New York before either of us had been born. Oh, and I think monshu settled on some chairs for the living room or something.

For dinner, we hit a previous birthday favourite, Oysy and everyone but e. ended up splitting a sizable bottle of sake. After gorging ourselves on tempura, octopus, and maki, we still had room for ice cream and walked all the way up to the Water Tower Ghiradelli to get it, fighting clueless tourists every step of the way. (Damn you, Air and Water Show! Damn you, I say!) monshu and I had planned to hit my association's annual garden concert afterwards, but after a few minutes listening from the roof, we realised the only thing we really want to hit was the bed. I thought he'd be out like a tealight, but instead we started forging more plans for our imminent cohabitation.

We did a better job of sleeping in the next morning, though I admit I was hampered by drinking the night before like someone who can actually drink rather than the wimp that I am. Unexpectedly, monshu suggested dim sum for brunch, which meant a trip to Furama followed by a visit to the grocery for fresh lychees, to Foremost for lychee liqueur, and then a trip to the park to see the native plants garden that I helped plant shortly after moving to Uptown. After his nap, monshu recreated the lychee mimosa e. ordered at Oysy and then roasted pork for dinner.

There was something special about each of the days--and the weather couldn't have been any more glorious for each of them--but in many ways Sunday was the best, because it was so unhurried and intimate. Waking in my own house to spend the day the monshu doing whatever we felt like and nothing we didn't is pleasure I just haven't had often enough. I can only hope that the future will make it into a pleasure that's commonplace, but never routine.

Unhelpful equivalences

I couldn't help but notice that aadroma missed another installment of Multilingual Monday. If this was for lack of fresh ideas, here's a juicy one: Ever reached for a bilingual dictionary to help you make sense of an unfamiliar foreign word only to encounter a gloss that was every bit as unfamiliar? I asked monshu if he'd ever had this experience and he complained about reading Balzac's description of 19th century carriages, which he would often describe in loving detail using technical terminology that was every bit as foreign to the GWO in English as it was in the French of any era.

This was on my mind recently because of a series of cryptic glosses in Bun-Ghaeilge. In order of appearance, they were:

banbh bonham
stuca stook
camógaíocht camogie

That last one really takes the cake, doesn't it? What all of these had in common was that (a) my Irish-English dictionary glossed them exactly the same way and (b) my American Heritage didn't contain the English "equivalents".

( See if you can guess their meaning before reading this. )

An example from last year (and another language) is German Tanga, helpfully glossed by my Oxford-Duden as "tanga".