Mowing; puzzling; sketching; x-raying

Earlier today: a difficult mowing, with dull blades, in the August heat.

I haven’t entirely recovered.

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Samuel has been learning the parts of speech. He discourses on pronouns, adjectives, and prepositions. His interest was sparked by Mad Lib-type activities.

He also likes crosswords. He doesn’t solve them himself. He forces his parents to fill them in. It’d been years since I’d done any. This week, I filled in four.

I see how a person could get addicted to doing crosswords. Each correct answer lets in a brief flood of dopamine.

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“Say a ‘A’,” Daniel requests – he means write or draw, not say – and I draw an “A” upon the screen of the children’s Etch A Sketch Doodle. It delights him. He gets his dopamine hit.

“Say a ‘B’,” he says.

And so on. “Say ‘Mercury’. Say ‘Venus’. … ”

Samuel takes the device and draws two thick parallel lines. “I made an x-ray of my legs,” he says.

Iterations

Karin & I hosted a dinner party last night. The guests were Karin’s grandpa, Karin’s mom, and Brianna. We had to spray Jasper with water to keep him away from the food. Even shy little Ziva came out of hiding a few times, and we had to spray her, too.

We discussed the Vikings’ dramatic playoff victory, which, in solidarity with Karin’s stepdad, we all had witnessed. (Here are some rather lengthy highlights, as well as the game’s winning play and the same play from a field-level perspective.) Later in the evening, Karin’s mom told me that “buffalo” is a verb. To buffalo is to baffle. Researching this, I learned that grammatical sentences of n words can be formed simply by saying buffalo out loud n times, for any cardinal number n; and that the writing of such sentences requires minimal punctuating. Here are a few examples:

“Buffalo,” a command to do buffaloing.

“Buffalo buffalo,” a command to do buffaloing to buffaloes.

“Buffalo buffalo,” which states that buffaloes do buffaloing.

“Buffalo buffalo buffalo,” which states that buffaloes do buffaloing to buffaloes.

“Buffalo buffalo buffalo,” which states that Buffalo’s buffaloes do buffaloing.

“Buffalo Buffalo buffalo,” a command to do buffaloing to Buffalo’s buffaloes.

And so on.

I stayed out of bed until one o’clock forming longer and longer sentences from iterations of buffalo. Then I lay awake in bed until three o’clock. This morning, bleary-eyed, I went to my first regular tutoring shift of the new semester.