on health and shiving

So this is the equivalent to if I asked for ice cream, and LHA sent me a Pomeranian.

Today’s prompt: I’ve listed two obscure words below, along with some etymology and definition from the online Oxford English Dictionary. Your assignment, if you choose to accept it, is to write a riff on one or both words, or figure out a way to incorporate whatever you’re writing.

TO SHIVE: “[f. SHIVE n.1 Cf. ON. skífa.] trans. To cut (bread) into slices.
1570 LEVINS Manip. 152/39 To shiue, dissecare. 1629 GAULE Holy Madn. 343 He shiues out his Bread by weight or measure.

DWALE: [In sense 1, a variant of DWELE n., = OE. *dwela, dweola, dwola, dwala, error, heresy, madness; in sense 2 app. aphetic for OE. {asg}edweola, -dwola, etc. error, heresy, madness, also heretic, deceiver; f. ablaut-series dwel-, dwal-, dwol-: see DWELL v. Cf. OE. dwol- in comb. ‘erring, heretical’, and Goth. dwals ‘foolish’.]

I think I should start off by admitting that I just googled “riff” because I didn’t actually know what she meant just then. LHA: 1, Summer: 0. Also… it took me far too long to figure out what WFMAD stood for. I was like “Woman in the Forest… comma… MAD?”

*facepalm* (It stands for Write Fifteen Minutes A Day, for those of you riding my bus.)

So this first word is a bit of a challenge, because I mean… WHEN would I need to slice bread? Isn’t sliced bread itself the GREATEST THING EVER? So great in fact, that we always refer to new great things as the “greatest thing SINCE sliced bread” because clearly the new thing CAN’T BEAT pre-sliced bread? So really, anyone still shiving has clearly missed the most revered invention of our time. It’s like people who don’t use wikipedia. Speaking of sliced bread though, I had toast this morning for breakfast.

This is worth mentioning, because I never actually prepare breakfast. I usually have either a Nutrigrain bar I grab out of the cabinet on my way out the door, or three vanilla bean scones at Starbucks. (BTW, those scones are AMAZING. I’m obsessed with them. If you’ve never had the vanilla bean scones at Starbucks, you are missing out big time. You are basically still shiving while the rest of us are using that precious slicing time to do things like stick the bread in the toaster and spread butter on it. Did I kill that metaphor yet?) And the toast was amazing! I also had a glass of orange juice with it, which is worth mentioning because my mom reads this blog. Hi Mom! I drink orange juice! I’m healthy!

In other food related news, I learned two days ago that if a recipe says “melt butter in pan with garlic powder and then add pasta” that is NOT the same as “melt butter in pan and then add garlic powder and pasta.” Raw garlic powder is disgusting. And that’s coming from me who went through a container of garlic powder in 2 months. I’m fairly certain it’s still coming out of my pores.

Anyway, the garlic butter pasta recipe is right here and it’s actually amazing when you make it correctly.

Oh and I didn’t use the second word: dwale. Oh well. That’s what LHA gets for not giving me ice cream.

thank you laurie halse anderson

(for many things, the least of which is my email address from high school: soursugar
which is from a line in Speak)

So today I noticed that Laurie Halse Anderson is doing this BEDA (blog every day in AUGUST) thing, except she’s calling it something different, as you are only supposed to write for fifteen minutes and she’s including prompts. PROMPTS! Like for writing! What fun.

I’ll try this out. We’ll see how long this lasts.

Today’s prompt (from Laurie’s blog): Describe your writing space. Focus on the smallest details possible, not the big ones. Don’t say there is a chair in the room; give details about the wear patterns of the rug under the chair, or the paint chips, or the dog hair in the cushion. Go small to tell big.

HAHAHAHA. My writing space? Oh Laurie Halse Anderson. You crack me up. And not just because you have three names and I’m envious. My writing space is also my eating space, and my reading space, and my television space, and my movie space… basically it’s my everything space. To sum up: I have one table. And one chair.

Wow I already violated the first rule. “Don’t say there is a chair in the room-” DAMN IT. Well… actually, maybe I didn’t because I didn’t specify that the chair was IN THE ROOM. It’s actually not. Little known fact, but in New Jersey, we are actually short on gravity. Seriously. It’s MAJOR annoying. Every month we have to pay a gravity bill, otherwise our possessions just start floating about. This wouldn’t really be a problem in and of itself, because I hear those astronauts get a HELL of a good night’s sleep out there in space. Can’t you picture it? The floating around and all that, I mean. It would be oh so soothing! But unfortunately… living without gravity has it’s downfalls. Like sometimes our chairs float out the window.

Seeing as we only have one chair per person in this lovely place I call home, this is MAJOR inconvenient. (I apologize for the excessive use of the word “major” in this post. I watch too much Zenon. Although she would say “inconvenient MAJOR.”) So we always try to pay the bill on time. But just in case we don’t, we keep our chairs in the closet at all times. And as we learned from Sorcerer’s Stone, a closet is not a real room, therefore, THE CHAIR IS NOT IN THE ROOM. HEY-O!

Okay fine, I don’t have a writing space. Wait! I got one! My writing space isn’t a PHYSICAL SPACE, IT’S A SPACE IN MY MIND! HA!

No. That’s lame. And I kind of feel like a tool.

FIFTEEN MINUTES! Ugh. I give up on this writing challenge, Laurie Halse Anderson. Better luck tomorrow. Ask me about ice cream. I am a PROFESSIONAL at ice cream.