April 12, 2014

Today was nothing special. At work I worked on my scarf and read. My scarf has reached the four-foot mark so it seems like the odds are good that I'll finish it. I switched off between three books, one of which being The Mother Tongue – English And How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson. It is a very interesting book and today a mystery was finally solved:

“Sometimes our curious spellings are simply a matter of carelessness. Colonel is perhaps the classic example of this orthographic waywardness. The word comes from the old French coronelle, which the French adapted from the Italian colonello (from which we get colonnade). When the word first came into English in the mid-sixteenth century, it was spelled with an r, but gradually the Italian spelling and pronunciation began to challenge it. For a century or more both spellings and pronunciations were commonly used, until finally with inimitable illogic we settled on the French pronunciation and the Italian spelling.”

That word has always annoyed me. Well, the spelling of that word has always annoyed me.

Tonight I did nothing. I wanted to do something but it didn't happen. Instead I spent most of the night watching Coachella performances streaming on YouTube. They have three different channels streaming different performances. Last night I ended up staying up late watching an EDM performance. Tonight I watched Chvrches, Bombay Bicycle Club, City and Colour, and bits and pieces of other performances.

Now I think I'm going to go to bed. It's not even 10:30PM yet but I'm tired. It was a long week. I just want to lay in bed for a day or two. But not tomorrow because I have to go to by brother's Eagle Court of Honor. I think the Court of Honor will be boring, because I vaguely remember them being boring when I was in Scouts, but I am excited for my brother. Getting my Eagle was never a goal I had but now that my brother has his, the family streak continues in the troop because my dad and uncle both got theirs in the same troop. Same church, even. So that is cool. There is a dinner afterward that I might bail on, not only because there could possibly be a large group of people and I'm not a fan of large groups of people, but also because it is at a straight-up barbeque place. Like the kind of place where the only non-meat thing are french fries and macaroni and cheese. But we'll see what happens.