16 February 2014: Sunday ... Weekend Word Puzzle w/mom ... shaver on her chin ...

Jane Frelick's ***BIRTHDAY*** today!! ... she is 94 years young (b. 16 February 1920). 

She asked that I do it but I told her she could handle it, and she did, fine.
Got out the mirror so she could see her handiwork, which pleased her. 

We listened to the Word Puzzle on Weekend Sunday Morning Edition with Will Shortz, for the first time with mom (will make it a regular weekly event), and I, of course, thought of Arthur Hugh Shealy, Esq., and phoned him. He did not listen to it because he's in his 4th day of no power running his bed and getting heat with a generator. The clues were so clever, in the Shortz tradition: two clues for words with the second word have the first three letters of the first reversed to answer it (e.g., something that goes wild on the Internet -- viral; and someone who challenges you -- a rival ... the 9-letter examples were rowdiness and wordiness ... so ingenious this enigmatologist from Indiana University-?). 

Another first today: Not the call to Shellhorn & Hill because our heater has stopped (think we are out of fuel again (and we were, the service technician put 10 gallons of the reddish colored oil into the tank out back, 1/30th of the way full) ... they will service us in the afternoon when I'm back from church, but the need to shave and have hot water necessitated the daily ritual of my father, for years, of transporting the steaming tea kettle upstairs with the exact amount of hot water for the metal bowl by the medicine chest to be poured, steaming, into its confines and used, quite wonderfully, for his daily shave. I did it today and the result was successful. Thanks dad! 

Dancer is recumbent on her side and snoring, again, on the floor in the TV room. She loves to sleep and can do it on a dime ... such snorting and whimpering like sounds come from her. 

Great service at Church this morning. My first exposure to a tuba (Thom Remington) and harp (Margaret Love) duo. Margaret is director of the Associates, a small group of UU singers. She is an accomplished musician who directed the choir at First Unitarian of Wilmington for years in the 70s and 80s and plays a number of instruments. Her harp playing was superb but she is suppose to be a better organist. We meet tomorrow evening with Margaret leading us and Thom singing bass in the home of Joanne on Mercury Drive in the North Star neighborhood area. 

Margaret Love was superb on the harp, such artistry. 

For a number of weeks now, Charla Larrimore, a '75 grade of DHS (who I do not remember) and a graduate of Stanford University, who lives in Hawaii, has been carrying on this dialogue with me via FB messaging that concerns "fortunetelling" through words ending in "mancy". She is brilliant and funny and her last one, sent late this evening as I walked Dancer behind Mealey Funeral Home, is "pedomancy" or fortunetelling  by the soles of one's feet. My response, which is a given, followed.

Met and got to have a nice conversation with one of the "Y" trainers, Mary, this evening during an extended workout. She located my water bottle and said it was about to go in the trash. Later, I misplaced my workout sheet and clipboard, a common occurrence that I shared with her (years ago a photog had sketched a figure with my ID on it and the words, "looking for equipment (or something to that effect)". It hasn't diminished, e.g., my iPhone mania at least once a day and having to have mom's cell call me to find it in the house (go figure). Well, I digress, Mary is from Long Island, so I pulled up a Google map and got a taste of all the towns and parks and waterways (rivers and ponds) on the island and recalled the home of Nancy Johnson (Garden City). It is quite a spit of land with the upscale Hamptons along the coast, which were described by her. She has a daughter going to college in the city of New York, where she is perfectly at home. Nice person. Nice conversation.

How crazy for cats must one be before they're considered ailurophilia? I adore MY cat, but, of course, he's purrfect. We don't care for other cats, especially the 100 or more that hang at the dumpster--so afraid of falling there and being eaten by cats that I take Miss Cashmere with me and I give her the direction, "Watch my back. " Feral animals scare me. Here's the WFT, pedomancy: n. fortunetelling by the soles of the feet.

"Fear of being eaten by cats" .. hmmmm? ... there's got to be a term for that Charla. If not, we can come up with a neologism. "Fear of being eaten alive" is phagophobia but can also mean fear of swallowing or eating, too. But I digress, seriously, for it is onto "pedomancy", which makes absolutely perfect sense to me, for one should be able to tell the future from where one has been before and what better measure than our bipedalism. How human. And to be homophonic about it, they are the "souls" of our body.