Short decorative bushes topped in a heavy layer of ice

A small row of bushes in a parking lot, encased in thick icicles on their lower half.

You really gotta be careful about automatic sprinklers in April around here.

Yeah it was really good training. I also caught up on all my grading, prepped and printed everything for Monday, talked to two colleagues about how to handle some students who need various support, and remembered to eat & take meds on time. I'm such an adult today! Heading home to play video games.

What's your wolf name, etc

Genuinely excited for this morning's two hour training session. It's part two of the trauma training! Title: "Responding to Distressed Behavior: Understanding Behavior as a dysregulated nervous system."

Also there's good coffee and snacks again. Trainings never provide coffee and snacks!

Tried to note to my spouse, while on my commute, that the dog should be taken out soon because there might be a thunderstorm at noon. Autocorrect turned that into "moon thunderstorm" repeatedly.

I think that would be much bigger news if it were on the forecast.

He's met smaller dogs before! But shorter dogs who are equally long? /Wild/.

Adverb got to sniff a proper actual miniature dachshund through the fence of the dog run, and that was very exciting for him. For once, a dog with shorter legs than him! Pretty similar length though.

On the plus side, the student I pointed at ACOUP because they asked for help with research for an Ancient Rome military strategy game reported back today sounding rather pleased. ("There are a lot of cat pictures on that site," they noted.) I'll take the wins I can get.

Let's just say I sometimes become keenly aware of how white I am when I'm standing in front of a class that's mostly not and saying "Okay but I think it's important to realize this portrayal is awfully racist, kids!" while I gesture toward an awkward timeline of Greco-Roman Egypt on the projector.

If your toaster starts working like this website today, report it to us on SaferProducts.gov.

I don't think I did a bad job, given available time and student level and such. But I'm sure it could have been done better by folks with a finer skill at discussing sensitive topics. (I definitely could have done better with half an hour and a room of undergrads who chose to take the class.)

Today in my afternoon classes I tried to explain the skeeziness of how ethnic conflict in Alexandria is portrayed in the Cambridge series (though I believe the new edition is better?) and its relationship to Romans perceived greeks, and greeks perceived Egyptians, in that time and place, and... oof.

My phone refused to log into bluesky for a few days, and while that may have been useful in some ways, it means I haven't been babbling about my enjoyment of this Iskyrne trilogy reread, alas. Very good books. And it's been ages since my last reread so I get to be surprised at some parts again.

I really adore this series. It's been way too long since I read them, but that's mostly because I got them in hardcover, and these days I do all my reading in bits and pieces during the bus commute, so mostly on my phone. So I finally got them all in ebook too.

(A very typical scene opening set of names: "Grimolfr and Hrolleif were very careful about balancing the patrols between older wolves and younger. Isolfr noticed that Sokkolfr and Hroi counted as “older” for these purposes...")

I mean, I have a terrible time with the names, because there are many humans (a handful of which change their names for cultural reasons after a few chapters) and most of them are bonded to wolves who also have names, and it's fricatives + glides everywhere. But that's on me. They're good names.

Goodness I find these books so satisfying. They're full of blood and mud and trauma and horrors (and sometimes beard lice), and yet they're somehow comfortable rereads for me. Even the tragedies are written so properly for the setting and the people within them.

The pass didn't work on the morning bus, bit it worked on the afternoon one. They say to give it 24 hours to activate, and while it's always faster than that IME, "within ten minutes" was apparently too fast to ask for.

Realized five minutes before I walked out the door that I hadn't renewed my monthly bus pass, which expired Friday. Oops. Load, little website, load!

<eyes bus schedule>

Load /faster/.

Tempted though I am to jump into my next read (fiction, with a reread of the Bear & Monette trilogy that starts with A Companion to Wolves, because I hanker to reread the third, Apprentice to Elves, and it's been ages), I should probably direct myself toward Latin & pedagogy & promptness.

"agent \ˈā-jənt\ n -s : a person who acts as a representative for someone (such as an artist, writer, or athlete) and encourages, protects, advises, or kicks the ass of their client <Without my agent, Heather Schroder of Compass Talent, this book would never have gotten off the ground.>"

...the acknowledgements are presented as dictionary entries (alphabetical, of course) with example sentences. Perfect.

"Business considerations aside, it is the damnedest thing to spend your career in the company of this gorgeous, lascivious language. We don’t do the work for the money or prestige; we do it because English deserves careful attention and care."

The epilogue deals with layoffs and commerce and the internet, so it's rather sad. But still good.

A thoroughly enjoyable book. Which should probably be clear from how much quoting I did after declaring I wasn't gonna do a giant thread on this one like I did for True Color.

"Removing racial slurs from the dictionary will not eliminate racism; removing “injustice” from the dictionary will not bring about justice. If it were really as easy as that, don’t you think we would have removed words like “murder” and “genocide” from the dictionary already?"

Presumably there are multiple good reasons, that one being among them. But I've studied it even less than the lexicographer who answered that question.

Okay that's pretty funny.

On write-in campaigns aimed at dictionaries:

"They believe that if we make a change to the dictionary, then we have made a change to the language, and if we make a change to the language, then we also make a change to the culture around that language."

But it doesn't work like that.

"An e-mail program crash could mean only one of two things: (1) the servers and building were on fire or flooded, or (2) there was a write-in campaign afoot. I rebooted my computer and fervently prayed for number 1 to be the case."

This chapter is on defining "marriage" so you can guess which.