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I can't believe I forgot - this weekend, through the end of May 29, Glimpses is completely free!  Just click on the sidebar of the blog to get to it.  (And let me know what you think!)

Etymology: Fusty

As this past week has been uneventful, I thought I'd do my fallback of looking at the etymology of a word.

The word for the day (week? month?) is fusty.  It's one of those words I came across a long time ago (I don't remember where), and I keep those in a file and just add on as I stumble upon more words I find interesting.

'Fusty' (also with the forms of 'fustier' and 'fustiest') is an adjective.  As defined by Dictionary.com:

         1) having a stale smell; moldy; dusty
         2) old-fashioned or out-of-date, as architecture, furnishings, or the like
         3) stubbornly conservative or old-fashioned; fogyish

(Fogyish is a bit of a fun word, too)

Its origins start in Latin, fustis, meaning staff or stick of wood.  Then, in Old French, you get fuist or fuste, meaning wine cask (which were made of wood).  In the late fourteenth century in France, the word fusté comes into play, which means 'tasting of the cork'.  As the wood would take on the smell of the wine, the word 'fusty' came to refer to the stale smell of the wine-scented wood.  Full circle back to the Latin!

It doesn't take too much imagination to see where the references to something (or someone) being out-of-date comes from there, does it? 😊

Regularly-Scheduled Life

I'm finally getting to be back in my regular schedule this weekend, although after missing a couple weeks of dancing led to me actually having to take a nap after class (instead of just considering doing so).

I did spend a few hours beforehand wandering around the mall with a friend before, but I don't think that wore me down that much :).

Part of my regular weekend schedule is going to my bi-weekly writer's group on Sunday afternoons.  I might've mentioned them before, but we first met doing NaNoWriMo a few years ago, and someone decided to keep it up.  It was initially just monthly, and we've expanded in the last year or so to twice a month.  It's been a great way for me to keep up on my writing, and I have to admit that some months, the only time I do any writing at all is during those three hour sessions.

I'm currently working on a short story challenge for a contest.  I've got until the end of June to finish it.  The way this challenge works is there's about a dozen art pieces (paintings and photos), and you pick one to write a story of 2000-5000 words inspired by the artwork.  Sounds fairly simple (I've done the same thing, for poetry, in a writing class), until I looked at the artwork and realized that all the pieces are modern, real-world, non-quirky images.

I don't write reality; it's not really my thing.  I gave it a go with a couple of different pictures, but finally decided that I'm a fantasy writer (and abstract-y), I'd write fantasy.  So the story ended up being a mix of fantasy and reality, with the main character losing the ability to tell the difference between the two.  It's only a couple of sentences from being fully written (I haven't decided if I want the ending to be 'strange' or 'horror'), and then I'll have quite a bit of work to do for re-writing and editing it.  It kind of reads like I threw up on the page, at the moment (apologies for the visual :).  But really, it does!).   It's all a bit out of order, I think I'm leaving out certain important details, and there's very little dialogue.  Not necessarily a bad thing, I think, but it's something for me to consider.

I realized recently that a lot of my writing style is based off the older books I read growing up, like random philosophers (Plato, Alexis de Tocqueville), long lists of fairy tales and mythology, Frankenstein, Dracula, etcetera.  Books with very little dialogue.  I suppose the fairy tales saved me from habitually using paragraph-long sentences.   At any rate, it wasn't until I wrote a scene some years ago with five people talking in the same conversation that I actually learned how to write dialogue.  My first story - in it's current incarnation as Nightmare (one of the short stories in my book) - is an example of how I wrote before I figured out dialogue.

Inspirational Birthday Cake

At my workplace, a cake is brought in for each person's birthday (unless we have multiple people with birthdays at the same time).  It's a bit amusing that, over time, the cakes have gotten taller and taller.  More often lately they've been chocolate, but otherwise, they're usually pretty plain.  Which isn't a bad thing, mind.

I've mentioned before, I think, that I enjoy making fancy cakes.  So whenever I see a cake with something interesting, I make a note of it and how to do it myself.

As I said, these cakes are generally plain.  Layered chocolate cake, not too sweet, smooth frosting, perhaps some writing that says 'Happy Birthday'.  This one had three layers of cake and two layers of non-sweetened chocolate ganache.  It also had, within the ganache, pockets of liquid salted caramel.

I've tried to make cakes with caramel filling, but either they don't taste right or the filling is too hard.  The best caramel, in my opinion, is between soft and liquid.  I'm not sure how this was done.  It looked a bit like the ganache was placed on the cake and then spots removed and replaced with the liquid salted caramel.  The caramel was soaking into the cake layers above and below each.

As a result of the soaking, this cake tasted even better the next day, and by the second day, what remained of the cake was even more soaked in the caramel.  Generally speaking, cakes dry up, and by the end of day two, if there's any cake that remains, we have to throw the rest away.  None of this cake was thrown away :).

It's been a while since I made a cake, but the next time I do one, I definitely want to try this sort of thing.

Desert Retreat

I'm typing this post up as I'm sitting on a balcony of a hotel room, listening to the desert wind rush through palm trees, birds chirping, and water splashing against the rocks.

Where am I?  Well, I'm in a desert at a hotel, as you probably assume from the previous sentence.  A better question would likely be 'why'.  My workplace is paying for a weekend retreat.  They do this every year, about this time of year.  I missed the previous one by about two months.  (It's a little funny to think of how much time has passed since I started this job - ten months!  It doesn't feel half that long, and yet at the same time I feel like I've been there a long time.  Which is nice.)

It's a bit wild that the firm does this, though I think it's pretty cool.  I've never heard of a job that had that as one of the perks.  They pay for the hotel room (villa.  It's more like a mini-apartment, really) and dinner at a very nice restaurant.  Mind you, when I'm paying, very nice is, well, $20 a person.  So I'm looking forward to tonight's dinner.

I brought my sister with me, and she drove all hundred plus miles to get out here yesterday afternoon, which was great.  I'm not a fan of driving.  We haven't done much so far except avoid the heat (the temperature's a bit high for my taste) by shopping.  She needed a new bathing suit (there's a water slide here we're going to check out later), I forgot to bring sandals, and, as there's a kitchenette in our villa, we grabbed some food to cook for breakfast today, lunch, and breakfast tomorrow morning.

Our plans are a bit vague at this point (hit the water at some point), but the general theme is mainly just to chill.  If anything exciting happens, I'll probably put up an addendum blog, but otherwise, see you next week :)