Reverse Latin!

It was a busy day, my sister and brother in law are visiting, and we leave Saturday for the annual gaming weekend in College Station. So today, I bring you Reverse Latin!

My Latin is almost nonexistent. I took one semester about ten years ago in college, from which I retained a small, hazy vocabulary and zero grammar. Watch me translate the Salve Regina primarily from word association!

Salve Regina, Mater Misericordiae. Salve, to my fuzzy recollection means health, so it probably corresponds to hail. Regina and mater are both common in English. Regina is a girl’s name meaning queen, mater obviously means mother. Misericordiae, by process of elimination is mercy.

Vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra salve. Vita makes me think of vitality, so it must be life. Dulcedo must be sweetness, derived from dulche de leche. Spes, therefore is hope. Et I remember from Latin, and nostra is our, very similar to the French and Spanish.

Ad te clamamus exules filii Evae. Evae must be Eve since it’s capitalized. Ad and te are more bits of remembered vocabulary, to and you. Clamamus reminds me of clamor, it could be cry. Exules is then left to be banished or exiled.

Ad suspiramus gementes et flentes, in hac lacrimarum valle. Suspiramus must be a verb, ending like clamamus does, so it’s ‘send up’. In hac is ‘in this’, also remembered vocabulary. Lacrimarum must be tears because tears are made by the lacrimal gland. Valle is obviously valley. That leaves ‘gementes et flentes’ which I am just going to collectively translate as ‘sighs, mourning, and weeping’.

Eia ergo, advocata nostra, illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte. I’m not sure about eia or illos, but they doesn’t seem entirely necessary. Ergo is therefore, but probably works as ‘then’. Advocata is clearly advocate. Tuos, I think is your. Misericordes must be another form of mercy. Oculos is eyes, from ocular. Converte fits best as turn.

Et Iesum benedictum fructum ventri tui nobis, post hoc exsilium, ostende. Iesum is Jesus, based its capital I and the scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indy nearly falls because he forgets there’s no J in the Latin alphabet. Benedictum must be ‘blessed’ the English benediction means blessing. Fructum reminds me of fructose, the predominant sugar in ‘fruit’. Tui is like tuos. Ventri is probably womb, it reminds me of ventral. Post hoc is ‘after this’, more remembered vocabulary. Exilium is obviously exile. That leaves ostende for ‘show unto’ and nobis as us.

O clemens, o pia, o dulcis Virgo Maria! Clemens must be clement. Pia I think is a feminine form of pious. Dulcis is like the earlier dulcedo, so it’s sweet. Virgo Maria is plainly Virgin Mary.

Wasn’t that fun?

Engagement Rings

I found my engagement ring yesterday.

It wasn’t ever lost, it has sat demurely in my jewelry box for… I don’t know. Years.

Officially, I stopped wearing it because one of the prongs had gotten bent and I didn’t want to lose the diamond. Unofficially, I stopped wearing it because I always had to take it off at work – solitary set diamonds do a terrible number on nitrile gloves.

But as I looked at it yesterday, I realized I was never really attached to it. It was a placeholder. And, hey, it’s shiny. And it has a story of an incredibly endearing, highly typical Mike-ism – he bought it without inquiring as to the size of the ring, without even considering ring size might be an issue until he was sliding it on my left hand… and it fit perfectly.

Looking at it, I feel vaguely bad over how much that ring cost him. I could never make up my mind what type of engagement ring I liked best. Looking back, I think it wasn’t important to me. Not like our wedding bands, which I knew were ours the moment I saw them on the webpage.

(For a hoot, I went and looked those bands up again. Wow, they’ve almost doubled in price. Apparently the vender’s gotten trendy.)

It was an odd thing, finding our wedding bands. I recognized them on that webpage like we’d been married fifty years. There were other rings I liked, some that I liked better, but none other that I recognized. I’ve never experienced anything like it.

Jewelry

A couple weeks ago the GeekHusband asked what I would like for Valentine’s Day. Now we don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day with elaborate gifts, we have our own custom, so I assumed he was joking and told him I wanted jewelry.

And this created a certain amount of… not injured feelings I guess, but I think he felt rather put upon. He doesn’t give me jewelry because he thinks I don’t want jewelry and won’t wear it. Which is true in one sense and not in another. I don’t wear jewelry because he doesn’t give me any, and he doesn’t give me any because I don’t wear it a lot. It’s the devil of all romantic catch-22s.

I don’t wear a lot of jewelry, I usually wear the same thing every day. But now that I think about it, he’s given me every piece of what I wear daily, with the exception of my Aggie ring.

I am mournful, not because he doesn’t buy me jewelry, but because he doesn’t seem to want to buy me jewelry. It rather inhibits romance, there’s no sense of being “draped with jewels that I might adorn them with my beauty.” What results is that I don’t know whether he thinks I’m beautiful, and I don’t really believe him when he calls me beautiful, because if he thought I was beautiful, why wouldn’t he treat me like I was?

It doesn’t boil down to “why doesn’t he spend more money on me” so much as “why doesn’t he help me feel more feminine?” Because I’m not good at feminine. I don’t instinctively go and dress up prettily in nice clothes and jewelry. I wear jeans and sneakers and labcoats all day. And a little help now and then would go a long, long way.

So, dear, that’s what I think I meant when I said I wanted jewelry.

All things have their End

Yesterday I found out something that has made me sadder than I’ve been in a long, long time. Teresa Wentzler has closed the doors of her needlework design business, TW Designworks.

I am glad, very glad, more glad than I can describe, that her patterns will still be available from PatternsOnline.com, at least as long as they will sell them. But we will never see Illuminata, now. Or the Miniature Spring and Summer Samplers.

I discovered her designs in college, with Footprints. It was the first large project I ever attempted. It was the first large project that I ever found the finished work so beautiful that I couldn’t bear it but had to attempt it. And while I still haven’t finished it (I made an unfortunate fabric choice), I have finished other designs of hers, large and small.

Everything she designed was wonderful to me, even those things that aren’t at all to my taste, and there many*, are done with such wonder and color and imagery that they hurt to experience. They are lovely, but difficult, and I am inconsistent in application, so I have not finished all that I would have liked.

I’ve learned a great deal from stitching her designs. I’ve learned new and exotic specialty stitches, nun stitch to finish edges in particular is a delight. I’ve learned to appreciate colors that in my youth I would have skipped over, disdaining as ugly. I’ve learned to hate confetti but rejoice in the results. I’ve learned about balance and composition. And I’ve learned how very hard it is to take a picture from the mind, to the paper, to the grid.

I am working on a project that is possibly too ambitious for me, designing and stitching and Advent calendar. But her work was its direct inspiration. And when I finish it, I will send her the pictures and the chart, because without her, I would not have dreamed needlework this lovely to be possible.

* Purely as a matter of taste, I prefer my dragons large and dangerous and dripping with flame and fearsomeness – because the best use of dragons in fairy tales is to know that they may be overcome. TW’s larger dragons tend to be too cute for these tastes. It hasn’t stopped me from appreciating her little dragons.

Angst

The last three months have just kicked my butt.  In that time, I have:

• temporarily moved into my parent’s house (more on that later)
• gone back to work part time
• put all of our junk in a storage unit
• left the apartment complex we’ve lived in since we got married
• caught a cold
• had Thanksgiving
• finished the baptismal gown
• baptized GeekBaby
• developed a sinus infection from said cold
• spent 16 hours in a car traveling to and from Los Suegros for Christmas
• spent New Year’s Eve with my parents (i.e. at ‘home’)
• spent another 3 hours in a car traveling to see GeekBaby’s godparents (and our goddaughter) on New Year’s Day
• GeekBaby caught a (different) cold
• went back to work, again

I’ve been rather busy.  And in the meanwhile, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just not angsty enough to have a blog.  Even when the pastor of the church where GeekBaby was baptized dropped another two babies on my deacon friend with an hour’s notice, even when I had a sinus infection and was miserable, I got no solace from blogging (and obviously didn’t bother).

I swallowed my pride and we moved in with my parents at the beginning of November.  This let me go back to work while my  mom watched GeekBaby, but it also got us out of a frustrating rent situation.  They were raising our rent (again), to the point that it just wasn’t worth staying at the complex.  But that meant we had to move, which meant I probably couldn’t walk to work anymore, and The Husband doesn’t want to go back to this particular HS next year because the teaching environment is completely unsupportive, only if he gets a teaching job in College Station next year, we’ll still have 3 months left on our lease here in Houston, and it’s just all messed up.  Staying with my parents lets us get onto a better lease-renewing cycle, and save all that rent money for a house.

Because that’s the other problem, we would like to have our own place eventually, but every time we got really on top of everything, our rent would go up.  So this living arrangement lets us move towards a house of our own.  We’ve made it through the first two months, so we can probably stick it out the remaining six.  But damn, does my pride stick in my craw.