various

Several things that are too small for one post:

1. I am the proud owner of this t-shirt from cafépress!
Thank you, Stacy, for alerting me to that wonderful website.

2. Recently I have been reading the dictionary. I am nerdy, yes, but this is such a cool dictionary! I invested in a dictionary which is about the size of one of those big old family Bibles. Besides thousands of words, it has word history, editorial notes by experts (eg Richard Dawkins on evolution), usage notes, et cetera. These are some of my favourite words so far:

dybbuk (n.) /'dibek/ In Jewish folklore, an evil spirit that inhabits the body of a living person.

finagle (v.) /fi'naygl/ 1. to manage to obtain something using trickery or persistence. 2. to trick somebody into doing what one wants.

zeugma (n.) /'zyoohgma/ The use of a word to modify or govern two or more words, used in such a manner that it applies to each in a different sense. e.g. She opened the door and her heart to him.

3. I have been enjoying a blog called Pilgrim's Progress. This is the product of a family of two parents, eight kids and a grandad from New Zealand who are travelling the world on a budget for a year - they started in October 2008 and will be back in September 2009. Destinations are, broadly, South East Asia, Mongolia, the UK, Europe... with other places as possibilities to tack onto the end of it. They were recently in Penang, Malaysia, where they hung out for a day with my brother and his family, who passed on the URL to me. Read this blog if you like being amazed and envious.