Words on Wednesday

Hello all,

I've been trying to get into a habit of posting more consistently here at Little Fiddly Bits, whether I'm posting as an editor or just in general. In my head I've been calling it "Words on Wednesday", which is admittedly a little cheesy, but then I try to convince myself to clean the house with "Mundane Monday", so, there ya go.

Not much on the editing front today, except that the world seems out to get me with the constant misuse of the words "rein" and "reign". The second one means rule of a kingdom. Think "regnum" which is Latin for kingdom. The first one is what you use to steer a horse. You do not give someone "free reign". You do not "reign someone in" when they get too crazy. You do, however, "reign supreme." Can we all please just embrace this and stop putting all over everything I read? I'd be really grateful.

I have two henna gigs this weekend, which is unprecedented given that it's only he beginning of March. Henna doesn't usually start up for me until May at the earliest. So. Yay! Now I just need to mix up a fresh batch of paste, rather than using last year's. There is generally nothing wrong with using last year's henna, but this time around my final batch didn't turn out right and didn't do much for clients anywhere other than their hands. Which was disappointing, given that I'd mixed it up for a cancer patient to do on her scalp, and we ended up with hardly any color. So I'm going to give that stuff away for free to people who are curious about trying henna, warn them that it's not very dark, and let them have fun.

I freaked my daughter out yesterday, accidentally. She'd been cheerfully humming "The Hall of the Mountain King" while she puttered, just quietly going "bum-bum-bum-bum Bum bum Bum, Bum bum Bum, Bum bum Bum" and I recognized it and brought it up on Youtube for her to listen to... yeah. She didn't know that it turned into the orchestral equivalent of a heavy-metal mosh pit halfway in, and she gets emotionally affected by music the same way I do, so it was like forcing her to watch a horror movie. I felt terrible.

Then I told her the story of a friend of mine who, back in high school, was in the marching band , at a football game, and his team wasn't doing well, and he was bored, so he fired up the tuba and just quietly started going "bum-bum-bum-bum Bum bum Bum" etc... See, "Hall of the Mountain King" sounds amazing on tuba. And the rest of the marching band was also bored. And they got into it. And they got louder. And their football team heard them and also got into it, and started hitting harder. And the game kinda turned around from that point. Once my daughter was laughing, we turned the music back on again and she listened to it a second time and decided that it was pretty awesome, as long as she could pretend to be a dwarf with a hammer and chisel and go pound things. Which, let's face it, is pretty much what that piece of music is for.

That's pretty much it for my words on Wednesday. Got a deadline to meet for someone presenting a PhD thesis, first time working on one of those. Novel length, only nonfiction and with bigger words. And I'm writing fanfic again, I've got a chapter I need to clean up and post. If you're curious, I'll only tell you that I like Loki far too much to be healthy.

Have a great week!