more balderdash

i was on the train early this morning, headed for the airport and ran across a page of more of those balderdash-like words in my little notebook, so i made up a few more definitions.

aquallar - that luminous, transparent turquoise blue of the sea off boracay.

subedi - pockets of no cellular service when the metro goes underground.

vemputis - an uncontrollable tendency to wear black or nearly-black nail polish.

terysol - a spray which should be used to freshen the air outside of office buildings where smokers gather now that smoking inside isn't allowed.

epoide - the portion of a t.v. program that's shown between commercials.

pedinges - the small splashes of nail polish that get on the cuticle by mistake and must be removed with a brush wetted with nail polish remover by the nice nail girl.

jibist - one who makes out as if they had no idea what their underlings were doing. example: ken lay was the very epitome of a jibist in the enron scandal.

now, how are all of you doing on those assignments i gave you?

balderdash

for years and years every holiday, we played balderdash, a board game in which you make up definitions for real (but little-known) words and you try to write it so plausibly that everyone picks your answer and you advance on the board. you can also advance by picking the correct answer from among all of the definitions read. there was always a lot of laughter in the game and some people became known for the type of answers they wrote...i was always accused of anything russian-related and uncle jim was famous for ancient farm implements.

when you comment on some blogger blogs, there is a verification word that you have to type in (hint, hint, you would KNOW this if you were COMMENTING, people). of late, they must have changed the algorithm that generates these words because they are much more word-like than they used to be. so much so, that i've been writing them down for a few weeks now, waiting for inspiration to strike and to write a bunch of funny definitions. here's what i came up with this morning:

cringo: i was going to say that it's what you do when you see a WTF Wednesday posting like this one, but upon further reflection, i think it's a curly-haired white person in mexico.

rhorifer:  a filter which clears away boring conversations like "do any of you ever use the highest temperature wash on your washing machine?" at dinner parties. i'm looking into a portable version of one of these.

domit: a small home constructed in the garden to attract hedgehogs.

menwisms:  the all-too-seldom clever utterance or observation by the male of the species. as in husband's statement last week while watching news of california wildfires on CNN that it so typical of americans to participate in global warming in such an extreme way.

brapigic:  that itchy feeling you get when you've just taken off an ill-fitting bra.

mismar:  to accidentally get caught in the waves and get the bottom of your pant legs all wet.

kajushin:   spontaneous squatting.

quinort:  an orangey-colored moss found at the foot of evergreens in the forest.  can be brewed into a healthy (if somewhat bitter) tea.

those who have played balderdash at our house will recognize "spontaneous squatting," as one of the all-time funniest balderdash answers ever written. and to be honest, i don't even remember who wrote it, i just remember laughing myself silly.

and now, to help get YOU writing, two assignments:

1.  what games do you remember playing?
2.  write definitions for some of these blogger verification words (bear in mind, they are not real words, they just LOOK like real words, more or less):  relfulsi, diderest, coses, subbeacc, fazedyma, amemat, fulmor, stion, dialomp, hamerfut, hinisha, frilsha, chollnes, hialigge, rensitr

i look forward to seeing what you all come up with. yes, ALL of you. especially you there. :-)

on vets

veterans day was this week.  when i was a kid, veterans were a bunch of old guys in long-outgrown uniforms, reminiscing about the old days. today, they are young people, fathers and mothers, who spend harrowing months away from their families in a desert.

as a kid, i marveled that vets had their own day. i did wonder why so many of those old guys dressed up and celebrated a day that was, in my view, only for uncle red, him being the only vet i knew. it took me years to realize it meant veteran and not veterinarian.

snow days

i remember one particular snow day when i was in the 4th grade. i wasn't supposed to go to school because we were going up to pierre to visit dad in the legislature. it was snowing like mad and mom decided not to make the drive. however, school was NOT dismissed and although i was going to be at least 2 hours late for school and no one was expecting me, mom made me go. and she made me walk, it being too dangerous to drive (but apparently fine for a 4th grader to walk the whole way across town).

i remember trudging through the snow from our house on the west side of town, dragging my feet, dreading getting there so late. by the time i got there, i had myself pretty upset and worried about being several hours late. i think i was pretty much in tears by the time arrived. i remember that mrs. petersen said my being late was no problem, they hadn't been expecting me anyway, thinking i was going to pierre.

i wonder why school wasn't let out with all that snow that day? they always said that if mr. walker could see his black house across the street from his office then it wasn't snowy enough to call off school. i suppose he could still see it that day, tho' it was apparently too snowy for mom to drive me across town.

p.s. the picture above isn't from that day, it's from a couple of weeks ago when i was in oslo. it was just the snow picture i had at hand.

The C-Word

Hello Nachtigal's:

Sorry to have been out of touch. A new adventure called colon cancer has occupied me since late June. I certainly never anticipated venturing on this path and it has at times been very rough on me physically and yet laden with blessings. I relay this information in the hope that all of you nearing 50 will get your colonoscopies promptly.

Evidently I should have had one at age 42-44, when my tumor would have been just a polyp. Two different oncologists have told me that I must have an underlying genetic tendency for my body to have manifested this at my current age of 52. Neither of my folks can think of any family members who succumbed to the disease, although when my dad was out visiting recently he said that Uncle Jim thought that possibly their Grandpa and Grandma Sabin died of some form of cancer. Back then I'm sure people just didn't know what was actually making them sick.

In an effort to spare you the gory details I will just say that I'm glad that the six weeks of combined radiation and chemotherapy I finished on October 6 is behind me. My mom had to (once again...this is my third abdominal surgery in four years) came out to take care of me once I got really sick in September. I have a port implanted in my chest that expedites the delivery of chemo. In the first phase I wore a pump on my waist that delivered the chemo drug 5FU (appropriate acronym) into my veins 24/7. My world-class medical team at The Nevada Cancer Institute gave me a glorious respite from treatment after finishing the first course. My body recovered quickly (no doubt due to that strong prairie stock heritage). I began my latest course of chemo a week ago today. I get a two-hour infusion of two chemo drugs Oxaliplatin and Leucovorin on Monday and then they saddle me with the pump (loaded with 5FU) and send me home. I return on Wednesday for pump removal. Then it seems I get really sick (nausea can mostly be controlled by medication) and feel like I've been hit by a truck for 2 1/2 days. By Sunday I was mostly recovered. I am currently in a blessed week free of treatment. Next Monday I will return to the Nevada Cancer Institute to do it all again (I should finish the 11 treatments by the first week in April).

My brother Jerry is a survivor of non-Hodgkins lymphoma and he is cancer-free now for a few years. Jerry was very private and stoic about his treatment and recovery. He says he got tired of talking about being sick. He once mused that he may have been exposed to toxic chemicals when he and Dad ventured over to Molokai to work on some test plots. I don't suppose we will ever know what exactly caused our cancers. Envirotoxins are certainly a likely possibility.

I understand that there is a DNA test just created that will allow everyone (for $399) to examine their DNA along with all the genetic tendencies of likes and dislikes, allergies and aversions and propensity to illness. It would be interesting to see what the Nachtigal DNA dictates.

The very good news is that my doctors have given me an 85% chance of full recovery with no reocurrence of the colon cancer, and as someone who lives in the gambling mecca of the world I will gladly take those odds.

I know that nobody likes to hear about the C-word so thanks for indulging me in reading my little story. Life is precious every day. I can cry at the drop of a hat now because my heart overflows and spills out through my eyes when I think about how much I love my precious Dad and Mom and how blessed I am in so many ways.

Cherish every day.

Love, Nancy

cousins julie & gisel are fishin' for stories

Julie is right! We need more relatives participating in our family blog! So, this is an invitation to all aunties, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews and friends of the family - we need your input!

HOW TO POST: E-mail Julie for a link to post. You will have to open a google account, but this is free and easy to do. If you need any technical assistance, call me and I can talk you through it. Julie's e-mail and my phone number are on page one of the family newsletter. We're looking forward to expanding our contributors and continuing to share family stories, photos and fun.

Funny story I heard

My friend from South Dakota was telling me about his mother-in-law who lives in Sioux Falls. An older lady, she's had a couple of strokes and is not one to listen to doctors' advice. When she was recovering from the first stroke the doctor was trying to determine the severity of the damage. He asked her if she knew who freed the slaves. "Janklow" she promptly replied.

of dialogues and polemic

i was asked in a message on my wall on facebook to remove the political postings i put on this blog and to post something warm and fuzzy. i'd like to write here about why i'm not going to do that. as i see it, a very big part of why i have grown up with strong political leanings is due to being a nachtigal. nachtigals are political and i know that some nachtigals are even republicans--why not be one if you can afford it, right? my dad always said that he was hoping and striving to be a republican himself one day...as soon as he had made enough money. we're still working on that in our branch of the family.

so, it seemed natural to me to write about politics and share political articles of interest on our family blog during this most important and historic election in at least a generation (certainly in my lifetime). the purpose of a blog is to be very immediate...so i shared my immediate reactions to videos and articles i saw as the campaign progressed. what i had HOPED would happen is that if other nachtigals reading this blog (all two of them) didn't agree, they would post something themselves and engage in an argument--presenting another side. because in this case, there was only one side that i could defend. i hoped that other articulate nachtigals, even if i disagreed with them, might at least post their reactions to my postings in the comments.

that did not happen. there could be a number of reasons:

1. no one is reading.
2. people don't care.
3. everyone agreed with me (unlikely).
4. the technology is beyond those nachtigals reading this blog.
5. people didn't have an opinion about this important election (i could scarcely make myself type that one).

i don't know what the reason was, but i will say that i am disappointed that no one engaged and even more disappointed to be asked to take down postings. this election is a part of all of our stories and to edit it out can only be an echo of what became acceptable to us during the past 8 years. 

i'd love to know what my fellow nachtigals are thinking and feeling about this election. so please, use the comments or send me a mail and i'll add you as an author on this blog.  what i'm thinking and feeling about it is a tremendous sense of relief and hope for the future. i can feel as well that my pride in being american (which had definitely been in hiding) is returning...i think that tomorrow when i'm standing in line at passport control in manila, i will not be hiding my passport away until the last minute as had become my custom. i don't feel ashamed to be an american anymore. and that's something special. 

i hope you'll share your reactions here. and i hope you'll also understand why i do not intend to remove any of the political postings i did here in the weeks up to the election.

snow days

I read this morning on Facebook.com that cousin Monica's boys are having a snow day today in Iowa City. Just the words "snow day" bring back so many wonderful South Dakota memories:

*Listening to WNAX radio station as the school closings were rattled off. Hoping to hear "Platte School District".
*Mom couln't get us out of bed for school on a normal day, but on a snow day when there was NO school, we'd launch out of bed at the crack of dawn.
*Eating hot Cream of Wheat with grape jelly toast. (We loved the lumps in the Cream of Wheat. We would demand that it not be stirred during the cooking process to insure the lumps).
*Running to the window for a look outside - making nose and hand prints; usually there was ice on the inside of the window.
*Cracking out the Monopoly game. We would play with several sets of money. The games lasted for hours. There was always a fight over who got the Scottie dog marker. We'd put the money collected from Chance, Community Chest and Get-Out-Of-Jail "in the middle" to be won for landing on "Free Parking". (Now that I live in California, I realize there is no free parking, but I digress). No one ever would put the game away when it was all over.
*Getting Dad to pull us on a sled tied to the back of his pick-up truck. (You know, people, this is not all that safe.) I remember cries of "faster faster" and then watching wide-eyed as we'd accelerate towards UNDER the truck when he had to slow down or stop. (No, not really that safe at all).
*Going to Platte Lake to sled down the lake hill on the West side of the lake.
*Watching the snow plow go by and marvelling at how wide the spray could be and how tall the snow mounds piled up.
*Going outside for a big chase game of tag on wheel-shaped circular paths we trudged out of the snow. The center was the "safe zone".
*Making snow forts.
*Snowball fights.
*Icicles sparkling in the sun and later, melting - dripping water onto the porch.
*Hearing the phone ring for Dad, the town veterinarian - some unlucky farmer usually had a calf or cow in some type of distress. Wondering how Dad was going to make it there.

I'd love to be there today for a snow day! Dibs on the Scottie dog.

thought for the day....

get out there and do the right thing!