My walk was the walk of a human child, but my heart was a tree.

I like goats. They are beautiful animals which keep the grass short and eat leftovers and provide milk and protect your house. I would have a goat if I could, but my borough has a rule against them. Still, two goaty things have happened to me recently: firstly, ghoti was taught how to groom goats by a clone of me. Then today at St Mark's, I talked to naamah for the first time, who is a very thoughtful, sunshiney sort of person, and she had a blessed stuffed toy nanny-goat who lived in her purse. The wonderful thing is that at St Mark's she can keep her sitting on the shelf in front of her, and nobody will think "How ridiculous, to keep a blessed stuffed goat on the shelf next to you!" I like places where that can happen. And I think everyone should have a blessed stuffed goat, or at least an equivalent. I wish I knew where my squirrel has gone. :/

I had to go in by bus this morning, because Sharon wasn't working today. Nargery: I did a little bit more work on the SEIU's site (every so often there's a couple of lines here and there to tinker with), and tried to fix a bug desh found, and tried to learn perl-tk for the new GUI (yes, I would have preferred GTK, but it had already had a lot of work done when I joined that project). On the train home, I reviewed a patch Thomas Andersen had made, which took the whole journey because it introduced a warning that needed tracking down. This is the first time I'd used the (rather obvious in hindsight) method of running metacity inside gdb (but pointing at an Xnest) to get a backtrace, and it worked very well. End nargery.

Also, my sandals broke. Big time. The left sole is cracked right across. firinel and smreigner came to pick me up from Norristown, and we went to a shop to buy some more sandals (I have some nice new ones which didn't cost very much now). And while we were there it poured and thundered and lightninged, so we stayed there and ate biscuits. There were diaries with large initial letters on, and I hung around rearranging them to spell things out. Poor Fin got pretty sunburnt the other day, and I keep randomly stroking zir shoulder as I walk past, which causes zir to wince in pain. I must learn to keep it verbal for a while.

A lot of this post makes me rather sad— not the liturgical stuff, but the U and non-U things like escargot and puff shells. The whole point of the Episcopal church is that it's catholic in the full sense of that word, it's supposed to be a church for everyone, and not just people who know which fork to use. All that that sort of stereotype does is make people feel alienated, and keeps them away. (I am glad to be part of a church where you can discuss things afterwards over a beer, though.)

Since two of you have asked me tonight what "nargery" means, I thought I would tell you the story. It's a Cambridge word.

Once upon a time at Cambridge (so the story goes), before the days of state-subsidised tuition, there were two kinds of people you might meet. There were the gentlemen, the sons of the gentry and nobility, who were at the university because they could afford to be. They were often not very interested in academic work, preferring to spend their time rowing and hunting and gambling at Newmarket.

There were also the people who were there on scholarships because they loved their subjects, worked hard, and were fanatical about what they did. They would even talk about their subject in fascinated tones outside of lectures and tutorials— even, perhaps, at parties! The gentlemen of leisure looked down on these students, of course: they would call such a person a "narg", because he was Not A Real Gentleman.

So as time went on, people who talked shop outside the times when it was necessary were called nargs, doing so was narging, and the practice of indecently talking about your subject in public is nargery. Along with the great majority of compscis, I am particularly commonly guilty of it.

Does that make sense? firinel points out that it's even in the Jargon File.