I missed yesterday, in case anyone noticed. I cooked a lot (guests for dinner) and then I talked a lot (one of the guests stayed and we finished the bottle), and by the time I cleaned up and started the dishwasher it was 10 to 12, only ten minutes left to blog...so I went to bed. (I made shrimp gumbo, in case anyone wants to know, and buttermilk cornbread and spinach salad with Clementines.) And I slept well.

So here I am, blog-less. I don't feel like writing. I feel like scunging. I had to insist on that word; the predictive editor wanted to change it to skunking. So I looked it up and it's not in the online dictionary. Oh dear...

So I started looking in my dictionaries, of which I own a number. I started with a couple of esoteric ones; The Endangered English Dictionary: Bodacious Words Your Dictionary Forgot, ed. David Grambs (W.W. Norton, 1994); and Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words, ed. Josefa Heifetz Byrne (University Books, Inc., 1974). Not there, but I had to stop and enjoy a few. Then I went to the big guns: my big two-volume, magnifying-glass edition of the OED -- nope. But the Supplement, Volume III and get your own magnifying glass, had scunge (alt.spelling skunge). It didn't have quite the same meaning that I apply to it. The copy refers one to sponge or scrounge as similar, and the meaning, to live off someone else is close but not quite.

My father used scunge to describe, that is, to accuse me of lying about doing nothing - on a day off, I might add, when scunging was admissible. If it was, indeed, a day off, then the accusation was playful. If it wasn't, then GET UP! I guess I was scrounging, at that. After all, I was living at home and he was supporting me. So, back to scunge. Now I'm the one supporting me and I'm harder on me than my father ever was. It's called self-castigation. I looked that up, too.

Castigation is related to chastity and it involves some punishment, self-administeed. Anyway, this is from the online dictionary:

"Self-castigation is applied by the repentant culprit to himself, for moraland/or religious reasons, notably as penance."

That's what I get for skunking. Scunging, that is.

I'm not really ready to write this but there are only two and a half hours left of this day so I will try.

I met, by prearrangement, a friend whom I last saw on 9/11, 2001 - really. As you can see, the date was not hard to remember. Where were you that day? He didn't know I was coming so he took a moment to focus on this grinning old woman obviously waiting for him to say something. He recovered beautifully and what's more, he recognized me. At my age such a reunion doesn't happen very often. I've said before that I feel like a duck in a shooting gallery with all the ducks around me being picked off, one by one. This particular duck is younger than I (everyone is), and much better looking. He has a new (to me) Significant Other; it was she who arranged our meeting. I told you, he's younger than I. I'm past all that and relieved, if anything. Men are very time-consuming.

So: how do you fill in fourteen years in a two-hour conversation? The fill-in was not as much fun as the memories of the years before the last one. Some of them were, of course, identical, or similar, but others acted as catalysts or corollaries to our personal data. Amazing!

Yes, amazing, and I have not yet assimilated it. I'll sleep on it, see what happens. It was a wonderful day, and that's my blog for today.