This is for all the people I never got around to wishing happy-holiday-merry-xmas to in December. I didn’t get very far in the alphabet in my email directory and even less in my snail-mail roster. Next year I’ll start at zed.

I’m a W, usually among the last to be acknowledged. Once only, on a trip to China, I think it was in Xian and we were waiting for a plane to take us to (I’ll have to look it up). The little airport was way out of the city and there were no facilities like food, coffee, not even a lounge. There were no other people, just our group, waiting for one small (formerly Russian ) plane. We were going to be divided for two runs. I was bracing myself for the delay when our guide made a sudden decision: he reversed the order. He let the M-to-Z people on first. The A-to-M people would have to wait. They didn’t know how long that would be.

It was a short run, I remember. We arrived at our hotel room in plenty of time for dinner in the dining room. We had Mongolian Hot Pot at a special table designed for it. I had cooked Hot Pot before, but had never had it in China. I persuaded others to join me to make up the seating at the table (with a hot pot embedded in it ). We had a relaxed, leisurely, delicious, long dinner and only as we were leaving, we reaiized that the other half of our group had not yet shown up. And they didn’t, not for several hours after the dining room had closed.

It seems that the plane crew, on their return from taking us, were hungry and took a dinner break. But there were no facilities available in that remote little airport so they left and drove back into the city to eat and then returned hours later to deliver the rest of their (hungry) passengers to their destination.

That’s the only time in my life that I profited by being at the end of the alphabet. This year I will reverse the order of names in my directory and go backwards into this new year.

It’s about time.

Three fish (what was I reading?)

snook noun: a large edible game fish of the Caribbean which is sometimes found in brackish water.

gar noun: the freshwater garfish of North America.

shad noun (pl.same or shads): a herring-like fish that spends much of its life in the sea, typically entering rivers to spawn. It is an important food fish in many regions.

squamous adjective: covered with or characterized by scales: a squamous black hide.. ORIGIN late Middle English: from Latin squamosus, from squama ‘scale’.

imbricate chiefly Zoology & Botany verb: | [ with obj. ] (usu. as adj.imbricated): arrange (scales, sepals, plates, etc.) so that they overlap like roof tiles: these moulds have spherical bodies composed of imbricated triangular plates. • [ no obj. ] (usu. as adj.imbricating) overlap: a coating of imbricating scales. adjective: (of scales, sepals, plates, etc.) having adjacent edges overlapping.

nebulizer noun: a device for producing a fine spray of liquid, used for example for inhaling a medicinal drug. he needs to use a nebulizer to get drugs and oxygen to his lungs. ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from Latin nebula ‘mist’. [I thought this had something to do with outer space because I only knew the word nebula.]

Here’s two I get mixed up: oncology ontology

oncology noun: Medicine the study and treatment of tumours.

ontology noun: he branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being. ORIGIN early 18th cent.: from modern Latin ontologia, from Greek ōn, ont- ‘being’ + -logy.

necrotic / necrosis noun: necrosis, Medicine, the death of most or all of the cells in an organ or tissue due to disease, injury, or failure of the blood supply. DERIVATIVES necrotic adjective ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: modern Latin, from Greek nekrōsis (see necro-,-osis) .

menhir noun: a tall upright stone of a kind erected in prehistoric times in western Europe. ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from Breton men ‘stone’ + hir ‘long’.

vlog and vlogger I guessed these. A vlog is a video blog and vlogger is the creator of a video blog. Very time-consuming. The dictionary does not accept them - yet.

fugacioius adjective literary: tending to disappear; fleeting: she was acutely conscious of her fugacious youth. DERIVATIVES: fugaciously adverb, fugaciousness noun. ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from Latin fugax, fugac- (from fugere ‘flee’) + -ious [I like this one!!] Also fugacity noun : 1 literary the quality of being fleeting or evanescent. (Ignore the chemical definition.)

strigil noun: 1 an instrument with a curved blade used, especially by ancient Greeks and Romans, to scrape sweat and dirt from the skin in a hot-air bath or after exercise; a scraper. 2 Entomology a comb-like structure on the forelegs of some insects, used chiefly for grooming. ORIGIN, from Latin strigilis, from stringere ‘touch lightly’. The term in entomology dates from the late 19th cent.

axionometric - not in my online dictionary.

That’s enough for today.