|
Roget's International Thesaurus
Electronic thesauruses are just not the same as this hardcover resources of the wonderful world of words I have sitting beside me on my desk. Sure electronic versions are quick, but it's like flying from one city to another - you miss all the stuff in between.
Roget's book is divided into two parts: you need to start in the index in the back and then flip back to the words at the front. If I am using WORD and look for a synonym for smelly, I get stinking, reeking, foul, malodorous, putrid, and fetid. All perfectly good words that will get the job done. In my Thesaurus I look at smell in the index and it gives me the options of scent or be fragrant or stink or detect. Then I flip to the words at the front and I can choose a verb or an adjective like fetid, nidorous, odorous, ill-smelling, smell-some, stenchy, whiffy, graveolent, mephitic, olid, rank, reeking, suffocating, unbearable, empyreumatic, repulsive, fulsome, noisome, and so on. Is a teenager's gym bag full of dirty football gear smelly or mephitic?
But wait, there's more. When you're in the pages up front, you can casually peruse, examine, scrutinize, scan, consider, review, pervestigate, indagate, inspect other words you just happen to be passing by. It's like driving through a one stop sign town in Georgia and stumbling upon the best fried chicken place in the country. You'd never find it from 35,000 feet up.
English is an incredible language. Too many great words get ignored.
|
My grandfather, my mother’s dad, was Ukrainian and Polish. I wish I’d listened more carefully to anything he shared about growing up in a home of this heritage. His parents were the ones who immigrated to the US for a better life, but I don’t know a lot of those details. I do remember my grandfather as one of the kindest people I knew. He always had warm, wonderful hugs and was a skilled cook. His golumpkis were simply amazing!
The standard heating degree day scale is based on 65 ºF.
A friend asked me about a quote she received for weatherization work on her house. Massachusetts has a wonderful program, called 
It should not be news that things break! Things with operating parts are more prone to breakage than things with no moving parts. I have my grandfather's pocket watch. It's a mechanical device that's still keeping great time after nearly 150 years. I wonder about fancy and expensive digital watches and how long they will last. I doubt if they will be something to pass along to the grandchildren.
Low-E coatings were just a glimmer in a creative window manufacturers' mind way back then. "Low-E" stands for "Low Emissivity". Materials absorb, reflect, and emit radiant energy. If the amount of thermal radiation can be reduced, more heat stays in the house than flows back out through the window glass. A Low-E coating on the glass is an ultra-thiin, virtually invisible layer that reflects infrared heat back into the home.
There are all sorts of things floating around in the air. Always have been. Always will be. Some volatile organic compounds are pleasant - like baking bread. Some are unpleasant like rotting rodents. VOCs are very, very small particles. Ozone, on the other hand, is a gas that won't be removed from the air no matter how restrictive the filter in the HVAC system is.
William Shurcliff: The Northeast Solar Energy Association (NESEA) had a chapter here in Massachusetts that had monthly meetings at MIT that Dr. Shurcliff attended. I had the distinct honor to meet him there as I was just starting to think about solar heating. He had worked on the Manhattan Project (the atomic bomb). He worked for Polaroid and he played an outspoken role in defeating plans for a supersonic passenger plane in order to prevent SST's from flying over populated areas. And then in the 1970's he became an advocate for passive solar building design and superinsulation. He wrote numerous books on the subject including a seminal book on air to air heat exchangers.
