I have not disappeared...

[oloriel]

... I'm just incredibly, absurdly busy. I try to keep up with the f-list, but most of the time I don't have enough dimes* to comment, let alone type up an entry of my own.

So, while real life (TM) holds me firmly in its claws, have two shots of the kids. (Sorry if you don't like kiddy photos.)


Minion and Minion.
(ysilme and anybody fluent in Elvish is going to get the joke at once. For the others, minion is "first-born son" in both Quenya and Sindarin. Couldn't pass this one up, could I.)


The other mini-person!

Incidentally, these pictures also show some of the other things that have been keeping me busy. Happy guessing, or something? Or just have a nice Sunday, as you wish!

---
* the "spoon" imagery puzzles me, because if you have any spoons, you can clean them up and then you have as many spoons as ever, right? But dimes, those run out. Like, in the old days, when you needed dimes to make public phone calls? And some days maybe you have enough dimes to make an hour-long call to Tokyo, but other days you don't even have dimes enough to call home from school? That makes a lot more sense (to me) than "I don't have enough spoons". Not judging you if you stick to the common saying, just refusing to use it myself.

Comments

[ysilme]

But the theory doesn't mean "spoonfuls" as portions of energy, it's just using spoons as symbols because they were handy at the time the theory was created. It could also have been cups, pebbles, sticks or whatever - or dimes, of course. (Although any kind of currency doesn't work for me, as they also equal monetary worth I can't separate this from, but that's just me.)
As I understand the theory the re-usability is actually part of it, since you use the items again every day, which wouldn't work if you threw it away.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

As I understand the theory the re-usability is actually part of it, since you use the items again every day, which wouldn't work if you threw it away.

But that's the thing! If you can re-use them, you can't have "just one spoon left". After all, all the other ones are lying in the sink, so if you clean them up, you have as many spoon as you could wish for. And if you don't have enough spoons left to clean up the spoons, well, that's just absurd because the metaphor begins to mingle endlessly.
I think it's a useful analogy as such. And it has caught on well, so the phenomenon clearly needs to be described. I just overthink it and that's why it doesn't work for me. As I said, I'm not judging those who're fine with it! I'm just not happy with it meself!

(I'm actually using Groschen because those are no longer in use, and thus have no practical monetary value. In an age of cell phones and phone cards, they're certainly no longer needed for public phone calls. But in my youth, you always needed Groschen for emergency phone calls etc. - and while you generally couldn't re-use a dime you'd already thrown into the phone box, with a regular allowance, your stock of dimes could be replenished. But when they were gone, they were gone for the time being!)