Have you ever heard an interesting word and then suddenly heard it used three more times in quick succession?  The word, in this case, was cant.  A cant is a secret language designed so a group can speak in front of other people and not be understood.

The first time it came up, it was in an article about thieves’ cant.  The next time, it was a line in a person’s biography mentioning that they wrote a book about Polari.  The third time referred to nadsat and A Clockwork Orange.  It was strange because I clearly knew words from cants — like drag — but didn’t remember that there was this word, cant, to describe these languages.

I liked the idea that something exists that is like a language geocache.  You know how there are dozens of treasures you walk by every day and have no clue that they’re buried in plain sight?  Well, I love the idea of these little languages spoken around us that we don’t know because the whole point is to be able to speak in front of other people without revealing the subject of conversation.

To operate in secret, out in the open.

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The twins and I just finished translating their Torah portion together.  We took it apart, word by word.  First, they would write out the word.  Then we would think about whether the word sounded similar to a word they already knew.  If it didn’t, I helped them look up the word in the dictionary.  We went through the portion, word by word, until it formed sentences and paragraphs.

We did it this way because I felt silly hiring a tutor to teach them something that I could teach them.  I have a translation degree.  Wasn’t it high time that I actually used it?  Plus I didn’t want to have to drive them to a tutor once a week.

But it was also special, taking something apart, word by word.  Learning etymology and how random words were related.  My goal was to instill in them a love of being a word archaeologist, something that will serve them well with everything from the SATs to discerning what someone isn’t saying in a conversation.

The project made us talk a lot about how languages divide all of us, making it difficult to understand one another.  But in the case of the translation project, it also served to bring us closer for hours at a time around the kitchen table.

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It was strange that the term cant kept popping up right as we were finishing the translation project.  The whole point of the cant is to set up that divide.  The definition is focused outward; it’s to exclude.

But, of course, it’s also to include.  To let someone in.  To clearly state that they are a part of a group.  Outsides only exist when there are insides.  Translating their portion together was about giving them a key.  They own Hebrew, are insiders even if they don’t know it fluently yet.  The project was about beckoning them in.

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A co-worker sent along an article about Facebook researchers that shut down an AI project when the system began developing its own language because the researchers wanted robots that spoke efficiently to humans, not to each other.  “In each instance, an AI being monitored by humans has diverged from its training in English to develop its own language. The resulting phrases appear to be nonsensical gibberish to humans but contain semantic meaning when interpreted by AI ‘agents’.”

I love the idea that even robots gravitate towards making language more efficient and more exclusive to other robots when given the chance.  Sets of people develop a shorthand, an informal cant, over time.  Our instinct is to always separate linguistically while we cleave to others in our defined groups.  Even robots.

The key is our ability to translate and cross linguistic bridges.

A puddle showed up underneath a kitchen chair.

The puddle wasn’t there when we exited the house.  It was there when we returned.  It was a clear liquid with a yellowish/brown tint.  Someone spilled something, right?  Except no one was in the house.  Still, I asked everyone in the house if they had spilled a perfect puddle of ginger ale underneath my chair with nary a drop anywhere else.

The liquid was under a chair.  The chair itself was not wet or stained — nothing had dripped on it and then continued to the floor.  There were no water stains on the ceiling or walls.  The tile was not buckled or damaged.

I cleaned it up and tucked it away in the back of my head.

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Days later, I walked out of the kitchen and stepped in something wet.  When I entered the kitchen, nothing was on the floor.  When I exited the kitchen 15 minutes later, there were suddenly several puddles.  One was in the doorway to the kitchen.  Another was about a foot away.  A third was a foot away from that.  There were a few drops of liquid here and there, but most of it was contained to these three main puddles in the hallway.

The puddles were maybe four feet away from the front door.  The space between the door and the puddles was dry.  The tile underneath the puddles was undamaged.  There were no water stains on the ceiling or walls.  The puddles were in the center of the tile — not on the seams.

The puddles were not there when we went to sleep.  They were not there when I woke up (and I was the only person to walk downstairs in the morning).  But they were there 15 minutes later.

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Days after that, a puddle showed up in the bedroom above the kitchen and hallway.  The puddle is maybe an inch or two in diameter.  When I press a paper towel into the carpet, it draws up water.  It’s not a small amount of water — we’ve gone through an entire roll of paper towels, and the puddle isn’t getting any smaller.

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The only other strange occurrence has been a leak from the basement ceiling; a single tiny hole that sometimes drips water when we’ve had a lot of rain.  The last time it leaked, it didn’t happen for the first 18 hours of rain, but it leaked sometime before the puddles appeared in the kitchen above.  There isn’t a pipe, and the no other space on the ceiling drips.  Just this single, tiny hole.

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So three rooms with water, one on top of the other, all in somewhat the same spot.  On the top floor, the water is on the carpet.  On the middle floor, the water is on the tile.  On the bottom floor, the water is coming from the ceiling.

Last facts to know: with all the puddles, there had been a storm.  In the first case, there was one big, quick rainstorm.  In the second case, it was after 24 hours of intense rain.  In the meantime, there have been other storms and no puddles.

The puddles are at least four feet away from external walls to the house.  They’ve appeared in different rooms, though all the rooms are one above the other.  The liquid has no scent, so while it could be ghost pee, it isn’t animal urine.  I trust that everyone in the house is telling me the truth about not spilling anything.

There are no water stains on the walls or ceiling.

Your thoughts?  Everyone who has looked at it is baffled.  We’re going to check that the gutters are clear and slope the dirt away from the house for better drainage.  But other than that, do you think it’s a ghost?  A ghost animal peeing on our floor?

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I am about to blow your mind.  (Unless you already knew this.  In that case, you’re about to stare at your screen, incredulously.)

I asked the Wolvog the date.  He glanced that his phone and told me the date.  I asked him how he knew it without opening the calendar app, and he pointed out that the ICON IS ANIMATED.

Yes, I had to scream that.

The icon itself shows the date.  Look at it.  Every day the icon changes.  Same with the Clock app.  Look at it!  The little hand is going around.  I have never noticed that the icon moves, but now I can’t stop staring at it.  It makes me wonder what else I’m missing.

What cool thing did you learn recently?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

Once upon a time, I posted the thirteenth Friday Blog Roundup.  I wasn’t numbering them at the time, so I didn’t think about that fact at all.  But this is the thirteenth mental sampler (like a Whitmans sampler, except with 100% less chocolate).  That feels ominous even if it isn’t a Friday.

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I got a dress!  The ChickieNob also got a dress.  She put it on, looked in the mirror and said, “This is the one.”  But this isn’t about her.  This is about meeeeeeee.

When we left off, I had a dress in hand that we all felt meh about.  (“We” not being a royal we.  I’m including my sister and Josh in that statement.)  It was fine.  It felt like the best I was going to do.

But I grabbed a few dresses to try on after the ChickieNob was set with her dress.  A bunch definitely looked worse than the meh dress, and I got stuck in one.  (There was a lot of frantic tugging by the ChickieNob while I moaned, “It will never come off.  Never.  Never.  I will have a dress bunched under my arms for the rest of my life.”)  But one was exquisite.  It was exactly what I was looking for: simple, timeless-ish, and whimsical.

And the most bizarre thing about this dress?  It’s not online.  Anywhere.  It’s not on the designer’s site.  It’s not on the store site.  I have Googled it incessantly.  It’s like a ghost dress.  I keep opening the bag to check that it’s still there.  It sort of looks like this, but it’s tea-length and doesn’t have an open back.

I’m actually excited to wear this dress, so I’m glad I didn’t settle for meh.

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We tried giving Linus his first bath.  He lasted about 15 seconds.  I put him down in the water, and he flipped out and immediately tried jumping out of the bathtub.  Then I soothed him by gently stroking his back while I told him about water and he cried.  Then he went back to trying to claw his way out, so I scooped him up and swaddled him in the towel.  You have never seen a sadder pig.

Unfortunately, even though he didn’t actually have a bath, his fur was wet so I needed to use the hair dryer to dry him.  But that?  That thing that comes with a loud noise and hot air?  That he loved.  He totally chilled and let us dry him for about ten minutes.  Such a weirdo.

He tends to do better with things the second time around, so hopefully next time we’ll make it to the shampoo stage.

I frequently have songs pop into my head and cannot remember where they came from or how I know them.  It happened this week with a Hebrew one, so I called Josh at work and started singing it into the phone when he picked up.  When I finally ran out of measures that I remembered, he said, “Who is this?”

My heart stopped and I murmured slowly, “It’s Melissa.”

“Just kidding,” he said, and started tossing out possibilities, none that were even remotely close.  All I had to go on was that it was (1) an album that came out in the early or mid-90s, (2) was next to a Teapacks song on a mixtape but wasn’t a Teapacks song, and (3) had a woman who screamed out the bridge.

That afternoon, I searched the basement and found the mixtape.  (Well, mixCD.  It was one of my first mixCDs because I didn’t even have a CD player until 1999.  The mixCD is from 1997, and I had to play it on other people’s stereos.)  I put it on and found the song.  I was trying to figure out how to upload it to the Internet so I could ask someone the name of the song when Josh had the most brilliant idea: Shazam the song.

(I know.  He’s really smart.)

It was Ha-Mechashefot’s “Kesem al Yam Kineret.”  Of course!  I realized that I hadn’t heard anything about this band in years, so I Googled them, looking forward to buying myself a new album and discovered that the lead singer died probably somewhere around the time that I originally made the mixtape.  She was only 26.  Remember how I wrote this week about mourning the death of a celebrity?  What if it comes 20 years after a person’s death?

I couldn’t stop watching this video.  She was so… alive:

It has been stuck in my head all week.  But every time I start singing it, I feel sad.

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Negative Thinking in Infertility and Childlessness” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “I Did Not Give Up” (My Path to Mommyhood)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Countingpinklines has a post about the baby gifts she knits.  She writes, “I find the act of gift giving for a new baby bittersweet. On one hand, I truly am happy for the friends and hope everyone will be healthy and happy. On the other hand, well, there’s always a persistent thought of ‘when will it be my turn?’”  Just like every baby announcement, each gift hits her differently.  But all the knitted pieces are gorgeous in the end; infused with love and hope.

ChezPerky has a post about keeping things in perspective.  She tells a story about a stressful morning, and how a chance meeting with a new neighbour changed the way she viewed all the annoying moments in her day.  And I love this thought because we all make promises to ourselves that we can’t keep: “I need to carry myself with more composure and stop always looking like such a mess. I will make this promise to myself. But by tomorrow morning I will have made a mess of my morning again. Maybe this time I can keep the promise an extra day. Thursday is a good goal. Right?”

Lastly, Delayed But Not Denied has a mind-blowing post, wondering how people around her mother felt seeing her pregnant belly.  Many people talk about the here and now — are people triggered by their pregnancy — but I never thought about how I was probably the reason for someone else’s sadness back in the 70s.  That someone saw my mother pregnant and maybe they went home and cried.  It also drives home the universality of the experience; that we didn’t invent infertility, and it will still be here long after we’ve stopped trying to build our families.

The roundup to the Roundup: The happiness and sadness of listening to good music from someone who will never make music again.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between July 21st and 28th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.