Today I learned

It’s been a long time between drinks.

I started The 100 Day Project on 31 January. Some ongoing freelance work on 9 February. And around that were various stresses and things to keep me busy.

I finished The 100 Day Project on 10 May. The freelance work is ongoing but varying in terms of regularity. And, hopefully, the stresses will drop back down again now.

Having said all that, I was (and I am) still learning things every day. And hopefully, I can get back in the habit of sharing them here again.

For this year’s 100 Day Project, I set myself the task of completing one sketch per day.

As someone who always wanted to draw and paint but felt I had zero talent for either, it was a way to challenge that thinking. And an opportunity to build a daily practice to learn a new skill.

One of the items I chose to draw was a swizzle stick from my collection of five. They were collected during a night of personal infamy back in 2005 in Melbourne, Australia.

In confirming the spelling of ‘swizzle’ and whether ‘swizzle sticks’ should be one word or two or hyphenated, I discovered more about these kitsch drinking implements that fill me with nostalgia.

Growing up in the 80s, I recall my parents having a Tupperware tumbler, or similar, full of a variety of them gathered as souvenirs from their travels over the years.

I didn’t realise swizzle sticks dated back to 18th century West Indian rum plantations.

Nor did I know the original swizzle sticks were fashioned from a branch of the Quararibea turbinata tree, colloquially referred to as the ‘swizzle stick tree’.

I also had no idea tiki bars first came into being as early as the 1930s.

So, I learned far more than one thing that day.

Last year, with the help of my partner and my downstairs neighbour, I transformed our front garden from a waist-high tangle of grass, weeds and brambles to something a little tamer and more picturesque.

It's fallen a little into disarray since the weather cooled toward the end of last year, but I'm hoping to get things back in order as the weather warms again.

As a consequence of the weeds being (mostly) suppressed through laying down weed guard and bark, we're discovering what else is hiding under the surface this spring.

So far, we have had a lovely, lone orange snow crocus. The first flower of the season to appear.

Followed not long after by a lovely, lone daffodil.

There is now a lovely, lone white hyacinth just starting to flower.

According to my plant-identifying app, Picture This, we potentially have snowdrops to look forward to flowering and possibly even some wild garlic.

I'm super-excited about the possibility of wild garlic in the yard, as I love the smell of it as we've walked through overgrown cemeteries in previous years. I didn't even know it was a thing until a couple of years ago.

I'm also pleased to see that our hydrangea planted last year appears to have new growth after being decimated during winter. I'm not as hopeful about the three dahlias, but it does give me some hope.

Before the daffodil flowered, I used the app to identify what it was as I wasn't entirely sure. Picture This told me it was a wild daffodil. I didn't know there was a difference and took the app's word for it, though it can be unreliable.

After a quick Google about a week later, I found that the app had, in fact, misidentified it. It's just your usual garden variety daffodil: all a single shade of bright yellow where wild daffodils are two-tone.

And then I discovered that daffodils are not always yellow. Mind. Blown.

I also never realised daffodils are the genus narcissus, famously depicted in Salvador Dali's painting, Metamorphosis of Narcissus: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dali-metamorphosis-of-narcissus-t02343

Oh, and they have an ovary. Which, in cross-section, looks something like a capsicum/pepper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissus(plant)#/media/File:Narciszaadhokken.jpg

This is actually something I learned in late May last year during a picnic with my partner in Theydon Plain, Epping, Essex. We went out to enjoy the sunshine as the first London lockdown was starting to ease.

I was reminded of it yesterday when deciding to draw a critter I met there for my 100 Day Project, 'A Sketchy Practice'.

As an Australian, I have a healthy respect for spiders, but I also know most of them are absolutely integral to environmental balance and definitely not a threat. They are pretty much never a threat in the UK.

A boyfriend in my younger days showed me how to humanely remove a spider from indoors when it wasn't dangerous or a threat to family or pets. I will generally do that rather than kill them (though I have been guilty of washing the odd spider down the sink or bath plughole in certain circumstances).

However, I had never heard of a harvestman before. Harvestmen are from the class of arachnids, but they're not spiders. They are from the order of Opiliones and are actually pretty darned interesting.

Levitating frogs.

(And a cricket and flowers).

You're welcome.

As a vegetarian for about 27 years, I'd never really looked into what foie gras was. I recall hearing about it years ago and realising how inhumane it was. But I didn't remember in what way exactly.

It recently came up through a discussion in one of the What's App groups I'm in with neighbours, as a new Hungarian restaurant had been announced to be opening nearby soon. Another member of the group noticed 'foie gras parfait' on the list of proposed menu items. It's not legal to produce it in the UK but, apparently, the UK imports about 180 to 200 tonnes of it a year.

On the back of the discussion about the French 'delicacy', I sought to remind myself of what it was. And then wished I hadn't.

I didn't recognise the word 'gavage', so I clicked through to the article about that before reading further ahead on the foie gras entry on Wikipedia. That was an error on my part.

Gavage possibly sounds more 'romantic' than force-feeding. But it refers to supplying a nutritional substance by means of a small plastic feeding tube passed through the nose (nasogastric) or mouth (orogastric) into the stomach. Not so romantic.

In case you don't know, foie gras is French for 'fat liver'. Specifically, the fat liver of a duck or goose force-fed for approximately two weeks before slaughter.

There are photos in the Wikipedia articles below of what that involves that I wish I could unsee. It made me feel ill to look at the pictures, so I could barely read any of the content.

If you have a stronger stomach than me, feel free to check out the Wikipedia entries below to find out more.

I love learning new words but, clearly, I'm not always going to like the definitions of those words.

I came across this lovely lady in my archive and edited her to share with my Patreon patrons early access last week.

I took this photo on a wander with friends through Dean Village in Edinburgh all the way back in August 2011.

Set atop St Bernard's Well on the banks of the Water of Leith, Hygieia holds her bowls, allowing a snake to drink from one.

Inscribed on the pump inside are the words 'Bibendo Valeris', meaning 'drink and you will be well'.

I'll drink to that!

(And constantly learning more through my photography).

In my last full-time job - maybe also previous jobs - my manager and coworkers would comment that I sighed heavily.

I remember that I responded, "I guess sometimes I forget to breathe…"

Fast forward to the other day, and I realised I was still doing it and breathing irregularly. And it worried me.

So I asked Dr Google and found out it's not just me. It's a thing.

Linda Stone, who worked for both Apple and Microsoft, coined a term to describe the phenomenon: email apnea or screen apnea.

There's an argument that those who are worst for doing it are in the majority and that they're 'vertical breathers', rather than 'horizontal breathers'.

But as someone who played clarinet and saxophone in high school, despite my insistence on crossing my legs when I played (which I was repeatedly told off for by my music teachers and band leaders as it blocked my diaphragm) I learned to breathe horizontally.

So I'm kind of confused about why I still do this, even in moments of low or no stress. One of the times I do it most is drying myself off after a shower, which doesn't make much sense.

But at least I know now it's not just me.