Chatty for once

Yestern's entry contained today's vid, so what i'm going to do with this, for once, is to do a diary-type post, but without the brooding.

Advent began this weekend, meaning busy-ness.  This morning turned out to be quite hectic and followed a party last night, which despite its enjoyability i left early due to being knackered from the night before.  It was a friend's five-dozenth birthday - yes, i have friends who are that old nowadays.  I then had an event-jam, and this is where things get hard and i start quoting that maroon leatherette bound collection of Bronze and Iron Age texts in the corner of the living room.  "But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth" - Matthew 6:3.  Nonetheless, i've been busy - interview at the front of church with the rest of the team about Nitelite, Christingle distribution and lighting in due awareness of the fact that the church is currently a building site and teas and coffees, which were fair traded.  Here's a picture of a Christingle orange:

The centre of the third rock from the small unregarded yellow star in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way is to the left of this picture, which is not the convention, as i forgot to rotate the picture before i posted it.

A couple of things then:  What's Nitelite (and why's it spelt that way?) and why is the coffee instant and not ground?  I assume you know what a Christingle is, and what an orange is, and come to think of it i'll do a little bit from 'Here Be Dragons' in a bit just to show i did actually do it and haven't just pretended to hide it away out of embarrassment, though there is that.

Nitelite is the late-night cafe where we offer soup, drinks, a listening ear and a chat to anyone who wants them.  It runs from 10:45 pm to the wee sma' oors each Friday and generally wipes me out totally over the weekend, though i only go there once every three weeks.  We're currently short of volunteers, so we needed to advertise it a bit.  Concerning the spelling, this brings up the interesting question of the variation in American English spelling according to register which is also said to be a remnant of the radical spelling reform undertaken by Melvil Dewey (whose first name seems to be an example of that), and yes, i am referring to that Dewey, the library bloke.  I am somewhat keen on spelling reform but not so much a fan of it than i am of changing the number base.  However, he was also rather naughty because he advocated the adoption of the metric system, though that would at least be progress over the Imperial one.

The coffee is instant because we have to serve hundreds of people in quick succession, though it might make sense to buy a bigger coffee machine.  We already have one, but we only use it for people who come to Tomatoes, the church breakfast which for me follows rather inconveniently soon after Nitelite, thereby leaving me what feels like only a couple of hours sleep between the two once every six weeks.  It's a good question, though the money might be better spent on buying food for asylum seekers or something.

OK, so the orange.  In the unfortunately abandoned project, 'Here Be Dragons', the English word "orange" refers to this thing:

This pic is almost identical to the one in 'Here Be Dragons', which in fact has one short of five dozen pictures but unfortunately rather a dearth of animal ones.  To someone living in Ancient World, which is the one whose poles are in the East and West Indies rather than the Arctic and Antarctic, this is an orange, but its colour is harder to name and would probably be described as "saffron":

which is the name of a colour in Ancient World, though quite a vague and often misapplied one which is not one of the basic colour terms.  If someone there were to be asked to imagine an orange, their mind's eye would probably conjure something like one of the following two up:

This is because they have no primary colour term for the colour orange due to the bias towards indigo introduced by their magnetoception.  As a result, their word for indigo is a primary colour term, in English "vrick".

Unfortunately, however, 'Here Be Dragons' will now never see the light of day, leaving me with a rather peculiar sense of absence and listlessness, which is however better than the disappointment and frustration i would've experienced otherwise.

What to do next?  I feel a bit lost now.