Funk

Funk - Derived from the Flemish word 'fonck', meaning 'disturbed' or 'agitated'.

Well I'm coming out of mine today, despite having just flooded the kitchen with garden hose. (small curse to budgetary control/husband for not allowing me to install an outside tap)

Yesterday my MIL was finally diagnosed with dementia. It wasn't unexpected and having a label for what's wrong will help us get her the support she needs, but I can see how upset my SIL is.

I'm glad neither of my parents had to go through this illness, my mother died of cancer in her early 60s - different kind from mine - and my Dad sort of self-destructed over many years, although he was lucid right up until the end, though perhaps not sober!

A friend says we're now in the sandwich years, when you still have older children around and your parents' health starts to fail.

So maybe I'm luckier than some in that I appear to have an open sandwich - though I feel for my husband as he's facing up to having aging parents in two different parts of the country, which leaves him torn on many fronts.

I just hope his mother can enjoy a bit of time when her worries fall away before the down sides of the disease become too pronounced.

When I told N she joked that that's another silver lining of having a poor cancer prognosis, you don't have to worry about dementia!

It strikes me that life makes it hard to arrive and equally hard to depart, and it's what you do in between that's the important part.

The garden is doing well, pumpkins are starting to romp away, and the first flowers are on my tomatoes. Garden residents now include a blackbird with a lot of white feathers and the blind in one eye thrush. It seems I'm cultivating the bird equivalent of Ellis Island.

Yesterday I was researching Lady's Mantle, a favourite plant of mine and discovered that it's botanical name alchemilla means little magic one, from the Arab alkemelych (alchemy). I think this is just such a lovely name. The plant was/is used to help menstruation problems and stop other types of bleeding, and one German herbalist claims prolonged use could cut gynae ops by a third. The name Our Lady's Mantle was given to it in early Christian times.

It is also known as dewcup because of the way it collects rain. (The pic is a web sourced one.)

This is the scientific explaination of why the plant beads water so well:

"The leaf surfaces of lady's mantle (Alchemilla vulgaris L.) are covered with small hairs, in addition to a waxy coating. A droplet of water carefully placed onto a dry leaf will rest on the "fur" and have no apparent contact with the leaf surface—a contact angle of 180°. The SEM image above shows a 2 mm droplet resting on a leaf hair cluster.

This might seem to indicate that the leaf hairs are hydrophobic, not unlike the cuticular wax on nasturtium leaves. However, if a single leaf hair is inserted into a water droplet, the meniscus is found to be less than 60°, clearly indicating that the leaf hair is hydrophilic.

Droplets that condense onto a cooled leaf nucleate onto the waxy cuticula with a contact angle well above 90°. When the droplets make contact with the hairs, they are lifted from the cuticula onto the hydrophilic hairs. As more droplets form and coalesce, they cause the hairs to bend and form bundles.

Energy minimization calculations based on the elastic modulus of the hairs establish an optimum size and degree of bending for the hair bundles. In this manner, it is possible to establish an optimum distance between the leaf surface and the bottom of the water droplets.

Long before humans mastered such things as car wax and rain slickers, plants were building hydrophilic lifting devices and differentiating between dew and rain drops. It appears we still have a thing or two to learn."

We do indeed have a lot to learn.