Setting Out Lines ?

My daughter is a good writer and recently started her blog(http://missionimprovisational.blogspot.com/). With that as inspiration I decided to start a blog of my own rather than exorcising (or exercising) my writing-demons by continually just putting comments into her posts.

I entertain delusions of someday becoming a writer in my own right -- and righter in my own write too, I suppose. Many sources say that the only way to become a writer is to write. I find it hard to discipline myself to do that, but hope that having this blog calling to me will get at least a few dozen words out of me each day.

The first problem was to pick a name for the site. My initial thought was "sisdui". That was a word I'd heard from my father growing up. It meant "left over food for dinner". He often used it in conjunction with "slumgullion". As in, "Dad, what's for dinner?" "Either sisdui or slumgullion.", he'd say, meaning that he didn't know what was for dinner. By the way, according to one source slumgullion variously means a stew (dad's use of it), a weak tea- or coffee-like drink, leftovers from whale butchery, or the red runoff from mining waste. It was first used in America in 1840-1850 and probably came from the Scotish gullion meaning quagmire or cesspool.

I didn't actually know how to spell "sisdui", pronounced sis - doo' - hee. Running a web search on the word didn't turn up any hits except on some non-English sites. Neither did "sisdoey" ("Did you mean sydney?"), "sisdoohee", or "sissdoey". "Cisdui" turned up a couple hits -- but not in English. "Cistui" actually had two hits: 1. a character from Lord of the Rings; 2. a type of shrub.

Checking with a few members of my family only found one person, my daughter, who even remembered the word. She remembered it as "sistui". We used it with her as the secret password when she was little. If a stranger said, "Come with me, Little Girl. Your father asked me to come get you.", then she asked, "What's the secret word?" If the guy didn't know "sisdui", he'd obviously not talked with me or I'd have given him the word. She was to run screaming to the nearest place of safety.

So anyway, "sisdui": maybe not the best name for my new site. Casting about for other names I ran through the list of other fairly bizarre sayings and quotes from my father:

Slumgullion - I just didn't like the sound of it.

ConfusionToTheEnemy - This was the start of a drinking toast to which the proper response was "May they rot in hell.". The whole quote is probably from somewhere in literature, but I don't know where. I figured using this name could label my site as being written by some skinhead war-monger, so I moved on.

HeresToUs - Another toast with response, "To Hell With Them". Or "And Those Like Us" if you were in a less belligerent mood. I didn't like it as a site name without the required apostrophe.

SeeingTheElephant - Civil War or earlier phrase meaning to have gone off to see strange sights away from your normal world. When wagon trains were going West, some would reach the plains or mountains, realize pioneering wasn't for them, and return East. It was called "Seeing the Elephant". As a kid, when it was time to return home from somewhere, my dad would say, "Well, I guess we've seen the elephant and heard the owl." The "owl" part appears to be something only he used, but it's in keeping with the idea of having reached your limit and ready to go home. I liked it but the site name was already taken.

TheHideyHole - The place where the big fish live. Fishing with my daughter, my dad would throw his line out to a particularly fishy looking place and say, "Oh, that's right in their hidey hole." I liked it, but that name was taken too.

DontHorseEm - Another fishing term meaning, don't reel in so fast you pull the hook out of their mouth. Needed apostrophe.

EverEasy or NeverSoBad - Dad's sayings were "Nothing's EVER easy" and "Things are never so bad they couldn't be worse." True statements, but as site names they didn't really say much concerning what I wanted to write about in my blog.

Turning to my mom's sayings, I thought briefly about Fukgitit. It's what Mom says to shock people when what she really means is "forget it". It's particularly funny when she says it because it comes out "Fuk...get it". Funny because this is a woman that doesn't even swear when she misses a 6" putt or hits her thumb with a hammer.

Having exhausted the old sayings that I could remember, I moved on to word play with "site", as in DarnSiteBetter, LineOfSite, OutOfSiteOutOfMind, SitelyMore, SiteUnseen, Unsitely, and Sight. In the same vein: BumpOnABlog was taken. None of these names thrilled me anyway.

I turned nautical and tried DriftingOnABreeze and ComingAbout. I considered one literary one: ToBeOrNot. Then I thought briefly of: TheWriteStuff (already taken), AndThenISaid, SoISaid, LookBacks, LooselySpeaking.

In a moment of weakness, I also considered NoArmsNoLegs, as in "What do you call a man with ... swimming in the ocean?" "Bob". Figured I'd have every physically challenged person on the net trying to crash my site. Cross that one off.

Then it came to me: SettingOutLines. On the surface, this could be setting out lines of writing for others to read. The hidden meaning is another from my childhood: going fishing using bank poles. My sister and I did this with our dad on the Mackinaw River in Illinois from the time we were big enough to carry the bucket of minnows. I see on the Internet it is still a valid (and legal) way to fish, but the last time I personally went was in 1972 more than 30 years ago -- subject of another posting at some point, I'm sure.

I want this blog to be about things I remember, like setting out lines, that are from my past and that I don't want to be lost with the passage of time. Like sisdui, don't horse 'em, and the hidey hole.

So let's begin.