Genghis Khan was the First to Use Bows in Combat, Though Bows are a Chinese Invention, Not Mongolian

Dorm rooms can be exceedingly lonely places when one’s roommate is out doing whatever it is that one’s roommate does when not in the room, and though plants help fill this quiet void, they’re not very talkative and don’t crawl about the floor very quickly, so a void of sorts remains. How to fill it? Thankfully OWU allows one to keep the small pets, such as rodents and fish, in dorm rooms! Intending to add a little moving creature to my mobile jungle of plants, I recently purchased a wee hermit crab named Gordon! He’s rather clumsy, so I firmly believe that he was intended for me. (We both seem to fall down a lot, so maybe we can work on our balance together with tai chi in those spare moments…) He’s adorable in my eyes, and I cannot wait to get him some new shells to paint up and make him trendy! (Granted that my idea of ‘trendy’ was last popular over a century ago…)
I also recently got a new bow string for my lemonwood longbow! I love traditional archery, no matter how often my arrows go whizzing past the haystack that I use as a target, and getting a few new arrows and a string to replace the broken one makes my week. The shop I had to go to is located just outside of Delaware, and Chuck, the rather animated proprietor, knew precisely the sort of supplies I needed. I had tried to acquire a new string elsewhere, and the bow ‘expert’ had the quintessential deer-in-the-headlights look when he saw a traditional bow, timidly muttering that they in fact did not stock anything for such relics. Chuck, however, was only amused that I used a self-bow from the 50’s or 60’s, which he correctly pinned down after seeing the bow for less than thirty seconds. This man breathes fletching; he’s bursting with information and history. Meeting him sparked an idea that I know had been shot down before, but I think I’m going to look into how MARRCA could possibly do maybe one day a week of traditional archery, but I know that this was shot down before, though the exact reasons fail me at this moment. Danger hazards are obvious and giant red flags, but I believe the lack of an expert hurt us as well, but I believe that Mr. Chuck would be more than ecstatic to lend a hand, as anyone who rattles off facts about Genghis Khan and Native American bow-crafting techniques would surely get along with a crazed group proudly reenacting the War of Roses in rondel battles after being briefed on the history of it.

German Word: German is a very cool language in and of itself, but then it has this really nifty habit of taking words and cramming them together to create new ones!! This can be a real time saver on one hand, or create word disastors on the other. For example, take ‘speed’ (Geschwindigkeit) and add it to ‘to cross over or exceed’ (ueberschreiten), and one gets the word for speeding, Geschwindigkeitsueberschreitung! This is super helpful when one doesn’t know a word, but can also create glaringly odd words that scream ‘DINGLISH!!!’ or ring very wrong to a well-tuned ear. I looked briefly in my German dictionary for the term for ‘hermit crab,’ yet found none. My solution? Take the term for hermit and add it to crab, creating Einsiedlerkrabbe! Is it anywhere close to the real term? Probably not. Does it work? Not really. But, if anything, it’s a good icebreaker at the local Stammtisch, and my old associates and I even got our German teacher to question whether or not our entirely fabricated terms were real or not. I’ll be sure to bring those up another day, though.

Pictures! Pet pictures. Adorable crab-creature or hideous thing that gives one the chills down the spine?