New Words

New words seem to be coming pretty steadily from Henry. Last night I he pointed to a few flags in a book and said, "flag." It was a bit difficult to discern, but if I paid attention closely I could hear all the letters in his pronunciation. Henry's also said "outside" and "cookie" lately.

In addition to saying new words he's also been "counting." Now when we ask him how many of a particular item he sees he often points to each instance and "counts" by utter some sound. I think he's just gotten used to us pointing and courting off the various things in his books.

Last night's pennies treated me very well. 6,450 of them turned up thirty-two Wheats, fifty-six Canadians, two US dimes and one UK penny. In this batch was a new Wheat variety for me, the 1928S! 17,266,000 were minted. I also got another clipped penny and a penny with JFK's portrait stamped into it. The Wheats were:

1913, 1928S, 1929, 1936, 1937, 1940, 1941(2), 1942, 1944(2), 1944D, 1945, 1945S, 1948, 1950, 1951(2), 1953, 1953D(2), 1955(3), 1956(2), 1956D(2), 1957, 1957D(2), 1958D



This morning I finished reading another book, Lake Ngami, or Explorations and Discoveries during Four Year' Wanderings in the the Wilds of South West Africa, by Charles J. Andersson (1827-1867). The book was originally published in 1856. The copy I have is a reprint done by Rediscovery Books in 2006. The facsimile is pretty good, except that the prints are clearer on Google Books and the map is printed so small as to be almost unusable.

The narrative details expedition Andersson made with Francis Galton to explore what is now Namibia. Their goal was to reach Lake Ngami. Most of the journey was completed by riding oxen and was done on the cheap. Galton went home to England before the completion of their goal and Andersson continued and completed the quest. Sadly, when Lake Ngami was reached the results were a bit disappointing.

The book like a lot of narratives from this era is lengthy (530+ pages). Andersson has personal writing style that was easy to read once I got used to the mid-19th century wording and included many stories about the peoples and wildlife of the area that I enjoyed. The many prints throughout the book are fantastic. The cover of the reprint gives some idea of the others. I'm looking forward to reading Andersson's two other books about his African travels and one day reading Galton's book on the first half of this expedition (I was able to find a map from Galton's book online and that was very helpful to have while reading the first half of this book).