New notebook time and new word for the day

The notebook I started Dec. 5 is full. Last week I bought four spiral bound, hard cover note books, 8.5 x 5.3, lined, 100 pages, at Marc's for $.67 a piece. There is a clear acrylic over the front cover. They are called "Sherbert Notes Journal" and I bought them in pink, lime, pale blue and lilac. The stationer is FYI Stationers and the producer Carolina Pad of Charlotte, NC. Marc's carries overstocks, remaindered and seconds so if you see something you like, buy it--it won't be there when you return 10 minutes later. A few weeks ago I saw some plain white, Mikasa china bowls (probably seconds), 2 for $.99. I have white china with a silver band and am short a few bowls (replacements cost about $60.00), so I thought I could work with something similar, and they looked fine, but when I went back there weren't any more.

Now for the new word. About 20 years ago I was a volunteer in a nursing home with a young woman who had suffered a brain aneurysm when she was 18 and was totally paralyzed. She needed people with her during her waking hours because she couldn't generate thought (a theory of another volunteer). Fortunately, she had parents and sisters and not a husband who wanted to be free of her, so no one starved her to death to end her life, but she did eventually die at about age 50. She couldn't talk, move voluntarily or see, but she could definitely experience emotion, as I found out if ever I said "Would you like some sherbert." She is the one who taught me that there is only one R in sherbet. It took 10 minutes to spell it on her message board which involved rows of letters each assigned a number and holding her hand to see if I could detect a movement if I called out the right letter. So when I saw that these notebooks were titled, "Sherbert Notes," I decided someone didn't know how to spell sherbet. But when I looked in my dictionary, here's what I found:

sherbet n. Turkish and Persian from Arabic Sharbah for drink. 1. a cold drink of sweetened and diluted fruit juice 2. or sherbert, an ice with milk, egg white, or gelatin added.

Even my spell check tried to drop that second R. And this is my new word for today.