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Until this week, we had been having exceptionally mild weather with brief cold snaps, this season, but the local TV meteorologists are telling us that that's over (for a while, at least). It's certainly chilly, now. In fact, later on I need to go bundle up the few remaining bits of exposed pipe outside. I'm going to wait until I take the dogs in for a while, though. I hope that if Trixie doesn't see me messing with the various spigots around the yard, she'll be slower to notice and mess with them. A vain hope, perhaps, seeing as she's already developed a fascination with at least one of them.
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Yesterday evening, I watched the 1998 film adaptation of Tess of the d'Urbervilles (the version with Justine Waddell as "Tess".) Having read the book before, I should've known better. The "dairy" segment of the film was beautiful (such lighting!), but the general trend of the story was much as I had remembered-- only worse. (I had forgotten precisely how it ended, so the last fifteen or twenty minutes were all but new to me.) Well, if nothing else, Thomas Hardy's depressing tales make me realize what a bed of roses my own life has been. . .
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Today I cleaned out the "deep freezer" (aka "chest freezer"). It's not exactly an exhilarating job, what with fingers cold from removing ice and the race against potentially defrosting food, but it needed doing. Now I have a mental inventory of exactly what's in there, and I can definitively state that we needn't buy chicken for at least a month-- possibly two. Nor are we lacking for bread. I'm sure you will rest easier tonight, knowing that. ;o)
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This strange story has been big in the local news for the past few days. It appears that an Indiana man (whose life was evidently falling apart) made a fake distress call from his small plane, parachuted to safety, and deliberately left his plane flying on autopilot, to fall wherever it may. It ended up in a residential area of Milton, FL-- but fortunately it didn't crash into a home. If it turns out that this guy did do this intentionally, he deserves to go straight to jail, and he ought to be on his knees thanking God that he didn't kill anyone with his abandoned toy.
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Looking through the local story linked above, I can't help but wonder why so many journalists (of all people) don't know the basic rules of punctuation-- like, you know, where commas do and do not belong in a sentence.
If you're a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick-maker, I don't really expect you to know (or particularly care) about the language, beyond the bare minimum you need to get by in life. Ok, I'm going to go all school-teachery on you and point out that maybe you ought to care a little, if only because sooner or later you'll have to write something, and your (in)ability to do so with clarity affects how people perceive you. But even if a butcher writes "Spare Rib's - Buy 1 Get One Have Off", at least it doesn't affect his ability to cut, package, and sell meat (though he may lose some business if people don't understand his signage). In other words, it's not specifically part of his job description, so we tend to overlook his goofs. A journalist, on the other hand, really ought to make a point of learning how the language works. (Why, for instance, does that article start with "but"? It feels like we were late getting to the website, and we missed the first part of the story!)
Anyway. . . I guess I should be used to it by now, but come on! Please, folks, at least cut back on the randomly placed commas. You're embarrassing me! People are going to think we're all uneducated hicks, down here, and it's simply not true.
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Well, that should be enough to keep the old digits from forgetting where all the letters are on the keyboard. ;o)
