running with paper

I was digging through my “to blog about” pile and found this from last November …

The three o-clock blahs hit me hard the other day. I don’t handle the shortening days well, and my sleep had been disturbed by an allergy attack that kept trying to turn from mere sniffle and headache to the blinding pain of a migraine.

I headed into the communal kitchen to beseech the snack machine gods for a bite to eat; perk me out of the blahs. Nearby stood a co-worker, and in the course of my attempting to explain that it was three-o-clock, the milk-and-cookies hour, I glanced at the watch I’d hurriedly grabbed at a local discount store and realized that my wrist watch has no three.

Reminds me of a comic who had an irregular phone and calendar. My calendar has no Tuesdays, he explained. I would have called you but my phone has no five.

And here I am, in his very predicament. My watch has no three. In other ways it is an unremarkable Timex Water-Resistant Indiglo date and time watch with an inexpensive leather strap. Ran me under $30 at a local discount store.

But if this means no more milk-and-cookies-hour, it’s time for it to go. On the other hand, if it means I won’t be woken by a sick kid, pet, spouse, or neighbor, perhaps I should sell it to the highest bidder ….

So I received another new spam mail at myrealname@realdomain.tld – not unusual. I and my family get such a massive ton of spam at our email addresses at realdomain.tld that we hardly even use them anymore (and yes, sibs, I will nuke and reset things soon!).

But this spam was unusual: it got through Gmail’s spam filters, which are pretty darn good. I read the first line, clicked the “PHISHING!” button* Gmail has, and forgot about it.

Then I got it AGAIN. This time, sent to realnaem@realdomain.tld, my other email address.

Amusing in two ways:

1. It was sent to, and only to, my siblings at their correct realname addresses.
2. It was sent from (apparently) one of my real name siblings. Well, at least seemingly from his address – we called him lots of names growing up, but Brittaney wasn’t one of them.
3. It was sent from FIVE MINUTES IN THE FUTURE.

Forget getting through my layers of spam-filters; I wanna live where it’s five minutes from now. I don’t think I can reach the Satellite of Love from there, but maybe I can live in the Mezzanine of Thinks You’re Kinda Cute and watch bad YouTube clips.

*yes, I know it’s not a button, it’s a link. And it’s gone now. I miss the PHISHING! link so …

First it was prepostions. A morning read of my local paper informed me that my teachers had been wrong about the whole “don’t end a sentence with a preposition” rule. The link above seems to indicate people have rallied against that rule for quite a bit longer than I or my teachers have been alive.

Now, it’s the “i before e” rhyme … gack. My kids are right – English is such a weird language. But it’s fun to learn, and explore with exploding young brains. Not just in the rules of the language, but in the way their little brains wrap around the rules.

But there it is; “I before E, except after C”; most people remember only that bit. I recall the second part; “or when sounded like a as in neighbor or weigh” – but the last part is new to me: “; and except seize and seizure and also leisure, weird, height, and either, forfeit, and neither.”

The author of that last page says the rule covers “most” cases; but only if you remember the whole thing, I expect, or grammarians wouldn’t be taking the discard of this rhyme under consideration.

Then again, one less thing to teach/unteach the next generation. I’ll dig up some of my old favorites though, like “Her first nurse works early …”, maybe work out rules for young punsters, and work on teaching them more fun with homonyms.