Best things

The best part of my day was going for a walk with Five. He's a good walker now, having left the crawl far behind. His style tends toward the trot, slightly pigeon-toed and so darned cute total strangers always want to cover him in kisses.

We do a short circuit, he and I. He narrates the outing, telling me what he sees, repeating it several times to make sure I heard. He used to call me 'Daya' which I loved but now he comes close to being able to say my name properly - which is cute in its own way, but makes me a little sad for days gone by.

He holds my index finger with his whole fist, arm up by his ear. Occasionally he adjusts his grip or tries holding a different finger. Each requires that we stop, and he gives it his full attention, involving a great deal of movement from his very expressive eyebrows.

Five has such a sweet little voice and a well-developed sense of humour for a little two-foot tall person. He's good company. However, he can also holler louder and longer than anyone else I've come across - and I've come across some! He's got volume and endurance locked up, baby!

Life is pretty good when you get to hold hands with the sweetest two-year old on earth.

This comma packs a wallop!

What is this thing called, love?


Do you remember learning grammar in school? Parsing, or diagramming sentences was out of fashion when I was being state-educated, but Mr. Arthur, my grade 8 teacher, was an excellent teacher (he actually taught us how to study for exams) and he thought it might be useful for us to know about verbs and nouns. He led us into deeper territory where gerunds and appositives played with participles (which never dangled). I loved it. It equally challenged, fascinated, and frightened me. Remembering fine details and split-hair distinctions is hard for me, but I really get off on organizing and making things tidy.

Since deciding to take these writing classes, I’ve been looking forward to the grammar portion. I enjoy editing – not my own work, as the many mistakes here in The Lighthouse will prove – but my idea of fun is to take apart a newspaper or magazine article. I keep track of typos, plot holes, punctuation errors and week passages in the books I read. For me, this is fun.

So, I embarked on class number three eager to tear stuff up. I imagined myself fearlessly and confidently wielding a red pen, tweaking and perfecting the words of others. I was brought up short by the 400 page textbook, full of things so hazy in my memory that I may have only dreamed about them one night long ago after eating some bad chicken. Four hundred pages of ‘grammar basics’, sentence structure, punctuation, and word choice! I was about to climb a learning curve.

I am particularly fond of the comma. It is an unassuming thing, but its misuse can bring hilarious results or tragic consequences. Here are some of the helpful grammatical tips I have learned so far:

Use a comma between coordinate adjectives - but not cumulative adjectives. Commas go after initial participial phrases, before a coordinating conjunction joining independent clauses, to set off non-restrictive elements (those elements being clauses, phrases and appositives), to set off transitional phrases, parenthetical expressions, absolute phrases and elements expressing contrast.

If a quotation appears at the beginning of a sentence, set it off with a comma unless the quotation ends with a question mark or an exclamation point. If two successive sentences from the same source are interrupted by explanatory words, use a comma before the explanatory words and a period after them. Periods and commas are placed inside quotation marks, while colons and semi colons are placed outside quotation marks.

By far the best piece of advice I have found on the comma comes from the book Eats, shoots & leaves, by Lynne Truss, and it is this: don’t use commas like a stupid person!


Leonora walked on her head, a little higher than usual.

Gleeful in Sohoe

Do you watch Glee?

Ok, good. Neither do I.

I can't begin to tell you how absolutely beautiful the weather has been here in Sohoe. For weeks! It's been so warm, consistently day after day, that all the flora and all the fauna has burst into song and dance (each in their species-appropriate ways)

Where normally one leaf would grow, there are two or three. A quartet of birds has become a full-fledged orchestra of song.

This morning, the squirrels were in full-out Glee mode. The were chattering in harmony, taking turns with the lead melody line. They were performing complex and perfectly synchronized choreography up and down the fence, across the patio, over and around the container plants, zigging and zagging, then pausing for dramatic effect before exiting stage left to resounding bravos from the chorus of crows.

It was a glittering, Rock Hudson, Doris Day extravaganza!

I wanted to join them.

(catch the quote?)

Fabulous

In my continued efforts to convert all nonbelievers to the Beautiful Game, here is another example of the global influence of 22 men chasing a round ball:







Reviews for the movie have been poor, so Warner Bros. came up with this campaign for the London premier. Perhaps it's meant to draw women who are tired to death of football; however I suspect women will be as evident in the audience as men, when England tackles the US on June 12.

They'll just be wearing cuter shoes.

Make work, not sense

There is, all around Sohoe, an initiative to spend government money and justify it by saying we're making park and recreation area improvements. Perhaps this is happening in a neighbourhood near you?

The large poster boards at each of the above mentioned park and recreation areas list the agencies involved, somewhat like the opening credits of a Hollywood blockbuster: brought to you by XY Agency; Sponsorship provided by LTD Inc.; MDF for this sign supplied by Bob.

Our lovely playgrounds, which had very serviceable and heavily-used equipment of the usual variety - slides, swings, climbers, teeter-totters - were pulled out roughly a month ago. Then nothing else happened.

Improvement, before your very eyes! Government style!

Today, to the great delight of Four and Five, there was construction activity at our Park and Recreation Area. There was a digger and a dump truck and a bright orange plastic safety fence.

We chose a spot under some big trees and settled in to watch the goings on. If there's anything those Peanuts love more than Monday morning garbage pickup, it's Thursday morning Park and Recreation Area construction.

The digger guy was busy pushing dirt around into piles, then flattening the piles, then scooping them up in the bucket and dropping it into the back of the dump truck. Several times he stretched the long arm of his machine so far we were afraid he was going to tip it over. But he was wearing an orange safety vest with a fluorescent yellow 'x' on the back, which reassured us he was a trained professional. Digger guy then became dump truck driver guy. He got into the big machine, and drove to the path that circles the perimeter of the park and drove about 3/8ths of the way around, beep beeped his way backwards to another section of our (not overly large) park, and dumped the dirt he had so carefully piled and scooped only 30 feet away! Then he drove his truck to where he started from, and continued the process: pile, flatten, pile, scoop, drive, reverse, dump, drive.... and so on.

Pop would have shaken his head at what surely was a system designed by an engineer. Grandpa Nut would have hopped the fence and asked the young safety vest if he needed any help, questioning his methodology every step of the way, and sharing a story about how back in 1982, he and his buddies built a park with nothing but some shovels and some homemade nails.

Seriously: a digger and a big dump truck to move dirt 30 feet? This is supposed to be a 'we're creating jobs' scenario. How about hiring three guys with shovels and a conveyor belt to do the work? Heck, five guys and a wheel barrow!

All the same, Four and Five sure enjoyed watching the goings on, while J and I enjoyed watching the safety vest (hush now! Nothing salacious here! We were laughing at the absurdity of it all.) I later biked past another park, further afield from home, and saw new equipment had been installed. Good things are coming. One dump truck at a time.

Signs of life

It's very exciting! There are wee little lettuces growing outside our front door! I planted those growing green things! I think it was last Saturday that we first saw signs of life, only we weren't sure if it was lettuce or little weeds. Sadly, I plucked a few out today and tossed them over the banister before I looked online to see what infant salad looks like. (Google search term: what does lettuce look like when it grows images)

On Victoria Day, I went to a large local nursery with the intention of buying more herbs and another tomato plant. I was very tempted to bring home other pretty flowers, but strictly disciplined myself to stick to the plan. I bought a little 'Sweet million' tomato, and a fully grown 'Parks whopper' plant that even has a few yellow flowers on - tomatoes are imminent! I also added a chocolate mint, a garden thyme, and three kinds of basil to our already flourishing herb containers: Thai, Italian large leaf, and Red Rubin.

Today we tackled potatoes. We had five old potatoes growing stems in the cupboard, so J drilled holes in the bottom of a deep Rubbermaid container we had laying around (as you do) and we planted them. Then, just for fun, I poked four garlic bulbs in the lettuce tub to see if they will turn into anything.

What's next?

Up the hill

There is an old bike in our shed which had a gel cover on the saddle. I say 'had' because I have nicked it. It now pads my very own bicycle seat, in the hopes it will pad my very own seat.

As today promised to be a fine day, I planned to bike up to the library in order to prevent the accumulation of overdue fines (I hear they can sometimes be steep!) It will get quite warm as the day advances, so I loaded up the front-mounted basket with books, wallet, water, billcap and sweater and set out. To brave The Hill. The Library Hill.

The Hill, as I've mentioned before is a challenge to the novice cyclist (of which I am one)as it is at once steep and long. Or so it feels. The first time up, I had to dismount shy of the parking lot in a near collapse. The second time I managed to keep my feet but again didn't quite make it all the way. My last trip I made it all the way to the bench outside the front door of the library, but had to sit for a few minutes before I was fit to show myself inside.

This time, dear Reader, I managed just the right gear setting and arrived at the library bench still in control of myself, and was able to go right in. The problem is, though, that my cheeks get very... rosey. I found a little table out of the way to sit and give myself time to calm down a little. Also, I was trying to be discrete about sweating - thus the light sweater I had with me. Sorry to be so frank about this, but biking makes me sweat. Not something I like to do in a refined environment like the public library!

The ride home was accomplished in rapid time, with confidence as I think I'm really getting the hang of this gear business. On the right hand, anyway. What I'm supposed to do with the gizmo on the left hand side, I'm not clear about.

There is good news: the gel seat cover did help! It's not the sofa cushion I was once contemplating, but it is certainly an improvement over the plank-of-wood experience of my first outings.

Tally ho!