The Junk Drawer

That’s right. Today is National Punctuation Day. A day to honor all the commas, exclamation points and semi-colons in your life. I plan to buy a cake to celebrate. My justification for buying cake is VERY thin. Here’s a link round-up of my favorite punctuation and language blogs. Enjoy!

Bethany Keeley over at The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks highlights the misuse, overuse and questionable use of double quotes. I "read" it every day.

Patrick Fitzgerald and Amber Rhea write a comical blog about the misuse of the word "literally." It’s so funny, I literally laugh my head off. Well, not really. Last I looked, my head was still attached. Check ’em out at Literally, A Web Log.

Chris, at Apostrophe Abuse, publishes reader-submitted photos of an "orthographic pet peeve" of his. In my opinion, the apostrophe gets the least respect as a punctuation mark. It’s either being used where it shouldn’t, or not being used where it should, as in it’s vs. its.

William Levin takes us on a visual tour of Lowercase L abuse, when you see mostly uppercase letters on signs, but someone inexplicably uses a lower case "L" in the mix. Why? What did capital L ever do to you?

If you have trouble with language rules, spelling and parts of speech, check out Dumb Little Man for 40+ Tips to Improve your Grammar and Punctuation.

At least for today, let’s all try to punctuate correctly. For any text-messagers out there, you’re exempt. There’s no hope for you, snc u cant evn spl.

I knew it would happen, but just not this soon. We’ve had our new coffee and end tables for a mere 200 hours. Been enjoying them. Until I moved some books aside on the table and shrieked.

The damage: Coffee table. Three fresh claw marks. Lovely.

The perpetrator: Lucky, the soon-to-be pawless cat. Where’s that rotary saw?

If anyone knows how to conceal scratches on wood, I’d much appreciate hearing from you. We don’t want to make things worse by using the wrong product on it.

While I’m at it, anyone want a spastic cat who never sleeps and doesn’t understand the meaning of "For the last time, get off the table!"?

p.s. Our new couch and chair are coming on Wednesday. I’m sure I’ll be reporting back on the damage to those in no time at all.

I admit it. I am directionally-challenged and it’s embarrassing. When someone starts giving me directions somewhere, I can only remember the first one or two instructions. After that, I need a picture. Better yet, a chauffeur. MapQuest doesn’t cut it because then I have to take my eyes off the road. And trust me, nobody wants that.

You might figure I’d have the most trouble finding my way around over long distances. You’d be right, and wrong. It’s possible for me to have trouble no matter how far I’m driving. Here’s how I got lost two tenths of a mile from my house.

It was October last year, the day my township was queuing floats on the street behind my house for a Halloween parade taking place nearby.

I drove up to an intersection just two blocks from home. A cop explained that I wasn’t allowed to get through until the parade got underway.

"How long will it be?"

"About 20 minutes."

"But I have ice cream in my car." Surely, melting ice cream qualifies as an emergency and aren’t cops supposed to assist with emergencies?

"You can drive down one block and loop back to Maria Lane."

Simple enough, I think. And then I remember. I’m a dunce. I begin to worry immediately that I’ll get lost in my own neighborhood and I might find myself still driving around by dinner time, and all I’ll have to show for it is melted ice cream and a massive headache. ‘Course, I could eat the ice cream, but then I might do it so fast that I get an ice cream headache. Either way, I’m going to have a headache.

I continue down to the next block and enter what I like to call Suburban Planners Toying with Me. I imagined them all sitting around a big table, then asking a 4-year-old with a box of crayons to draw some figure eights and squiggly lines. "Looks good. Now dump the houses here." There are more roundabouts and cul de sacs than through-streets. I drive through all of them. Twice. "Hi. Me again." Wave real nice. "Just ignore me."

As God is my witness, you cannot traverse this ridiculous maze of suburban streets to save your life, and thank God I have food in the car because I might actually have to save it.

I have a cell phone, but Dave’s at work, so it won’t do me any good. But there might be a series of answering machine messages that go like this:

"Dave. I’m lost. Come get me when you get home. I’m a block away."

Beep.

"Dave. I’m scared. Little kids are pointing and laughing at me because they know I’m lost."

Beep.

"Dave. People think I’m casing their houses. I keep driving past them over and over."

Beep.

"Dave. Tell the cats I said good-bye. I’m never getting home. I ate all the food."

After fifteen $%*@# minutes of driving around in Dante’s seventh circle of development hell, I finally found the cross street I needed to get me home. When I got there, I screamed a colorful expletive I only bring out for special occasions such as this, and gunned it. Look out! There’s a gallon of chocolate chip cookie dough with my name on it.

Before the Great Furniture Hunt, there was the Great HDTV Television Acquisition. I hadn’t really thought much about our new TV until word got out that we had it. I know it’s an awesome set, but I didn’t know how awesome until I mentioned to a few people what we bought.

People — OK, men mostly — would start salivating and pepper me with questions, as though I’d just told them I rode on the Space Shuttle. "Tell us more! Is it just like they say? Is it like you’ve seen God? Two of my colleagues invited themselves over to watch football, and I’m afraid my Dad’s going to want one for Christmas.

For the record, it’s a 46" Sony Bravia Full HD 1080, WCG-CCFL, 7000:1, HDTV with HDMI. I have absolutely no idea what all that means except that the picture is simply gorgeous, especially when viewing HD channels. And that’s all I need to know. The above picture is a shot I took on the actual set. Soak it in, baby. Soak it in.

Buying this TV was very easy. For me, at least. Dave did all the heavy lifting, researching the differences between multiple brands of HD sets, the features offered on all of them, and what add-on purchases you should make for the best possible viewing experience.

When it was time to make the purchase, we went to Tweeter in Whitehall, PA on good authority that they know what they’re talking about and don’t strong-arm you into making a buy. We were pleasantly surprised at how true this turned out to be. I’d give a shout-out to the guy who helped us, but I just can’t remember his name. Sorry, Tweeter Guy.

Here’s how it all started. It could have gone a lot faster, if I wasn’t so annoyed by the stupidest things. The list is long and I sometimes wonder how Dave puts up with me. But that’s a post for another day.

"Kath, now this is the one we should get. It’s the Sony Bravia XBR3. The best."

"I don’t like it."

"Why?"

"It has a shiny frame."

"Huh?"

"See. It has this stupid shiny frame around it and it’s going to annoy me."

"Why?"

"Because I’ll see all the light reflected in it. It’s distracting."

"Oh, for God’s sake. You hate everything, don’t you?"

"And how long have we been married and you don’t know this already? Where’ve you been?"

Now we’re in big trouble because I’m not going to let Dave buy the set he really wanted and we start looking around at all the other models. The ones that don’t have the distracting shiny frame.

Tweeter Guy is just the most patient salesman in the world. He graciously shows us around and explains all the features of the other sets, trying to get us as close as possible to the desired one. But first I make him change to a different movie that’s running on nearly all of them because there happens to be a big bug crawling around in one scene. I can’t look at bugs, real or otherwise. I can’t even look at them in print. Freaks me all out. Dave rolls his eyes. Tweeter Guy is right on it. He can smell a sale and he’ll do whatever it takes.

Once we have the sets showing non-bug-infested movies, I now insist that he show us other channels. The stores will always demonstrate HDTVs in high definition mode for obvious reasons. It just looks so much better. But I need to see how a non-HD channel will look. He puts on the Food Network and now we have a face full of Emeril "BAM!" Lagasse. Ugh. Switch it back to HD, please.

After about an hour of looking at all the sets in the store, and Dave and Tweeter Guy discussing the finer points between them, we finally settle on the Bravia 1080, which has an un-shiny frame. We plunk down a rather large amount of money and off we go.

When the set arrived, Dave gave the delivery guy 25 bucks to set it up and configure the internal settings just right to get the best picture. And what a picture it is.

There is one fact that I’m sure all the actors and actresses in Hollyweird are lamenting with the advent of HDTVs and that’s that their faces look incredibly bad. I urge you, if you buy an HDTV, prepare yourselves for some of your favorite stars looking really awful in high-def. You can see all their flaws and all the makeup they use trying to hide their flaws. HD is brutally unforgiving. I never want to see Larry King in high-def. EVER.

What looks best, of course, are all the HD channels. With our cable provider we get about 20 of them. Regular channels still look better than they did on our old set, so there are improvements there, too. To give you an idea how mesmerizing it is to watch TV in HD, I’ve become a fan of the Discovery HD Theater channel. It features a program called Sunrise Earth which runs a full hour with a camera trained on a single scene in nature.

Yesterday I watched a sequoia tree for fifteen minutes. A tree. For fifteen minutes. Next week they’re airing an episode called Milk Cows in the Morning and next month is Bison before Breakfast. Swear to God. And I’m going to watch it and love it. Think I’m crazy? You go and buy yourself an HDTV and see if you don’t find yourself staring at cows and bison and trees and come back and tell me if it isn’t the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in the televised world.

I gotta go. Wildflower Elk just came on.

Does anyone know whether or not there are grocery stores in the Lehigh Valley where you can place an order of deli meats and cheeses in advance, and have them ready for you when you get to the store?

It would seem to me that in our technologically advanced society, where one can order up just about anything via phone or internet, we can muster up a system that keeps me from waiting in line behind twelve other people who need four kinds of cheese and two kinds of meats, all sliced to different thicknesses.

To make matters worse, sometimes my local store has a ticket dispenser available, and sometimes not. Do they not feel like taking people in order some days? I want a ticket!!

It would make sense to me that they can take advance orders. They do it in the bakery section for cakes. Why not cheese? I mean, it’s not like I’m going to make a crank call for 3/4 lb. Heidi Ann Swiss and a half pound Schaeffer’s baloney. They can DO this! No one would abuse the system, I’m sure.

And I’m not even asking that there be a special pickup place for it. I’d get in line like everyone else. It’s just I wouldn’t have to announce my order, one cold cut at a time, and then wait forever while they go to the case, find my item, unwrap it, go to the appropriate slicer, ask me again how much I wanted, walk to the scale, weigh it, not get it right, walk back to the slicer, get a couple more slices, walk back to the scale, get it close enough, and then ask "Will there be anything else?"

I could just walk up and say "I’m here for my cheese." Pick up my order and go. What’s so hard about that?

Me thinks I’m getting cranky again. Is it Friday yet?