The Final Touch

Don’t you just LOVE the new logo??!!  See, I can brag about it because I’m not the one who designed it!

So here’s a shout-out to my AWESOME hus­band, who also hap­pens to be a FABULOUS graphic designer, Greg Mann! And a shame­less plug: If you’re in need of graphic-design work — book cover or inte­rior lay­out, posters, brochures, busi­ness cards, logos — he’s the one you want to con­tact! Visit the Face­book page for his busi­ness, Mon­key­Mind Stu­dios, to see pics of his work.

And… I’ve got a chal­lenge for you! There are a num­ber of sym­bols woven into my logo. If you can iden­tify at least one cor­rectly, your name will go into a draw­ing to receive a half-hour of proofreading/copyediting ser­vices from me at no charge (a $10-$15 value). Leave your ideas as a com­ment below. Respond by Mon­day, Novem­ber 7, as that is when I’ll draw the name of a lucky recip­i­ent. You never know when you could use a fresh set of eyes to look over your writ­ing: resume? col­lege appli­ca­tion essay? a paper you’ve writ­ten for school? an arti­cle for pub­li­ca­tion? And there’s no expi­ra­tion date to my offer — only to your chance to respond! So, hey! What are you wait­ing for?!

I always loved this video — along with many other School­house Rock selec­tions — so I thought it would be appro­pri­ate to share today. Not only does it have to do with gram­mar — which, as you prob­a­bly know, I’m all about! — but it also fits because today is our kids’ first day back at school!

I really wanted to post “Billy Joe McGuf­frey” from the Veg­gi­eTales Jonah movie. If you have kids who’ve watched it over and over, you’ll remem­ber how each verse starts out:

“Oh, Billy Joe McGuf­frey was a really clumsy kid. On the first day of first grade I’ll tell ya what he did…”

“Oh, Billy Joe McGuf­frey was a really clumsy kid. On the sev­enth day of sev­enth grade I’ll tell ya what he did…”

It goes all the way from first to twelfth day/grade of school, but our two boys are in first and sev­enth. In each of the verses some­thing ridicu­lous hap­pens and Billy Joe McGuf­frey ends up in the hospital:

“You could buy a zoo with all the doc­tor bills he paid!”

It’s all sung super-fast so you can hardly under­stand all the words, and it’s done by the awe­some Chris­t­ian rock/pop singer Chris Rice.

Any­way, of course the main thing is that we hope no acci­dents or mishaps befall our two kids — or any of the kid­dos head­ing back to school these days — because no one I know has the money to buy a zoo, and our lives are prob­a­bly zoo-ish enough as it is! Bet­ter to stick with learn­ing about con­junc­tions and all that fun stuff!

(And if you need any help with it, I’m just an email away!)

Hey, while you’re still here, do you have any first-day-of-school mem­o­ries you’d like to share? Leave a com­ment below. Thanks!

What could pos­si­bly be more beau­ti­ful to a parent’s ears than the sound of two young broth­ers play­ing nicely together? — espe­cially when those same two are usu­ally fight­ing, or at least when the elder is usu­ally snip­ping at the younger? Read the rest of this entry »

Though, of course, we’re hop­ing we won’t have to try it for long.

About a week ago, my hus­band learned his graphic design job was being moved out-of-state (and he was not offered the chance to tag along). Of course, we went through a whole range of emo­tions — a bit of relief, as things had got­ten com­pli­cated at that job; but mostly, as you might imag­ine, anx­i­ety and ner­vous­ness, not only about find­ing a new job but also about the likely need to move and about how close we are now to the new school year (could this not have hap­pened back in May or June? Really??).

As we sorted things out more, Read the rest of this entry »

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The Minneapolis-St. Paul (Minn.) Star­Tri­bune news­pa­per, in its blog enti­tled “On Weather,” stated today that Moor­head, Minn. — only 30 miles south of Hen­drum, where I live — was the “hottest, most humid  spot on earth Tues­day evening”:

“The coolwx​.com site shows global extremes from hour to hour. Tues­day evening, around the din­ner hour, the dew point at Moor­head reached 87.8 F, mak­ing this the most humid report­ing sta­tion on the planet. The heat index peaked at an almost incom­pre­hen­si­ble 134 F. at Moorhead.”

Hearty — or fool­ish! — peo­ple that we are, my fam­ily and I were OUTSIDE at my youngest’s tee­ball game, and there was NO shade at the ball field! For­tu­nately, it only lasted an hour. I wouldn’t have even taken him if it hadn’t been the last game of the sea­son. He would have been awfully sad to have had to miss out.

(By the way, the pic­ture below is not of our ball dia­mond — WAY too much shel­ter from the sun to be ours!!)

I hope the rest of you are sur­viv­ing sum­mer quite nicely — spoiled, per­haps, as we are by our air-conditioning and fans, and for­tu­nate to not be home­less on days like these. Sum­mer bless­ings to you all!

photo © 2008 Paul Swansen | more info (via: Wylio)
A line from a news arti­cle I read today at the New York Times blog for Kin­dle (and, yes, I know I said I wouldn’t reveal sources when I turn writ­ing errors into teach­ing moments, but some­how I think the Times is big enough to take it from li’l ol’ me; I won’t name the author, though):

“Mr. Blago­je­vich, a Demo­c­rat whose for­mer aides say once saw him­self as a pres­i­den­tial con­tender some day, was found guilty…”

To be fair to the writer, this is a really tricky con­struc­tion. I had to reread it a few times to even sort out whether it was incor­rect or not. But, alas, Read the rest of this entry »