A gorgeous
day in North Texas—sunny and bright and clear, and after a coldish start to the
day, pleasant temperatures in the afternoon. In fact, so pleasant that Megan,
my Austin daughter, complained about how hot it was in the cottage. I do wish
the girls could understand that my metabolism is not what theirs is with me at
eighty and they in their forties, and when I sit all day at my desk, I easily
get cold. As it was Megan threw open the patio door and went outside to cool
herself.
Still, her arrival
was a bright spot in an otherwise ordinary day. She’s in town just overnight to
get together tonight with some of her high school friends. Worried about
missing too much work time, she took the Vonlane bus from Austin and got in
almost three solid hours of work, in addition to a good lunch. Had everything
good to say about Vonlane. I’ve taken it twice before and really liked it—will take
it again next weekend to San Antonio.
Meantime, Megan
arrived about 2:15 and by 4:30 we had dropped her off at a friend’s house, not
expecting to see her again tonight. We will visit tomorrow until one o’clock
when her bus departs for Austin. She needs to get home because Sawyer, her guitar-playing
son and his band, have a gig tomorrow night.
We did visit while
Jordan, Megan, and I did errands—Eatzi’s to get their tuna salad, which I have
newly discovered is wonderful. Also got a salmon cake for my supper—very good—and
some cheeses for our everlasting happy hours.
Otherwise, the day
has not been remarkable. I could not tell you what I did this morning, but the
morning disappeared. I did try to figure out how to clear the cache on my
computer. I know, I know—it’s something everyone does. Except me. I also tried
to rid my computer of some malware, and called Colin, who was with the IT guy
from his company. He advised a hard disconnect, so I tried it. No idea if it
worked, except the computer refused to stay off and kept rebooting itself. I
usually think for a woman of my years I’m pretty computer savvy—this was not
one of those days.
Random thoughts: After
several years of thinking I was being pure by drinking almond milk, I began to
hear that drinking it was destroying the environment. Hard to see that
connection, but I finally saw an article that made it clear—sort of: Almond
milk has become such a popular health fad that growers are putting in huge
orchards of almond trees and contracting with beekeepers to send hives in to
pollinate the trees. The trouble is that the bees keep dying—for no reason that
science can figure out. Whole colonies are destroyed; in other instances,
colonies produce deformed offspring. It’s still a mystery to the almond
growers, the beekeepers, and scientists, but be aware that if you drink almond
milk you are consigning bees to death. And we need all the bees we can foster.
My other
incidental information is that someone has published a book, an entire book,
from one of the five remaining major publishers, on the semicolon—when to use
it, when not to, what it means. Subtitled The Past, Present, and Future of a
Misunderstood Mark, it is billed by Amazon as a page-turning,
existential romp through the life and times of the world’s most polarizing
punctuation mark. The blurb suggested that Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Orwell detest it.
Herman Melville, Henry James, and Rebecca Solnit love it. But why? When is it
effective? Have we been misusing it? Should we even care? My question:
who is Rebecca Solnit?
Reminds me of the flap over the Oxford comma, of which I am a
big believer (see how adroitly I avoided ending a sentence with a preposition,
with a nod to Winston Churchill). I’ll venture an opinion, not having struggled
through the delightful romp: the semicolon does not belong in fiction. No one
talks that way.
Happy Friday, everyone.
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