The room is about eight feet square, with baffles on the ceiling made of foam that looks like upside down egg carton innards, black acoustic panels on the walls, and grey industrial carpeting on the floor. All of this makes it look like a rec room renovation that veered way off the rails. The room […]
In Which an Audiobook Gets Born, Sort of Read More »
If you visit this blog regularly, you may know that I’ve been taking university English courses. For fun. If you visit this blog regularly, you may also know that I have a supremely misguided notion of what constitutes fun. Just in case you are contemplating having the same kind of fun I’m having right now,
English as a Second Language Read More »
This important news item may have escaped your notice in the past couple of weeks, and I completely understand why. There have been many news-worthy things going on than journalism space to recount them. Some prince and his not-good-enough-to-be-a-princess wife and their not-allowed-to-be-a-prince son (except when he will be, which will happen when said prince’s
There are ghostly cat paw prints on the floor. You have to look at just the right angle to see them on the hardwood, but when the sun comes in through the sliding glass kitchen doors, like it’s doing today, they are as obvious as dinosaur tracks on the marble tile. There are dust bunnies,
From Russia, With Love Read More »
The other day, I did a walk-up curbside pick-up at the library to collect two books I borrowed for my English 1002 course. Although there was only one copy of each in the library, they were easy to reserve and, I hope and expect they will be easy to renew if required. They are Slaughterhouse
A Former Librarian Repents Read More »
January is pretty much always the same. Dead Christmas trees get kicked to the curb. The tenth batch of turkey soup arrives with only a fraction of the enthusiasm that greeted the first. And we’ll spend countless hours we’ll never get back sitting on the phone with customer service trying to figure out what’s gone
Back when such things were considered amusing because nothing more amusing had yet to be invented, my grandfather was fond of reciting limericks as part of the Presbyterian after-dinner frivolity, as we drank tea as viscous as crude oil from the depths of the north Atlantic. Tea fully capable of walking on its hind legs
In Which I Assay an Essay Read More »
It’s been twenty-five years since Alanis Morissette released Jagged Little Pill. For each and every one of the years between then and now, she has had to suffer the scorn of English 101 students everywhere, because they are experts in recognizing and using irony as a device that can be verbal, dramatic, or situational, but
It appears I am the last person on the face of the earth to know what the ‘Comic Sans’ font is. And it’s already twenty-five years old, as of this week. In my own defense, I am not unfamiliar with type fonts and can spot a serif or lack of serif at twenty paces, but
A Font of all Knowledge Read More »
Weather: good, thank goodness. For the moment. Summer, don’t fail me now! Reason weather needed to be good: Lumber’s Island Labour day weekend party. Six Mile Lake island and island wanna be’s converged from far and wide. Nobody lost an eye, that I know of, even though we almost killed Lois with the nuts in
Cottage Status Report: 20190904 Read More »
