Jan Dunlap's Blog, page 12

It’s defiantly a part of my job

As a college English instructor, I’m obsessive about correct word usage. I continually badger my students to check their word choices, as it’s an easy thing to mishandle big words, and, often, word processing programs automatically default to certain words when that’s not what the student meant.

For instance, one of the most frequent errors I see is the use of the word ‘defiantly’ when it should be ‘definitely.’ As in “I defiantly will turn in the assignment no later than tomorrow!”

Really? I’d rather the student took an additional day to proofread and make sure he ‘definitely’ will turn in the assignment without any word bloopers.

Another one I saw a lot last year was ‘pervert’ when it should have been ‘previous.’ As in “my pervert employer can give you a good recommendation.”

Actually, I’d rather not communicate at all with a pervert employer, thank you. A ‘previous’ employer would be much better.

Before the fall semester begins for my classes next week, however, I want to even the playing field and publicly admit that I have made errors in word usage, too. But my problem isn’t with a word processing program.

My problem is my mouth that opens before checking with my brain.

So here’s the story of the most awful word blooper I ever made: I was the communications specialist for a public school district in 1979 and the director of academic programming was unhappy with a news report about school test scores that I had released to the local press.  She called me on the phone, and promptly gave me a verbal tongue-lashing for what I had done.  Flustered and eager to defend myself – since the superintendent had told me to release the story – I stopped her in mid-tirade.

“Before you castrate me any further, I think you should know I was just doing my job,” I said.

There was a pause on the other end of the line, and I immediately released that I’d used the wrong word.

“I meant to say ‘castigate,’ not castrate,” I uttered into the silence, my face flooding with heat.

Oh yes, incorrect word users – I know your pain.

But I’m still going to call you on it. Just doing my job, folks.

Oh, I wish I drove an Oscar Mayer Wienermobile

Oh my gosh! The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile is in the news! I LOVE the Wienermobile! And since Paul Ryan, vice-presidential candidate, once drove it as a sales rep, it’s getting all kinds of media attention. Thanks, Paul! Not only that, but I just saw the Wienermobile two weeks ago when I was in California for my son’s wedding.

Not that the giant-hot-dog-on-a-bun vehicle was at the wedding. It wasn’t. My son hired a charter bus at the wedding to bring guests to and from their hotels. I don’t know if he tried to get the Wienermobile, but I doubt it, as the Wienermobile won’t seat enough people to make it practical for use as large group transportation.

Unless you hired the whole fleet of Wienermobiles.  According to the official Wienermobile blog, there are six of them that tour the country. They each have two drivers, though, so I don’t know how much room there would be left for other passengers, let alone for wedding gifts. Besides which, I don’t know how many people would actually want to be driven to a wedding in a huge hot dog.

Other than me, of course. I think it would be hilarious. But then, I’ve always wanted to drive a Wienermobile myself. I’d love to see the look on other drivers’ faces when they see a big hot dog passing them by. And when I stopped at a light, I’d lean out and ask if anyone had mustard.

Maybe my son was right to make the wedding transportation plans without me…

 

No contest: Fuel economy versus frozen custard

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two ways to deal with rising gas prices. One way is to get a hybrid vehicle to improve your fuel economy so you use less gas. Another way is to quit driving so you don’t use any gas at all. I have now tried both ways. Neither is perfect.

A few months ago, we bought a hybrid car in our bid to battle the gas pump. Sure, we get great gas mileage with it, but the thing the car dealers don’t tell you is that driving a hybrid is very distracting because there are a gazillion indicators at the touch of a finger that can tell you anything from the outside air temperature to the inside temperature to how many miles you’ve driven since you started out on this particular errand to how many miles you are getting at this exact moment.

And I mean EXACT moment.

Now, for some people, knowing their fuel economy isn’t a riveting concern. They can drive for hours without once thinking about how much gas they use to climb a highway entrance ramp or make a left-hand turn.

For others of us, though, constantly monitoring gas usage can become more than an economical habit. It can become a vital matter, an obsessive interest, an addiction.

It can also be a very stupid thing to do.

“I’m giving the car some gas,” I told my daughter on our maiden voyage in the new hybrid, my eyes focused on the fuel economy gauge. “And – oh my gosh! I’m getting more than a million miles per gallon because the car is running on electricity!”

I increased my speed and tapped the display button on the steering wheel. A little diagram popped up on the screen on the dashboard and showed arrows moving from the gas engine to the wheels.

“Now the car has switched to the gas motor because I’m going more than 20 miles per hour.”

I tapped the display button again and got a bar graph showing fuel economy. “We’re averaging 36 miles per gallon on this trip.”

Tap.

“We’ve driven a mile since we started.”

“Mom?” My daughter asked from the passenger seat.

“I just slowed down. Here’s the little diagram again. The engine switched back to the electric motor. Our gas consumption just dropped dramatically and our mileage soared!”

“Mom?” Her voice seemed a bit more urgent.

“It’s 83 degrees outside.”

“Mom!”

I took my eyes off the display screen just in time to see a truck pull out in front of me.

I slammed on the brakes.

“That was close,” my daughter breathed, her eyes wide with alarm.

“Definitely a bad move,” I agreed. “When I hit the brakes, my fuel economy plummeted.

From now on, no sudden braking,” I told my daughter. “It wastes too much gas.”

“From now on, no driving a hybrid,” she replied. “It’ll kill you.”

I figured she might have a point.

Now my husband drives the hybrid, and I have our old stickshift.

Which I’m not driving at all in order to save gas money.

Except in the case of dire emergencies.

Which is a real problem in the summer when we have all this time on our hands.

“I’m so bored! There’s nothing to do! I want to go somewhere!”

“No driving.”

“But everyone else is!”

“That’s their choice. Think of how responsible we’re being, how much money we’re saving, how good we’re being to the environment. It’s all about priorities. You can do this, Mom.”

She’s right.

I can.

Except for those dire emergencies.

“Mom, it’s your favorite flavor at the frozen custard stand today.”

I am so driving.

Me and the baboons

I am so depressed.

I read a quote from prolific author and novelist James Scott Bell on Goodreads the other day. I think it was supposed to be motivational, but instead, it depressed me.

He said, “If you can write each day, do it, and meet a quota. Minimum 350 words a day. A baboon can do 350 words a day. Don’t be shown up by a baboon.”

Great. I’m being shown up by a baboon.

I don’t write 350 words a day.

Some days, I might write 30 words on my to-do list, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the kind of writing Mr. Bell is talking about.

I can’t help but wonder what kind of writing the baboons are doing, though. I doubt they’re working on suspense novels or intense emotional dramas, although I guess you never know.  It reminds me of the Infinite Monkey Theorem (yep, it has a designated scientific-sounding name! thank you, Wikipedia!) that posits that a monkey, given infinite time, could actually reproduce the works of William Shakespeare by random typing.

So far, it hasn’t happened. Not for lack of trying, though. There was an experiment in 2003 that used virtual monkeys (a computer simulation of a bunch of monkeys typing randomly) that actually did manage to write part of a line from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2. It took them more than a day, however; apparently it took the equivalent of several billions of monkey years to get that far.

Okay, now I don’t feel so bad about the 350-word daily quota for writers. The monkeys took a bazillion years to eke out less than ten words. I know I can top that.

Another item I read made me feel even better about my low writerly output. According to a CBS news article from May 9, 2003, researchers at Plymouth University in England put a computer into a cage of macaques and instead of typing, the primates picked up stones and “started bashing the hell out of it,” said researcher Mike Phillips. “Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard.”

Geez. And I thought I got frustrated with writing.

The good news was that the macaques did finally settle down and did, indeed, type five pages of…the letter S, with a few of the letters A, J, L, and M mixed in.

It took them a month.

So there, baboons. I might not be up to your daily speed yet, but I’ve got those macaques beat hands down.

Move over, monkeys, I’m on a roll…

NOT wearing beige

I’ve cleaned the bathrooms, mopped the floors, vacuumed the rugs and baked cookies.

My husband thinks I might be going into labor.

My daughter wants to know if we have company coming over that no one told her about.

Neither is the case.

The truth is that my son is getting married, and as Mother of the Groom, I don’t have to do anything. Which is a problem for me, since I have all this adrenalin pumping in joyful excitement. I’m not very good at just sitting back and letting someone else do all the planning and preparation, but as the MOG, that’s my job. I keep thinking of what my friend Katy told me when her sons got married: the Mother of the Groom is expected to show up, shut up, and wear beige.

Okay, I can do that.

Except for the beige thing. I look awful in beige. I tried it and I just couldn’t stand it. I looked about a thousand years old and anemic. And that was in good lighting. I’m going with navy.

And I probably won’t shut up at the wedding either. If my daughters’ weddings were any indication, I was sobbing by the time they exchanged vows with their new spouses. My mascara was running down my cheeks. I’m bringing myself a gag this time and skipping the eye makeup altogether.

I will, however, definitely show up. I wouldn’t miss my son’s wedding for anything.

Let me just finish a few things first, like emptying the dishwasher, polishing the silver, taking out the trash, washing the car…

About squirrels

This is a true story.

A woman called a local wildlife rehabilitation center to ask for advice. She told the rehab employee that she’d found a baby squirrel on the ground beneath a nest, and she’d put the baby back in the nest, but the mother squirrel pushed it out again.

“What should I do?” she asked, on the verge of tears.

The rehab person explained that sometimes a mother will abandon or remove one of her young if it is sickly or she’s unable to care for it adequately in order to devote her energies to the young that will thrive. The staffer also noted that people should call the center first before they do anything, since sometimes the mother will reject a baby that has human scent on it. Since the caller had already handled the baby, though, the staffer suggested that she try one more time to return the baby to the nest.

The caller said she would do so.

An hour later, the caller was back on the line, in tears, saying the mother had once again booted out the baby.

“Bring it to us, and we’ll see what we can do,” the staff person said.

When the caller showed up at the center with the baby, it was all the rehab person could do not to laugh out loud.

The baby was a rabbit.

Not a squirrel.

“That would explain why the mother kept pushing it out of the nest,” the staffer commented.

This story tells me two things: 1. Some people can’t tell the difference between a bunny and a squirrel (some outdoor time might be a good idea there!);  and 2. I think like a squirrel. I wouldn’t want another species taking up residence in my house, either.  They’d eat different foods than I do. Their behaviors would seem weird to me. Their hours of activity would be the opposite of mine.

I think I just described new high school graduates.

Maybe I need to take a page from the squirrel’s parenting handbook…

The mysteries of tea

I drink a lot of green tea. One reason is that it contains high concentrations of antioxidants, which research studies have shown to be good for your health.  Another reason I drink it is that other studies have shown that ingesting green tea may promote weight loss, which is never a bad thing when you frequently hear the food in your kitchen calling your name, like I do. And finally, I drink green tea because I get thirsty and it tastes good.

Now, however, I’m feeling pressure to have a more intense experience when I drink green tea, thanks to Tazo, a tea company out of Portland, Oregon. (Why am I not surprised?) I bought a box of their Zen green tea, and I’m intimidated by their brewing instructions. Not only do they suggest using a gourd as a cup for drinking the tea, but while the tea steeps for three minutes, you’re supposed to contemplate eternal mysteries.

I don’t have a drinking gourd, and I can barely catch my breath in three minutes, let alone mull over eternal mysteries.

Heck, I can’t even think of an eternal mystery in three minutes.

Four minutes, maybe, but three?

Never happen.

So now I figure I have to do more than zap a cup of water in the microwave to get my tea started, which incidentally, is probably unacceptable to the Tazo people, since the box instructions show a picture of a kettle for bringing water – fresh, filtered water at that! – to a boil. (See, I’m already feeling the pressure.) To be properly prepared to drink my tea, I have to come up with an eternal mystery before I even put the cup in the microwave. Seeing as I’m usually between doing laundry and answering emails when I fix tea, it’s going to be a stretch to think up any mystery more involved than why the towels are still wet in the dryer or my laptop is acting weird.

Gee, maybe those do qualify as eternal mysteries.

I’ve got to get the water heated. Now I just need to find a gourd…

 

Hide the cupcakes!

I have often been accused by my children of worrying too much.

“You’re going to catch a cold,” I’d tell my teenagers as they ran out the door to catch the school bus, coatless, in the middle of January.

“I’m fine,” they each replied. “Don’t worry.”

“Watch out for deer when you’re driving after dark,” I’d say when they got their drivers’ licenses. “They’ll jump out right in front of the car.”

“Mom, don’t worry,” they said.

“Don’t date vampires,” I warned them.

Groans from the kids.

For the record, however, I would like to point out that there is one thing I never worried about: that aliens would destroy us because of global warming.

No, I have not stumbled upon another conspiracy website. I have simply read about a study produced last year by a team of NASA scientists. It’s titled “Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis.” One of the speculations of the study is that one day, environmentally responsible aliens will throw up their appendages (or whatever they have) in dismay at how poorly humans have managed the earth’s resources and wipe us out before we trash the rest of the universe.

Sounds about right to me. I totally believe that actions have consequences. You don’t wear a coat in winter, so you get a cold. You don’t watch for deer; they hit your car. You generate too many greenhouse gases, then of course aliens will smack you down. This is obvious stuff. But it’s not something I worry about.

What does worry me about this study (which, incidentally, I sure hope I didn’t help pay for through my taxes), is that these so-called galactic experts demonstrate a horrendous lack of knowledge about extraterrestrials. For instance, the study notes that aliens “could attack and kill us, enslave us, or potentially even eat us.”

Come on, guys. Everyone knows that aliens won’t eat us. Use us as host organisms or enslave us – sure. But eat us? No way. If an extraterrestrial is smart enough to figure out how to find us and visit us in our teeny, tiny spot in the universe, it’s got to be way too intelligent to eat humans who ingest processed cheese spread and Hostess cupcakes.

Wait a minute. I love Hostess cupcakes. I bet aliens would love Hostess cupcakes, too. Maybe that’s why they’d destroy humans – they want the cupcakes for themselves. Am I making myself a target when I buy them?

And my kids say I worry too much….

A Canadian mystery

Canada didn’t give me a passport stamp. Earlier this month, when we crossed the northern Minnesota border into Manitoba, try ohe border guard looked at our passports, but he didn’t stamp them. I’m bummed. I now have no proof I was in Canada.

I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

“Why didn’t they stamp our passports?” I asked my husband, since he’s always a lot more informed about current events than I am. I figured if I’d missed something important in the world, he would know. Had Canada declared bankruptcy lately? Could they not afford rubber stamps at the border?

“I have no idea,” he replied.

“I really wanted a stamp,” my daughter said.

“I did too,” I agreed. “If I’d known he wasn’t going to stamp the passport, I would have drawn a little maple leaf in there and asked him to initial it. Or I would have brought stickers he could use. I must have about a zillion ‘Have a nice day!’ stickers from all the charities that send us donation requests. I’d leave him all the sheets of stickers he wants.”

Oh, man. I could finally get rid of all those stickers in my junk drawer. Heck, I’d even throw in the hundreds of Christmas-themed return address labels I’ve accumulated over the years. I would have to live to be a thousand years old to use all of those up.

Although it might be a little strange for people from all over the world to have my return address label in their passports.

“Canada? No, I went to..it says here…Jan Dunlap.”

Talk about name recognition. I am SO packing up my stickers to send to the border patrol.

Oh, Canada!

 

 

 

The dog days of summer

Back in May, I bought a wading pool for our dog, Gracie. Since she’s a black lab mix, she tends to get really hot when we walk her in the summer heat, and I thought if she had a pool to lie in after our walks, she could cool down faster.

So I watched the sale flyers, and as soon as I saw a hard plastic wading pool advertised, I went to the store to get one.

“I need a pool for our dog,” I explained to the saleswoman as I studied the 4’ and 6’ diameter pools. “She’s too big to stretch out in the smaller one here, so I’ll take the larger one.” Realizing that it would not fit into the trunk of my Camry, I asked her if someone could help me secure it to my car roof for the ride home. She assured me I could get help.

She was wrong. The store prohibited employees from helping customers strap things to their car roofs because of liability issues. She did offer me all the twine I wanted, however.

I looked at the 6’ diameter pool laying on the parking lot asphalt next to my car. The pool was bigger than the car’s roof.

“I can do this,” I told myself, heaving the pool on top of my car and beginning to thread the twine over the pool and through my car windows. By the time I was done, it looked like a monster spider had spun a web over my car.

No problem. The pool was secure.

Until my car speed reached 15 mph.

Then the pool bucked and shuddered on my roof and began to slide sideways. I hit my emergency blinkers, pulled off the road and tightened the twine. I took back roads home, drove under 10 mph, and kept my blinkers on.

“Gracie better appreciate this,” I muttered as I inched home. And then the twine broke and the pool flew off the car.

I looked at the pool lying in the road behind me. Thankfully, the road was empty and no oncoming car had been attacked by my dog’s wading pool. I pulled over again, turned off the car and walked back to retrieve the pool.

“I cannot believe I am doing this,” I said as I lifted the 6’ diameter pool off the road and returned to the car. I examined my twine, which was shredded into several pieces, and debated what to do.

I could abandon the pool on the side of the road in hopes some mom with a carload of hot and crabby toddlers would find it, thank her lucky stars, and take it home.

I could leave it and come back with heavy rope to secure it to the roof.

I could just forget the whole thing and abandon the pool. But then I would be throwing away the money I’d spent on it. (A whopping $12 plus tax. I could feel my frugal forebears’ disappointment.) Not to mention I’d be committing a crime of littering. How much of a fine do you get for throwing a pool on the side of the road?

I didn’t know and didn’t want to find out. I grabbed the pool and stuffed it into my trunk as far as it would go. The hard plastic gave a little, so I could finally fold it over. A third of it still hung outside my trunk, so I took the longest twine piece I could find and tied the trunk shut over the pool. I drove home slowly, all the while thinking that Gracie better LOVE this pool.

Guess what?

She doesn’t. She refuses to get into it. She’ll drink water out of it, but she won’t set foot in it. What am I going to do with a 6’ diameter wading pool?

Well…I’m 5’7”….it’s really hot this summer….

“Stop drinking out of my pool, Gracie!”