Every once in a while, life just hands you a treat. It’s usually unexpected, outside the realm of the everyday, and genuinely smile-inducing. When it happens, it can make your day.

Just such an event came my way last Friday as I was walking to work. I was at a major intersection, just up the hill from where I live, waiting for the light to change. I looked to my right, and there, also waiting for the light to turn green, was the oldest-looking car I had even seen in my entire life. It was sitting well past the crosswalk, it’s nose nearly in the intersection, and the driver was signalling to the cars behind him, presumably that they might have to go around him.

Needless to say, I gawked. I love old cars (I don’t know many people who don’t, actually), and this was total vintage staring me in the face. I was going to wave at the driver and make some kind of comment, but for some reason I held back. I just looked at the automotive wonder before me and grinned.

When the light changed, I had to be careful of my steps, because my head kept turning to my right to look at the old car. The sound of the engine starting jarred me into the realization that it had been shut off while the car was stopped for the red light. As I crossed the street, the old car got into gear and finally passed me as I reached the curb on the other side. (more…)

So, when I’m not rattling on about my lack of blogging, I can often be found rattling on about writing and language. Why? Because, dammit, language is important to me, and I happen to be fairly proficient at stringing linguistics bits together in coherent and interesting ways.

[Aside: Would we call a string of linguistic bits a linguine?]

[Aside Followup Fact: The word “linguine” literally means “little tongues” in Italian.]

I have on occasion been accused of the crime of pedantry in the sphere of language. I will confess to bouts of nitpickiness bordering on pedantry, but as to full-on pedantry, I don’t think I have the qualifications for that. One thing’s for sure. I need to loosen up a bit. While I’m not prone to fits of letter-writing when I read or see something that is grammatically, punctuatively, or orthographically incorrect, I do often cringe, and I do often complain about it. (more…)

I’ve often been harsh with myself about my lack of blogging. I’ve even gone so far as to write entire blog posts about the fact that I haven’t been blogging. I don’t know if blogging about not blogging actually counts as blogging or whether it somehow cancels itself out. That’s more of an existential dilemma, I think, and one I won’t be delving into here.

What I will touch on, however, is a little bit of insight into this whole blogging process, and what I’ve recently discovered about it.

Well. Ahem. As many of my readers know, I started this whole blog thing just under two years ago, with the intent of writing a post every day. Every. Single. Day. Which I did. For about seven weeks. After that, it became spotty. Sometimes an entire month would go by without a post. I didn’t like this, and it made me anxious and ill-tempered.

The solution would have been to start blogging regularly again, but oh, no, I couldn’t do anything quite that simple, could I? I had to ruminate and cogitate and every other –ate word you can think of—and some I wish you wouldn’t—in order to figure out what my problem was.

Feh. Enough of that. I’m done with beating up on myself. It is what it is. And if I blog, I blog. And if I don’t, well, geez, guess what? I don’t. (more…)