Gifted Typist

It’s always struck me as curious that this day is codified as 9-11.
It’s true that we say September (9) 11th(11), but whenever you distill a date down to numbers on a form, the little boxes always ask for day-month-year in that order. Not month-day-year. Think of your birthday.
I always assumed the logic to be that [...]

When I put money in a bank, the bank gives me interest. The bank also sends me monthly statements with my balance and interest payments.
When I make an overpayment on my Sears account to the tune of $63.28, they don’t send me monthly statements with the balance.
But at the anniversary of the overpayment, they do [...]

A child was born at 2 am on 5 September 1996 in Britain.
But at the moment of birth, the time was actually 10 pm on 4 September 1996 in Atlantic Canada which is four time zones behind.
The child now lives in Atlantic Canada.
So, is the child’s real (ie not official) birthday 4 Sept or 5 [...]

This was me eleven years ago today, not quite nine-months pregnant, waters broken and needing a little push to get me going.
After the necessary incendiary devices were inserted, I sat for the next 24 hours like a hand grenade with its pin pulled out.
But when that thing went off - oh boy! – the devastation was breathtaking.
I [...]

Tell me, can a “cottage” have a dishwasher?
Until recently, my experience of a cottage has always been a wooden salt box with no insulation, a party-line telephone, lumpy bunk beds with mildew-scented sheets, chipped dishes, poor ventilation, no ceilings, cracks in the outside walls big enough to let in  the mosquitos, and no – repeat no – dishwasher.
I know that a [...]

You think the action scenes in Bourne Ultimatum and Casino Royale were exciting?
They were nothing compared to the epic battle of good verses evil I witnessed in my kitchen the other night.
It was man versus fruit fly. Go here to see who won.

I truly do appreciate living a civil society that keeps its streets clean.
I also appreciate the effort of city workers who operate street cleaning machines.
I particularly appreciate the fact that they operate these big hulking machines in the middle of the night so as not to disrupt the movement of traffic and people through our [...]

Thirty years ago today, Elvis was found dead in the bathroom of Graceland.
And thirty years ago today, my beloved cat Tiger was found strangled to death in my backyard.
The culprit was a spurned suitor, a boy in the ‘hood who asked me to go out with him.
I said no. He strangled my cat. This is [...]

The last few weeks I’ve been noticing “hey” or “hey there” being used to open certain CBC programs – as in “Hey there, welcome to Q.”
This leads a typist to wonder if “hey” isn’t replacing “hi” as a casual greeting.
I first noticed the Hey-for-Hi transposition on the TV program Friends, as in: Ross to Rachel: [...]

On Saturday morning I awoke just before six to the sounds of “clink clink” and “chink clunk” coming through my open window. Curious, I looked outside and saw something unusual.
Spread out all over the neighbour’s lawn was stuff, tonnes of stuff, furniture, mirrors, lamps, books, everywhere, at six in the morning. A yard sale.
I dressed, [...]

And that’s no big deal. Right?
Well, no big deal until I tell you that I’ve never seen an episode of The Simpsons before. (Well, there was that time in the 90s when I saw part of an episode in Czech and I didn’t speak Czech at the time. Long story.)
When I came out on my [...]

And while we’re at it, let’s junk the cap Ws in World Wide Web, and cap E in email. I’ve never understood the maniacal attachment to capital letters for all things related to the internet.
We don’t use a cap T for telephone, R for radio or railroad, cap Ps for pencil and paper and cap [...]

I’ve been meme tagged by Grammar Grrrl Beth from A Cup of Coffey to answer five random questions.
1. Who was your Tiger Beat crush? Do you still find him cute?
Tiger Beat was a teen magazine of the ’70s read by mostly pre-teen girls. My crush was Tony DeFranco who used [...]

Because today’s job is preparing my quarterly HST return for the Canadian Revenue Agency, I am battling a strong urge to slit my wrists.
So, for the sake of the little typists, I will take a little break and share with you ten things I learned on my recent visit to Toronto.
1. The meaning of the [...]

So I’m outside tonight admiring the Blue Moon, when something strange catches my eye. It’s in the garden. It’s, it’s flowers! A profusion of them. In MY garden.

Huh? How could this be? Flowers in my garden? Lots of them? Tulips and begonias and other flowers I can’t name because I don’t know enough about flowers. [...]