Good Morning.
I'm writing this on Thursday as the weather is trying to change from rain to snow. We had thunder and lightning last night and a few minutes of hail that sent the dog under the desk onto my feet, bare as always. Meanwhile my son is in Illinois under a tornado alert. He is home on his lunch hour and trying to locate his cats so they can all head for the basement if the siren goes off. The warning system is annoying because the siren blows and then someone comes on and says, in a garbled tone, to seek shelter. Straight out of 1984, he says. In any case, here are a few items that slightly vex on a day when the weather is clearly confused:
1. Solid color ties, particularly red and blue. I long for the return of patterns, anything but these lengths of plain silk that brush the belt buckles of America, particularly on the floor of the House and the Senate. Perhaps they should have dress-down Friday except none of them are ever there on Friday.
2. The really big pickups that require the skill of a mountain climber to access them and that prevent people in boring sedans from safely backing out of an adjacent parking space.
3. Houses with garages in front rather than in back or on the side. When I look at a house, I would like to see a house, not a garage.
4. Regular, familiar names that parents spell funny in an attempt to make their child stand out:
Ghordun, Mycle, Lezlee, Betsi. Actually Betsi happened in eighth grade as a dumb girlie thing rather than at birth. It was cute then, but it isn't now, hence the increasing use of Elisabeth,
spelled with an S.
5. T shirts with slogans
a. Kiss Me, I'm Irish. Look for that one this weekend.
b. I (heart) NY, LA, Cleveland, wherever. Use the word love if you, in fact, love some
place and ditch the heart. Think about what a stronger, more serious statement
it makes when your shirt says I Love Tallahassee.
c. Make America Great Again. See below.
6. The word right as constantly used by the pundits as a comma or for emphasis.
a. The women said they were marching in the street, right, because they were angry
about a bill that would require their weight to be listed, right, on a driver's license.
b. He said he was leaving the White House for the weekend, right, because they
were cleaning the carpets. Actually he wanted, right, to sneak in a little golf with
Sean, right, and the rest of the foreign policy team.
7. Lies. The college admissions scandal should bring this one home in very real terms even though the barrage out of the West Wing has apparently failed to move the national conscience. The truth in several forms has actually been AWOL for quite some time now. When my husband was teaching on-line courses in business and marketing, he had to deal with cheating almost on a daily basis, and it included not attributing sources on term papers. One guy he caught red-handed, an MBA candidate, said it wasn't his fault for not citing any sources because his wife had written the paper.
8. I still cannot access my graphics except for a handful that make no sense.
Enjoy the Ides of March,
Elisabeth
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