christmas present shout-outs ::edit::

since i shouted out paul's family and rachel for their christmas gifts in the last post, i thought i should make a more complete list of all my continuing enjoyment of christmas presents

i'm using my mini vera bradley wallet-on-a-string from mommy k as my main "purse" now, except when i need a real bag, at which point i throw it in the big floppy eddie bauer bag that ninny got me for (i think) christmas 2005.

i use my aveeno chapstick daily (stocking stuffer from the 'rents)

paul and i had a delicious cassarole for dinner last week made of needed-to-be-used eggs, bread, milk, cheese, and onions and baked in my very first le cruset piece of kitchenware, a mini cassarole from aunt judy

i've cooked pasta three times so far in the pasta pot we exchanged for the waffle iron that ninny got for us (we already had a waffle iron, but we LOVE the pasta pot!)

of course the delicious pizza from the last entry, the pizza stone is the best part of that kit, it's nice and big and beautiful. we also used the alton brown DVDs megan got for paul to make an AMAZING batch of baked macaroni-and-cheese that was the perfect companion for the succulent pulled pork paul made last weekend.

of rachel's gift we've so far eaten the tortilla chips in the salsa verde and used the tapenade for the pizza sauce, which worked really perfectly.

i have a picture of greer above my tv in the cute little doggy picture holder han got me in france

i used my borders gift card from paul's family to get a much-needed dictionary to keep by my bed for nighttime reading when i don't feel like getting up to use the computer to look up words

i haven't yet used any old navy gift certificates...i'm waiting until there's an article of clothing that i really need, because i need to be spending as little money as possible for basically the rest of 2007, so hopefully the gift certificates will come in handy to satisfy a craving.

also haven't used the amazon gift certificates...tried to use mine to purchase a friend's long-overdue wedding gift from amazon.co.uk, but it wouldn't work, i assume because they're only good at amazon.com.

well that's all i can think of at the moment...let me know if i forgot anything. time for bed. past time for bed, in fact, but we had a late dinner after doing laundry and walking all the way to hollywood video, browsing the store for two movies (buy one get one free this week!), and walking home, then taking 90 minutes or so to cook beef and barley soup. ok so good night!


::edit::

paul just used our new full-sized food processor (also from his family) to make the best hummus he's ever made! he's only made hummus a couple other times, but this time is far superior...it is probably a combination of the experience and the food processor...the full-sized fp is definitely the reason it's much smoother and a better texture this time. Yay food processor!!

amalgam

i LOVE Norah Jones...can't wait 'til her new album is out. birthday present, anyone?

woke up at 4:30 this morning to the lovely sound of paul snoring like a chainsaw. he was also doing that thing where he bends his leg with his knee in the air, and then it keeps trying to fall over and he keeps standing it back up, and it shakes the bed. that problem was easier to fix than the snoring, but i did eventually get him to roll over.

i have a rash on the back of my right hand...when i itch it, it grows; when i stop, it shrinks into one little red dot. right now it's medium-sized patchy field of tiny bumps. yesterday i thought it was a hive, but it's definitely a rash. luckily i have some cortizone.

paul and i rented last night: the illusionist which was entertaining but not especially great, the devil wears prada which i plan to watch this afternoon (see below), and an inconvenient truth which we will probably watch tonight. we'll have to rent at least two more movies this month, because our three rentals yesterday got us rent-one-get-one-free for the next two weeks.


last night was a very nice evening: i got home from work and made pizza dough, then while it was rising paul and i went to borders and hollywood video, when we got home he chopped veggies while i rolled out the dough (it fit perfectly onto the new pizza stone we got from paul's family for christmas! it was also the best pizza dough i've ever made, so try this recipe!), then while the veggies roasted in the oven we started the movie. after 30 minutes we got the veggies out (eggplant, green zuccini squash, yellow zuccini squash, plum tomatos, baby portabellas, red onion), popped the crust in for 5 minutes, added the sauce (i used the roasted red pepper and artichoke tapenade that rachel got me for christmas as sauce - delish!!), added the veggies, and feta and mozerella cheeses, and back in the oven for 15 minutes. we watched a bit more movie while the pizza baked, then finished the movie with yummy wonderful veggie pizza!
the movie ended around 10:45,and we went to bed...usually when we do that much stuff in one evening, we're up until at least midnight! it was a spontaneously wonderful evening.

i bought "the denial of death" by ernst becker on amazon yesterday, free because i bought it used so it fit on an old partially-used reward certificate from my amazon credit card...there was $9.06 left on the certificate, and now there is $0.24 left. it's the next book group book for church down here...i also need to get a hold of the trinity nawakwa book group book, but i don't want to buy it because it looks cute, but not like something i'll want to re-read.

so, plan for the day is:
eat a slice of bread, go on a jog/walk, clean the kitchen & bathroom, then go thru all my france pictures while i watch the devil wears prada, which i finally rented in english so i can see what the heck was going on. i saw it in french while visiting han...we thought it was in english with subtitles, but it ended up being dubbed, so i have this weird memory of it, because i've seen it, and i know the general arc of the plot, but i can't remember any details because, oh yeah, it was all in french and i don't speak french. it's not like i remember them speaking french in the movie, either, because when you totally don't know something it doesn't stick in your head, so i kind of have a silent memory of the film with some associated feelings and emotions. it's actually very much like remembering a dream you've had but you can't make sense of it: it's just kind of a wash of impressions.

ok so i'm going to go start all that, and add to this post later to see what i've actually completed. oh, and maybe finally post some france pics. my main goal for the france pics, tho, is to print out some 8x10's and fill up all the cheap picture frames i bought at ac moore a few months ago. i have a bunch of big sheets of card stock left over from christmas presents, so i'm excited to use that as matting.

off for my snack and then my jog...

PS: you can click on the pics to see them full-sized...this is especially good with the delicious pizza pics!

finally, as promised

here are pics of our new car!


this is from the parking lot near the Cactus Cantina in DC near the National Cathedral, where Paul and I met my parents and Han on Sunday for a late lunch. Mom and Han wanted to show me some potential bridesmaids dress material they bought, which I didn't like, but I did like their idea for a layer of toulle in contrast color over a lighter fabric.

They also bought a few dress patterns which were all great, and I'm even more excited about these dresses now because I see how lovely and simple they'll be, but there's still so many options to choose from, and my bridesmaids could even pick out the neckline that best suits them! It's going to be so cool.



Oh, and also notice that the cherry blossoms are out in DC in MID-JANUARY. That's Han in the turquoise coat you see through the branches. It's been ludicrously warm lately, but today it's supposed to be in the 20's, so bye-bye little cherry blossoms...this spring will probably not be the best time to visit the cherry blossom festival, as all the blossoms will have bloomed and died by the end of this week. whoops.



One more thing: I switched the visual format because the other one, although I liked it a lot, was too skinny - I wanted my blog to span the window, not be crammed into a center column. It felt very squishy if I added any pictures. I like this much better.

A Grammatical Rant

After reading the chapter "r/ Inse^t a Carrot e/" in Anne Fadiman's book Ex Libris about how she and her family are compulsive proof-readers; and the very next evening seeing this post on my cousin Katy's blog about her meticulously constructed, lovingly composed, mis-punctuated wedding invitations; I have been musing about my own aversion to grammatical and punctuation errors.

First, after reading Anne Fadiman but before hearing of Katy's dilemma, I arrived at a new theory explaining why I hate it so much when people misspell my name: In addition to just being annoying and insulting, it offends the same part of my self as do errors in books, on signs, in store windows, and in periodicals. I take time and go out of my way to make sure I spell people's names correctly, and even the myriad e-mails I write every day at work are re-read at least once so I send very few errors to my co-workers. Misspelling my name is like a regular error made personal, so no wonder it bothers me.

---

A short exposition about "Meredith" and its origins:

The most common misspelling of my name is "Merideth," which I am currently faced with every time my coworker RJ sends me an e-mail...I corrected him once, but since he immediately reverted to the same misspelling I haven't had the heart to correct him again because he's a good guy and I like him. I have also had people spell it "Meredeth," but the current winner for gross misspellings of my name goes to two relatives of Paul's family who each wrote on their Christmas cards this year "Paul & Merrideth"; I think they must have collaborated. However, I can't be too annoyed at this because my own parents addressed their Christmas card to Paul's parents "Edwin & Linda," and Paul's Dad's name is Ed, short for Edgar...this mistake was probably my fault, at least partly; although I have never thought his name was Edwin, so I'm not sure how the mistake got passed on to my parents.

Over 43,000 people work for SAIC, so I searched the name "Meredith" and found:

• 4 people with the last name "Meredith"
• 12 people with the first name "Meredith," including me
• 2 people with the first name "Merideth"
• 1 person with the first name "Meredeth"
• 1 person with the first name "Meridith"

If you look in a baby names book the only spelling listed is "Meredith," so the four other Mer_d_th's above are victims of parental creative mis-name-spelling (a phrase I intend to patent as an often-abused practice and subsequently lead protest against).

(As a side note, "Meredith" is the only spelling listed on babynames.com, as a Welsh name for a boy or girl meaning "Lord"; however, I did find "Merideth" and "Meridith" on babynamesworld.com, which listed "Meredith" and "Meridith" as girls' names and "Merideth" as a boy's name, and all as English names meaning "Defender of the Sea," which is what I've always known it to mean...Wikipedia says "Meredith is an uncommon first name in the English language. It was originally a Welsh male name, (Meredydd; in its earliest recorded form, Morgetiud), in which final element, iud, means 'lord'; the meaning of the initial element(s) is unknown. It is often wrongly explained in name books as 'protector from the sea' due to confusion with the Latin mer and the Old English Edith. It can be used for either gender, but is more commonly a girl's name in English-speaking countries." A search of Wikipedia for Merideth reveals that it is a small town in Victoria, Australia; searches for Meridith and Meredeth yield nothing. I still consider the only official spelling to be "Meredith," but would like to do some more research on its origins.)

---

Last night after reading Katy's post and calling her to express my sympathies, I had some further thoughts about grammar and punctuation. I notice errors all the time in public places, and it always bothers me. If I'm with Paul, I can point them out to him, and while he won't particularly care, he won't be annoyed either (unless I'm correcting him, which I do, and he doesn't always like it). If I'm with most people, I don't feel comfortable pointing out these errors because they wouldn't share in my annoyance and amusement. If I'm going to notice these things, I would most like to be with my mom and sister, because they will both revel with me in the awfulness of such public mistakes.

Once soon after I moved, Mom, Dad, Han, and I were all in a restaurant near my VA apartment. This restaurant is still a favorite of Paul's and mine, and we've been there many times. It's decorated in a southwestern theme with big mirrors in hand-carved wooden frames that the restaurant commissioned from a local artist. Each mirror frame has some quote carved into it in giant letters; one is "If you don't know where you are, your riding down the wrong trail." Right there in the middle of a big, popular restaurant! In gigantic carved wooden letters! This is, to me, one of the worst public errors I've ever seen, I think because it feels so permanent and uncorrectable. When I walk past a sign in the mall that says "Come in for you're free gift," I know it could be corrected fairly easily, even if it never is; when I read an article in Time Magazine with the sentence structure of a 12-year-old, I know it will be tossed in every one's trashcans by the time next week's issue comes out; when I proofread a friend's paper, I can make corrections outright; but when an artist has been commissioned, paid, and carved huge letters into wood, there is no hope.

I anticipate that many readers of this post (excepting my mom, Han, and Katy) will not only agree with my decision to refrain from correcting public errors and not sharing my notice of them with friends and co-workers, and furthermore might even feel that I am being way too hard on them and should cut everyone some slack.

To you I say: you're right, BUT.

It is true that I can't expect most people to be as picky as I am. They weren't taught these rules well enough in school or were perhaps interested in other things too much to absorb it all, and now they are surrounded daily by common errors such as its/it's, your/you're, and there/their/they're going uncorrected and unacknowledged every day.

This, then, is my BUT: It is exactly because these errors have become so commonplace and are unopposed and unchallenged that everyone is caring less and less about them. If every printed sign, every book, every periodical were corrected each time an error was committed, soon those errors would start to be much less frequent in the first place because everyone would be unconsciously absorbing the RIGHT usages instead of the wrong ones. This is exactly why I had little sympathy for my education major friends who had to re-take the grammar test over and over before they could become teachers: if we have teachers who use incorrect grammar, we can't hope to have our children do any better!

It may be unfair to hold Joe Schmo accountable for his poor grammar, but only because we don't hold those in control of education and popular media accountable. These are not difficult concepts; they are just not in the public mind. If we mentioned these issues on a few popular news and talk shows, NPR, The Daily Show with John Stewart, etc. it would be ridiculously easy to make good grammar practices popular instead of taboo, and within months I think we could see a drastic reduction in the most common errors.

Maybe I'll start a facebook group.

Cleaning...lots and lots of cleaning.

Sorry for no pics yet, i will eventually i swear!!

Paul and I did LOTS of cleaning tonight, and our apartment is about back to normal, altho there's still more to be done...hopefully by Saturday evening it will be nice and shiny. All the new kitchen gifts still need to be washed, kitchen & bathroom both need some cleaning, and the whole place needs a good vacuum.

We are now waiting for a pizza from zpizza, topped with pesto, mozzarella, roasted eggplant, feta, and pine nuts; a reward for all our hard work cleaning.

In the mean time, here is the bag I croched, ripped off of Barb E...but as you can see, mine didn't shrink as much...and I washed it 4 times! I also made the earrings, which are attached to the bag because I'm going to give the whole thing to my boss Kelly as a thank-you/Christmas gift.

The bag is actually dark yellow and purple, but in the pics it looks more orange for some reason...