Last night I had a strange dream, a dream in a world where it was traditional for a play to be put on as part of a quinceañera celebration, and where quinceañera celebrations sometimes consisted of a road show of these plays. An aluminum trailer rolled up and from it one of my former students emerged as the quinceañera and star, and she did this dance that, well, this is terrible, but I was videoing it with the little camera specifically for YouTube. And all the while I was wondering what the best way to blank her face out would be, because this had to be shared, and even the ex-student seemed to think it was a good plan. But I was also recording because Andrea McArdle was on the road with them as some sort of technical consultant, and she was sitting a few folding chairs down from me.
Honestly who has celebrity dream cameos from Andrea McArdle? Maybe one of her 600+ friends on MySpace.
It turns out there are after-affects from eating red velvet cake. In the rare spirit of tact, I'll limit us to this photo:
The best thing about this photo is that it's not the photo I took two minutes earlier, the one where I squinted at the mixer afterwards and said, "Am I using a dough hook to mix the cake?"
Whatever I said however many posts ago about how the next batch of cards would be better lit was a lie. Bigtime lie. Maybe next time, really.
I had to stop for a moment here because I was getting paranoid about using "lit." People seem to use "lighted" for everything now, and I started getting this nervous idea that my brain wasn't wired for whatever the rule is for these two words.
So, it turns out that "lit" simply falls into the category of "verb forms that are slowly getting ditched, like dreamt/burnt/pled/clomb, and so on, in favour of dreamed/burned/pleaded/climbed and, of course, lighted. I really like those original forms, so I guess I'll be staying with "lit" when it feels right. (I'm kidding about "clomb" - I didn't even know about it until a few minutes ago, and so it sounds freaky to me. Also, you might think dove/dived belongs in this list, but apparently dove came about because people just expected the verb to be irregular, like drive/drove.)
Anyway, irregular verbs are pretty, and we should all have a favourite in our pocket. Now if I could just stop slipping hyphens to modifed past participles, maybe I would feel better about myself as a human being.
"St. Raphael, its cathedral, its port, its beaches:"
Sent to Holland in August 1976, with only the brief message "Hartelijke groeten mevr - mijnk h ools." The most I get out of that is "Cordial greetings," plus I've just reckoned out that "Mevr" is the short form for both "Miss" or "Missus," "mevrouw." It's used in the address on this card to Mevr. A. de Winter-bomen and I've seen it on the other cards.
It's too early to dwell on the low countries. Let's move on.
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