Language

I need to apologize for not 'blogging' very often. The whole concept is new to me, and being a member of the 'older generation', I tend to think of writing letters before emailing and blogging. I'll try to be better in 2008, although I suspect that my daughter is the only one who reads these things anyway.

The English language is a rich and varied one, where the rules seem to be made to be broken. Where else can you 'polish' your 'Polish' furniture and change the pronunciation of a word just by capitalizing it?

For example - how would you pronunce 'ghoti'? In 'tough' and 'enough' the 'gh' is pronounced like an 'f'. In words like 'condition' the 'ti' is pronounced like 'sh'. Now if you pronounce the 'o' the same way it is pronounced in 'women' you have:
ghoti = fish

It has been said that English is one of the hardest languages to learn because of all of the broken rules. It is particularly fun to watch the kids struggle with learning how to spell things. Our older daughter once wrote that if you exercise you will get 'strog mucles'. My personal favorite is when the stamp store called to tell me that my Great Britain supplement was in, and our younger daughter dutifully wrote down the message - "Mom, your grape written supplement is in". Is it possible to die from laughing too hard?

My father particularly enjoyed all of the weird things that can happen with the English language, and wrote a poem about it. I won't quote it in it's entirety here, but some of the lines were:
There are some things everyone understands
You don't get music from rubber bands
When two streets meet they don't shake hands.
If mouse becomes mice, does house become hice?
If a man who keeps sheep is a shepherd, is a man who keeps lion a leopard?

Sometimes things just seem so logical, that you can totally understand why kids say them. We frequently talk about things that happened yesterday, so our grandson started talking about things that happened 'yesternight'.

Its not just the spelling and the different ways that certain words can be pronounced or used (look at bow and it's different meanings), but the punctuation can also have a profound difference in how something is interpreted. And English professor once wrote the following sentence, without punctuation, on the board and asked the class to put in the commas where appropriate.
Woman without her man is nothing.

The men in the class wrote "Woman, without her man, is nothing".
The women wrote "Woman, without her, man is nothing".

I will close with something I read recently that really struck me. At a military conference where American, Canadian, British, Australian and French officers were attending, one of the French generals complained about the fact that Europeans learn several languages, but english-speaking nations don't. He wanted to know why these conferences always had to be in english, instead of french.

One of the American officers quietly said, "Because the Americans, Canadians, Brits and Aussies made sure that you wouldn't have to speak German".

Here's hoping that 2008 will be the best year yet for all of us!

The Dog that almost was

Our grandson has been asking for a dog for a long, long time. This, despite the fact that he is slightly afraid of dogs. Although our house could accurately be described as a disaster zone, I decided that the time had come for us to fulfill his dream. Therefore, last Monday (on his 11th birthday) we headed for the Humane Society to get a dog.

I have to admit that it wasn't exactly what I expected. It was much more commercial at the front end, and less modern at the back end. There were also a lot more people there than I expected. Actually, from the amount of people wandering around checking the dogs out, I'm surprised they had any animals left at all.

Tim wanted a black dog. Bill wanted a female. I wanted something housebroken. The dog we settled on was all three - a labrador/retriever mix with a white chest and paws and a very gentle disposition. They had picked her up as a stray and had already spayed her and put in a microchip. They had named her Melanie and she seemed close to perfect for us.

We completed all the paperwork, paid the adoption fee (rather higher than I had expected), and headed for home. Hmmm - hurdle number one - getting dog into car. Most dogs just jump into cars with great enthusiasm, but we literally had to pick her up and shove her into the van. Either she wasn't used to riding in cars, or she had had a bad experience with one.

The ride home was actually rather funny. Tim was in the back seat with her, and she was very nervous and moving all over, causing Tim to howl that he was being squished. She tried several times to move up into the front seat with us (such a friendly dog!), but Bill managed to push her back.

We had originally planned to go out to dinner for Tim's birthday, but decided we didn't want to leave the dog alone right off the bat. Therefore, as Bill and Tim followed her around the house, I went off to Burger King to get his birthday dinner. Rather tasty, actually. When I got home I found chair barricades up all over the house to keep Melanie confined to the kitchen area!

Most of the rest of the evening went fairly smoothly. Our oldest daughter, Miranda, had come over to help celebrate, and after the Burger King feast we all settled down to play some Apples to Apples. (If you've never tried this you should - it's a great game!). Melanie lay on the carpet next to Bill and went to sleep. The ideal picture of a house dog.

After Miranda left and Melanie had been taken out to 'do her thing' (and she was very good at it), we started thinking about going to bed. Melanie kept going to the door as if she wanted out - whining actually - but subsequent trips into the great outdoors didn't alleviate her desire. In fact, we discovered that she could easily jump over our chain link fence. I will treasure the picture of Tim hanging on to her leash with him on one side of the fence and her on the other, and Tim hollering for help. I had to walk around to the outside of the fence to take the leash and rescue him.

We had originally planned for her to sleep in the upstairs laundry room, but she was NOT going to go up the stairs. Therefore we put her into the downstairs bathroom with a chew toy and a blanket. Needless to say, within a short period of time, she wanted out. When barking didn't accomplish this, she tried to tear the door down. We could hear all of this upstairs and it absolutely terrified Tim. We couldn't hear it very well in our bedroom, as it's farther away - but in Tim's bedroom (which is almost directly above the downstairs bathroom) it was fairly loud. So Tim ended up sleeping on the floor of our room!

By now Tim was quite vocal in his opinion that the dog would have to go. Bill and I waffled back and forth, but the deciding point was the fact that both Bill and Tim were showing signs of breathing problems - consistent with allergies. The next morning Tim himself was going back and forth between "When I get home from school I don't want any trace of IT around", and "Can't we keep her another day or two to see if it works out?" He went off to school sobbing his little heart out, and yet almost too scared to pet her goodbye. I think the fact that she had managed to tear a strip of molding off of the bathroom door had something to do with it.

While Bill was driving Tim to school, I had to contend with a very restless dog who obviously wanted OUT. She almost climbed over me and my computer to get to the window. In the living room she was up on the couch trying to get out the window there. She spent a great deal of time whining and barking at the door. We have concluded that she was probably an outdoor door - maybe even a kennel dog. Perhaps if we had had a chance to work with her more, we could have made her more content with being inside, but we were worried about the allergy problems.

When Bill got back, we had the struggle to get her back into the van. Then off to the humane society to return the dog that we had had less than 24 hours. While we were waiting to be helped, she suddenly started bleeding out of her rear - big clots of blood. They whisked her off to the vet, but we haven't been able to find out what the verdict is. I'm afraid that she swallowed a splinter or a nail when she was tearing down the door molding. Our other concern was that she might have cancer or a tumor. She was very thin, and wasn't very interested in eating - although she seemed to like dog treats.

We took Tim out to dinner that night and are very careful not to mention the word 'dog' around him. We have said that perhaps next time we should get a puppy and let it grow up with us - but none of us are really anxious to do this in the near future. In fact, I rather have the opinion that we are not really 'pet' people. Although I would love to have a cat. Nix on that, though, as both Tim and Bill are very allergic to cats.

So that is the saga of the Dog that almost was - and we fervently hope that she will find a good home (with a well-fenced in yard).