Grammar Princess would have been a fine name

Before we get too far into this blog without a grammar rant, I would like to share a little peeve with you. You know "never mind"? That phrase upon which this blog's title is 50% based? Yeah, it's two words. Not one. You can't run it together, i.e. "nevermind." I don't know what a nevermind is, but it was not brought to us by the same people responsible for "butterfly" and "flashlight."

I know some of you will take this loving correction rather personally. All I have to say is, while I adore you, I can't be blamed for your grammatical incompetence. Straighten up and put that space in there. And before you go off in a huff, thinking this is my personal preference, that I'm coldheartedly keeping these two words from fulfilling their romantic destiny of total union, I want to assure you that I looked this up in TWO reputable dictionaries.

Thank you for your compliance. Further correction forthcoming as needed.

Tara Lipinski's Tu-tu

Ice skating kills your feet, and mine are in their death throes, but the rest of my body is more or less alive. Actually, skating (which I tellingly mistyped as "staking") wasn't as bad as I thought, although I did spend more time than I thought strictly necessary either a) flailing my arms in a desperate attempt to stay upright, or b) investigating the actual temperature of the ice at rather close range.

I did enjoy, however, watching the three- and four-year-olds attempt to skate. Their legs tended to do that newborn-horse-attempting-to-stand thing, where the knees lock and you think they've got it, but then everything sort of collapses and down they go. Skating—what a foreign concept: you learn to walk, which is hard enough, then you get running down, and then a couple of years later somebody straps quarter-inch blades to your feet and goes, "Hey, good luck!" and gives you a nice push. Those kids must think they're going to have to wear that white hockey helmet for the rest of their lives. Little do they know that bicycle-riding and driving a five-speed will make ice skating look...well, never mind. Life is cruel. Get used to it, kids!

Insanity, ho! Mush!

My family and I are headed out the door to points north for ice skating and after-Christmas bargain hunting. Getting all six of us organized to do anything is a task. First of all, my parents downsized their car a couple of years ago, so there's no automobile that will hold all of us safely. Thus, two cars, which my father and brother feel necessitates the use of walkie-talkies, regardless of the fact that every single one of us knows where we're going and how to get there. Second, none of us wants to do anything another person in the group might want to do, with the possible exception of "mope."

All right, they're headed out the door, and I will get left if I don't put a move on. More tales of hilarity when I return.

Romance Novels: Meth of the Reading World

I read three books yesterday. Start to finish, cover to cover. Three. Admittedly, it's not like I was reading War and Peace or The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All or something (I read a romance novel and two books by Meggin Cabot, who isn't exactly difficult), but I did probably read about 900 pages. Let's see if we can figure out a rate...started at noon, finished Book Number 1 (~300 pages) at 2. Picked up Book Number 2 (~250 pages) at 3:30, finished at 5. Started Book Number 3 (~350 pages) at 11:30 p.m., finished at 1:30. That's...five and a half hours to read nine hundred pages. Five and a half hours is 330 minutes. That's almost 3 pages a minute. That seems a little fast—I think the actual rate is somewhere around 2 pages a minute, so my figures might be a little off.

Still, I'd like to know why I can't read that fast at school. Probably because treatises on pre-historical iron development or the future of American theatre aren't quite as fascinating as Boy Next Door, the first e-mail novel I've ever read (fabulous, by the way—a hip update of the epistolary novel we all love). I am trying to decide if I would trade my ability to speed-read during vacation for faster reading during the semester. The answer? A resounding "no" because if I did trade them, I would read a lot more boring crap during the semester and a lot less interesting crap during break. And really, who wants to learn more than necessary?

Sleep for the Wicked

I slept in until noon today and didn't actually get out of bed until 2 p.m. Now, I'm on vacation and I didn't have anywhere to be, but this sleeping in business always makes me feel vaguely guilty, like I should have been up and about, getting my life accomplished or something. It's not like I'm not spending the requisite number of hours awake; I am. I'm just spending most of them in the p.m. and the very early a.m., as opposed to the later a.m. and earlier p.m. Why don't people who go to bed early have guilt? I blame it on Benjamin Franklin ("Early to bed, early to rise...").

Times New Roman: A State of Mind

Good God, does nobody design templates with serif fonts? Honestly. If I were at all HTML-savvy...but I'm not, so I will stop griping and be grateful. Mmm-hm, that'll happen. And a fat man in a red fur suit came down my chimney last night.

Speaking of, looks like this post will go up moments before the end of Christmas Day, so here is your last present from the Christkind: a new blog from me. It will have a cast of thousands and include all the whirly goodies you've come to expect from disenfranchised twenty-somethings, plus impeccable grammar and diction. Just what you always wanted, right? Stop making that face; that's the same face my sister made this morning when she opened the old-lady bathrobe my grandmother sent her.

And we're off to a rousing start....