Alarming Grammar

You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning feeling that you had just gone to sleep only minutes before, even though you really did get a full night's sleep?

That happened to me this morning.

But when my alarm went off, I didn't turn over and go back to sleep, because I recognized the phenomenon--where you feel you've just gone to sleep even though you've slept a full six hours--and formed a thought communicating the phenomenon to myself.

But the thought I formed, alas, triggered my Grammatical Angst Complex, and I was unable to go back to sleep.

(This turned out well, because Tuesdays are my early days, and I really did have to get out the door.  But it was annoying.)

The thought I thought to myself was, "Man, I just lay down ten minutes ago!"

It was a grammatical thought, but as soon as I thought it, I was wide awake, wondering whether I had thought grammatically.

"Wait, I just lay down?  Or just laid down?  Lie, Lay, Lain, Lay, Laid, Laid.  Lie.  Lay.  Yes.  Lay.  But I'm much more confident with the past participle, so I could make it easier on myself and say, 'It feels as though I had just lain down!'"

Yes, dear Readers, it was 5:06, and I was revising my own internal grammar.

This is what writing a dissertation will do to you.  I can only imagine what writing a grammar textbook does to you.

And then I thought, "I could avoid the problem by saying, 'Man, I just fell asleep ten minutes ago!'  And Chicago Manual of Style always suggests avoiding the problem if you're unsure, or if you know you're correct but you think your readers will trip over it."

Yes, dear Readers, it was 5:07, and I was quoting the Chicago Manual of Style to myself.

If you ever meet any of my sons, have pity on them.  They're doing the best they can, after being raised by such a mother.  It's really amazing they can speak at all, or are willing to.

Whose Bible? Which Table of Contents?

"Mommy, do you want to use my Adventure Bible for your class?"
"Well, gosh, Theo, I don't . . . um . . ."
"It has EVERYthing you could need. It has Genesis, Exodius, Livlicus, Numbers, Dridomy, Joshua, . . . and there's TWO Currenicles and Plammis. There's Zurrackium, MickChali, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romis, Crenthinus one, Crenthinus two, Glactians, Tittus, Filimonia, Judo, Revolution. Are those things you could need?"
"Well, um, I'm supposed to, uh, teach about, uh, the Psalms tomorrow."
"That's not in here. Maybe my Bible isn't the full Bible."
"Um, well, see here where it says Psalms?"
"MOM. That says Plammis."
"Uh, maybe I'm pronouncing it wrong. But, you know, I'd be happy to take your Bible with me tomorrow and use it."
"Okay! Good! I'll put it in your bag so you don't forget it."

During. And more during.

After all the work Stephen and Isaac did pulling down the sickly, thin, and annoying trees, there were still some serious problems with the trees.

There were several trees, like this one, that were just dead or dying.

And most of the rest were hackberry trees, which have a tendency to rot and split and generally make life difficult.

So we decided to take thirteen of the weakest and least healthy trees out.

The tree guys came, and very sensibly marked which ones we wanted gone.

And then on the appointed day, they came, all seven of them, with their bucket truck and Bobcat and ropes and pulleys and fourteen (!) chainsaws.

First they dropped the easy trees.  Right in the middle of the yard, without, like, measuring it or anything.

They used the Bobcat to help them cut it into pieces.

Then they brought out the bucket truck.

And we all watched . . .

(some of us more nervously than others)

. . . as they cut down the trickier trees.

I will admit that I got a little nervous at this point, too.

The guy in the bucket seemed less concerned for his safety than, perhaps, he ought to have been.

He kept leaning right out of the bucket, with the chainsaw in one hand, just lopping off big old branches.

I mean, he was really leaning.  Really far out of the bucket.  Using a chainsaw one-handed.

I found this a little stressful.  (But nothing went wrong, and we're all grateful for that.)

There were a few trees that needed an even more elaborate setup.

There were pulleys and anchors and a bobcat pulling rope and all kinds of fun stuff . . .

. . . so that they could drop the individual branches slowly and carefully, before taking the trunk down.

It was a fascinating process.

The Bobcat had a lot to do, in addition to anchoring ropes and lifting big trunks to be cut up.

It hauled all the trees to the curb.

There was a rather big pile.

So big, in fact, that they needed even more heavy equipment to come haul it away.

(I'm pretty sure Theo and Amos had the best day of their lives.  And I feel really stupid for failing to take video.  We could have made our own episode of Mighty Machines, and it could have been about two hours long.)

Theo hung out with the guys whenever they took a break.

Because, you know, he's Theo.  I'm pretty sure he wangled a job offer out of them.

And, finally, it was done.

We went from this:

. . . to this:

(Still not a huge change.)

This:

. . . to this:

This:

. . . to this:

And this:

. . . to this:

Alas, once more, the improvement left us feeling even more depressed and unhappy.

All the light finally flowing in to the yard only served to point up all its deficiencies.  And as hard as they tried not to destroy anything, you can't bring all that heavy equipment into a place without tearing up the soil.

We tried working with it.  We thought about ways to go piecemeal--a little grass seed on this side, a little mulch on that side, a few bushes here until we could get the ones we really wanted there.

But after a few weeks of trying to wrestle it into submission, we surrendered.

We got even more professional help.

Testing

Today is PSAT testing day for lots and lots of highschoolers (including Isaac).

I have only vague memories of PSAT and SAT testing.

But I remember GRE testing very clearly.

The second time I took the GREs, it was in France, and they only had the computer option (not the paper option).  And it was weird.

I can remember having to go to a section of Paris we hadn't visited before, and I can remember thinking that the building looked like a US public school that was built in the 70s, and I can remember the insufficiently lit room and the bank of computers for the All New That Year computer test.

I remember feeling like I was doing really well, especially in the verbal section.  I kept getting progressively harder words, which was good, because it was an adaptive test--getting an answer right prompted the program to give you harder words.

And I was getting harder and harder words, right up until, like, the third-to-last question, when the word it gave me was "nice."

I sat back in my chair in the testing room and laughed out loud.  Then I looked around to see if I was being pranked or something.

And then I realized that I was going to get myself a talking-to if I didn't play it cool, so I went back to the test.

I realized that it was asking for the secondary (Jane-Austen-era) definition, and I tried to remember how Jane might have used it.  I can't remember what the answer options were, and I can't remember what I decided to pick. I hope I got it right.

The first time I took the GREs--well, that's a story.

Stephen and I were supposed to be at a church retreat in the mountains in Virginia on GRE weekend.  The retreat center was about an hour and a half away from a testing site at James Madison U, so we decided to go to the retreat anyway, and to skip the morning sessions on Saturday to go take the test.

I can't remember why--whether we were changing time zones or changing from Daylight Savings to Standard Time or something--but for some reason, we set our alarm wrong.  And we woke up a full hour after we had planned to leave.

So instead of getting there half an hour early, we were looking at getting there half an hour late.

I'm only admitting this because I'm pretty sure most traffic violations have a pretty short statute of limitations, and because we'd absolutely never do such a thing now, but . . . um . . . well, we weren't half an hour late.  We ended up being only about five minutes late.

But we were still five minutes late, and the testing had begun.

We were in the intake room, looking our most desperate and harried and flustered (as if we had just, say, driven fast enough to cut twenty-five minutes off an hour and a half journey) and furious with ourselves for possibly making it so that we would lose the $150 we had paid for the test.

The intake coordinator looked very sympathetic, but she had "My hands are tied" written all over her face.

We hadn't even finished our "Please, isn't there anything you could do?!?!" speech when, all of a sudden--I swear, I am not making this up--one of the proctors came bursting into the room, harried and flustered and out of breath and looking like she had been driving rather fast herself.

She said, "I am SO SORRY to be late.  I feel just awful, since I was supposed to be a proctor.  What should I do?!?!"

The intake coordinator looked at her, looked at us, and said, "Well, it looks like we have a proctor.  Go take your GREs."

For some people, the stress of the drive, the not knowing, the worry--all of that would have knocked them just a little off their game.

But I swear, I was smiling all morning. I think I even splurted out in giggles a couple of times.  I don't think I've ever done better on an exam.  Because, I mean, how utterly awesome, right?

I hope Isaac had a less stressful build-up to his PSATs today than we had that morning.  (I dropped him off myself, and I don't remember, you know, a police chase or anything.)  But I hope he also found something to smile about, something to help him relax and take some of the stress out of the process.

Transformation

So, when you write a blog entry entitled, "Before," some people might expect there to be an "After" post.

The "After" is still in progress, even three months later.

But it's been three busy months.

A man with a chainsaw . . .

. . . and a helpful assistant can get a lot of work done in a few weeks.

They turned this . . .

. . . into this:

(Okay, that one's not a lot different.)

This . . .

. . . into this:

This . . .

. . . into this:

This:

. . . into this:

And this:

. . . into this:

It was a pretty big difference.  It opened things up a little, and took out the worst of the junk.

Also, it produced a whole lot of yard waste that we put on the curb to be collected.

Unfortunately, in the process of improving things, things started to look worse.  Depressing and worse.

We took out about seven trees, and things looked lighter and brighter, but the light only highlighted all the flaws.

So we got some professional help.