Clean Thoughts

 Old age has some fine moments. One of these moments is now, as I am ensconced in my fine office chair (a gift for my birthday several years ago), writing this post in glorious leisure while my neighbour scrubs out my bathroom for me. I can’t manage this kind of work any more and so I have hired her – young, muscular and hard-working – and my bathroom is looking good. It will also smell good and be organized when she is done.

Our first job was to empty out the storage closet. An embarrassing number of things were stale dated (some by years) and got binned. There is also a collection to take to our local recycling centre. And the things to keep are being returned to unstained, clean shelves. It is a salutary operation to sort out the keepers from the junk. In my case, a little voice in my head keeps saying “WHY did you ever keep THAT???”. Not sure how you shut up that kind of little voice.

As you can see from the paragraphs above, the downsizing is going on. It gives me the cold chills, however, to think about doing my office.

This afternoon the hockey teams are in play for a place in the finals. I am not sure I have the strength to watch; one more incident like the one that took out Crosby and I may have to stop watching entirely. These days Olympic level play is about the only thing left where the game is a game. Other than hockey and skating, ignoring the scoring in the latter, I don’t really care for the winter games. There is too much that is not fun to watch – long track speed skating, for instance – or too nerve-wracking – short track speed skating, for sure. Ah well, I am sure Canada’s teams will be out there trying today.

Grammarly wanted me to put commas after each of the opening clauses in the paragraph above and I am ignoring it. I think too many commas spoils the cadence. This, while I sit with my mother’s favourite grammar text beside me, looking at all her underlining and comments, while I try to get the {censored} Oxford comma rule stuck into my head. Again. The book, just in passing, is Douglas Brown’s A Handbook of Composition, 1953 edition, and is pretty beat up. But it will last me out. My other go-to is Dreyer’s English. I am on my second copy.

If my mother could read this, she and Grammarly would have a field day. The Microsoft Word grammar check, on the other hand, is quite happy to pass the whole thing.