Loose Ends

I thought I'd better go ahead and post something before I leave town for the weekend. I'm taking the kids up to my mom's this afternoon. Then tomorrow morning we're going up to Fort Worth for a funeral. After that, we're driving to Houston. The next morning, we go to Lake Charles, Louisiana. I'm glad to know my OnStar works, but I don't intend to run out of gas again on this trip. I'm thinking this time, maybe it'll be a flat tire instead. Mike gets to take his jet directly to Louisiana. Bless his heart.

Don't you hate it when someone says they are going to funeral and just leave it at that? You start wondering, Who was it? What happened? Were you close? This is not unlike the situation when someone mentions that they had "minor surgery." You just know that when they don't elaborate, you probably don't want to hear about it. So the funeral is for my aunt Bonnie. She was my grandmother's sister. She was also my third grade teacher. I think she was in her late 90s. She was one of those who lived a nice long good life, never lost her mind, and never had any major physical problems. For someone who was almost 100. A few years ago, I caught her reading the obituaries. She said that's what old people do to keep up with their friends. She made me promise that if no one comes to her funeral, I have to announce that the low turnout is because all of her friends are dead.

I am looking forward to this little break. Work has been burning me out. Back in February or March, I posted a story about my experience with this pro bono veterans' event I went to and pretty much supervised. Well, because I am a moron and a masochist, and because no good deed goes unpunished, I took on several pro bono cases. Just out of the kindness of my heart, to put some good karma back out there in the world, and in hopes, of course, of signing up the good cases later for a fee. Since I lost my conscience in law school, you can bet that any philanthropic act on my part will someday benefit me one way or another, and I mean financially. One of my new pro bono clients had the nerve, the absolute gall (after I had put in a good four or five hours reviewing his file and writing an important letter for him for free) to ask me for an advance. As if: (1) I would ever do that, (2) I have the spare money to do that, (3) his direct deposit from the VA was coming in next week, or (4) if I am a sucker to give him free legal advice, I must just be a sucker in general. Needless to say, that file is now on my very back burner.

My new favorite song the past few weeks is Kid Rock's All Summer Long. It is this cool mixture of Warren Zevon's Werewolves of London and Lynyrd Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama. I like it even though he has some seriously lame lyric problems. Like he got high and drunk and scribbled some words down and recorded it before anyone sat him down and said hey, we can make this better. He rhymes the word things with the word things. But the worst offense is rhyming bottle with tomorrow. Regardless, I think it's a fun song.

I saw this painted on the side of the truck the other day: "Quality at it's best!" I had to sigh and roll my eyes. All I could think was, punctuation at its worst. I guess not everyone can care about apostrophe misuse the way I do.

I have a question. Why does everyone say "sherbert" when it is spelled and pronounced sherbet? There is only one R in it. I don't much care for sherbet anyway, but when people mispronounce it, I really have no use for that stuff at all.

A couple of French words that Americans can never say correctly: armoire and coup de grace. I don't mean that they should be pronounced with a French accent. That would be pompous. (No offense, Chris.) They should just be pronounced the French way, but in American. Armoire is not "Arm-wah" and coup de grace is not "Coo day Grah." The French do say the endings of some of their words. The bottom line with me is if you can't pronounce coup de grace, use some other phrase. I even saw it spelled somewhere like this: cou de gras, which I think kind of means neck of fat. Not really the meaning they were going for.

Ever since I started this silly word business, I get recommendations from friends and I'm always pulling out my little notepad to add words I hear everywhere. One day not long ago at an awards ceremony at Luke's school, this albino kid stood up to receive an award. I immediately pulled out my notepad and scribbled the word albino. Nothing against melanin-challenged people, I just like the word albino. Hey, there's one, melanin. Just like if I saw a little person, I might jot down midget. I wish I could stop this, because some of the good words have started repeating themselves. And I'm not about to keep track or start alphabetizing. I have a hard enough time keeping my spices in alphabetical order. So if any of you have any suggestions of things I might shift my focus to, I will be glad to consider them. In the meantime, here you go:

tryst, brandish, rakish, rancid, putrid, heinous, esperanza, Esperanto, myriad, grandiose, palindrome, rebus, anagram, algorithm, thwart, zilch, squelch, nada, akimbo, charisma, chimera, alchemy, adrenalin, albumin, acumen, geode, obsidian, abyssinian, onyx, minx, manx, calamity, squander.

My friend Kathy recommended crotchety. That word is both descriptive and nasty. It has the word crotch in it, and it usually refers to an old person. And that's just wrong. As in, "The octogenarian pole dancer was crotchety."

Words that irritate me for no particular reason: scrumptious, copasetic, simpatico, kibosh.

That's all for now. My cleaning people are here, so I need to get out of their way. Maybe I'll get the oil changed, have the tires checked, fill up with gas, and of course, get some cash to blow at the casino.