Ye watchers and ye holy ones

Happy feastday to all the Michaels, Gabriels and Raphaels (and variant spellings and derivatives)!

Past participling

Having accepted an invitation to become part of the editorial review board of ICS Publications, I am reading too many books on grammar, copyediting, proofreading and style.

(Hmmm. Maybe  that should be "... books on grammar, on copyediting, on proofreading and on style." And what about that serial comma? Yes? No? Or these incomplete sentences? Like that one.)  

Having warned Tom that my pedanticism (pedantry?) was likely to increase, something he considered unlikely if not impossible, I picked up another volume of William Safire. (Another volume by William Safire? Would a reader think Mr. Safire himself was a multi-volume set?) Immersing myself in his excessive lexicographical precision,  I soon surrendered control of my own utterances, discovering to my horror that I had reverted to a former (long-past? one-time?) over-dependence on participial phrases at the beginning of sentences. Aiiiiee!

(Or should I have written, "Screaming, Aiiiieee!"?) (Re-reading that question, I am puzzled by the placement of the question mark.) (Having now read the most recent sentence, I wonder if it would be stronger had I written "I puzzle over...", avoiding the passive construction.) (Or, perhaps humorously, "I question the placement of the question mark.") ("Perhaps humorously?" Only perhaps? If it is not humorous, why say it at all?) (Losing my sense of whether my revision of this still-incomplete {still incomplete? yet incomplete?}text is proofreading or copyediting or neither, I  ...)

When I studied Classical Greek at Michigan State University, much (most?) of the second year was devoted (we devoted most/much of the second year? Spent most of the second year?) to translating Xenophon's Anabasis. If you are among those fortunate enough to have forgotten your Xenophon, I remind you that his account of a military undertaking was described by Will Durant as "one of the great adventures in human history" -- IMHO (to be informal and colloquial and jargony), one of the great hyperbolic statements in human history. (To be fair, Durant meant the undertaking was one of the great adventures... or did he? Note to self: Check reference.) I mention it because the text seemed to be an endless series of sentences that read something like (that is, similar to) this: "Having crossed the river, the army marched twelve stadia." (In Greek, mind you!)

In those days I still wrote letters to family and friends, letters delivered by mail. Today we would say "by snail mail", but it was so long ago that it may indeed have been "by dinosaur mail." I began to realize that all the sentences in these letters had begun to begin (not the same as Cole Porter's 1935 song about a dance nor the same as R.E.M.'s song, "Begin the Begin") with participial phrases. I seemed to be unable to write, "Yesterday, we went to see The Graduate and then had pizza." Instead, I wrote, "Having gone to see The Graduate, we had pizza." Imagine sentence after mind-numbing sentence like (that is, similar to) that.

(Now I wonder if I should revise this entire paragraph and recast most of the sentences.) (Noting along the way that I did the proper copyediting thing -- dang, now I have to go re-check [recheck?] all the references to copyediting.) (Wait! Is re-check/recheck unambiguous? Does it mean I am going to make a check mark alongside references to copyediting or that I am going to examine appropriate references to ensure {insure?} that I have spelled it right?) ({[And what about all those brackets inside brackets, or parens, as the cognoscenti might say?]}And by "this paragraph," of course,I mean the previous paragraph, not this paragraph that I am writing now.)

Screaming again, Aieeee!, I fled the room.

I do not know what I will be doing for ICS Pubs, and I may never have to worry about any of this stuff. Nor am I am going to spend more time proofing or copyediting or revising or fact-checking this post.(Should that be Nor do I intend to ...?)

Do a spell check? Wrong! Or is it? (Or, is it?)

For those of you who may be tempted to comment on any errors you might (might, I say, and might, I mean) find in this version, I smugly warn you (warn you smugly?) that I may have left some to tease you. (I may have left some as a tease?)

I have to go now.  Seriously. (Are you going in a serious manner? Or are you serious about going?)

And as Sigmund Freud did not say, although he might have had he been asked, sometimes a typo is just a typo.

Oh, stet!

It's not over till the fat clouds rain!

And they aren't raining yet.

Earlier this week I planted about 70 grape hyacinth bulbs. Instructions said to plant 4 inches deep. I watered the area first to soften the ground, as per Tom's direction. When I dug down three inches, I hit dry dust. I watered longer -- about an hour to an hour and a half all together -- and I was still hitting dry dust on the last row I put in.

Because the temperatures dropped to freezing, Tom took down the fountain and replaced it with the heated bird bath. The birds were not a problem, but the squirrels kept knocking it slightly off center and last night raccoons turned the whole thing over. All creatures great and small are looking for water. The squirrels have taken to tapping on the doors to the deck to get us do something. They are licking the deck furniture every morning to get the dew off it. It would be funny except that it is so not funny.

This is the little pond down the road from us. This is where Tom's Stein ancestors built the first farmhouse back in the 1840s, eventually moving away from the marshy mosquito-breeding ground. Dave Foster and his wife own that piece of the old homestead now. 

Below is a copy of that third picture with the normal water level indicated by the blue coloring:

Not quite bluebonnets

Yesterday we got a bunch of Grape Hyacinth bulbs. I plan to put them out in the area Tom has been developing as Daddy's garden -- anchored by the hydrangea Kathie gave me last year in Daddy's memory.

These are very winter-hardy bulbs, and I see the flowers all over the place up here in the spring, sometime filling a small yard, looking like a field of wild bluebonnets in Texas. They are a bit like mini-bluebonnets, which is another reason to put them by Daddy's garden. (For those who don't know, the bluebonnet is the state flower of Texas.) We tried real bluebonnets here once, but they didn't do at all. Bluebonnets are hard to grow anyway, apparently, and add the stresses of a Wisconsin winter and it's all over. I hope these will eventually spread and make a naturalized blue show in the spring.