Tonight, the S@L Family went to dinner at a local joint called something like "Oriental Delight of China".  I always enjoy the names of Asian take-out places.  For some reason they feel that Americans require Asian restaurants to contain the word "China", the word "Oriental", or the word "Asia" in the restaurant name, for example, "Asian Garden" and "China Delight", "Oriental Express".  What do you think they call American restaurants in China? "USA America Food?"  "Hollywood America Garden"?  Perhaps they just call them "McDonalds". 

In any case, Zoe received her very first fortune cookie fortune this evening. It read: It is important to always express yourself.  This is not exactly a problem area for her. In fact, she expressed herself last evening for close to two and a half hours before finally surrendering to sleep. Somehow we've backslid from her being a great sleeper to her demanding to be rocked or patted to sleep. 

Oh, but you say, how sweet! Only a DEVIL MOTHER wouldn't want to rock their baby to sleep.  Yes, but would any mother want to rock their child to sleep for 2.5 hours, when they were starving for dinner and also having to pee so badly that it hurt but if they knew that if they tried to set their baby down, even in the most ninja-like of moves, their baby would cling to her and scream so loudly that the mother knew she was never ever going to get to eat or pee or even sleep for several more hours? 

 Is everyone still with me after that sentence?  Because I dove into that sentence and came up the other side of it just like you did -- disoriented and gasping for air. Hopefully everyone managed to hang onto the rope because guess what? I'm not editing that sentence because it's my blog and I can abuse grammar with reckless abandon in public if I feel like it.  Perhaps the language police will arrest me and send me to Grammar Management classes for my first offense. Then I will have to stand up and admit to the group that I only abuse grammar and spelling because I fear their power over me. For example, it baffles me that after 36 years of daily  English use, I am unable to spell the words Bureau, committee, maintenance or license without my enabler, SpellCheck. Also, I am intimidated by jokes about dangling participles because I don't remember what a dangling participle actually is. Everything I know about dangling participles has been gleaned from jokes in TV sit-coms, which is just another way of saying I know nothing about them except that they sound funny.  So you see I abuse grammar because I mock what I do not understand. 

More Later,

S@L