Toilets and Fans

Only two more days until we lose the giant fans in our office. Thursday night, just as we were leaving to go to dinner, the toilet tank in the office bathroom overflowed and didn’t shut off. In about five minutes, all the carpet within five feet of the bathroom (including the media closet) was soaked. I’m glad we caught it before it could do any more damage.

Fortunately, maintenance managed to get someone out here with an extractor that night, and we now have big fans blowing above and beneath the carpet to get it good and dry. I’m sure it will also get cleaned afterward, but I fear we’ll never have that “new apartment smell” again. It’s a good thing we’re planning to vacate pretty soon. All the same, I’ll miss this place. After thirteen years in a dingy San Francisco hovel with a cigar-smoking lunatic downstairs, it’s been really nice living someplace with appliances, plumbing that (usually) works, climate control, and a relatively pleasant aroma.

Anyway, we left the noisy fans behind and went to Winston-Salem on Friday and Saturday. We might have stayed the whole weekend and done more, ummm, shopping, but Mark had to be on a plane back to The City of Doom this morning.

I Was Wrong

I stand corrected, and by a member of the family at that. Apparently, “gift” actually is a verb common in legal documents for several centuries. Of course, legal terminology is somewhat unrelated to plain English anyway (by design, maybe?), but I apologize for my error. I will, however, continue not to use “gift” as a verb myself, because I find it just a little repulsive. As I’ve said before, the fact that you can do something doesn’t mean that you necessarily should.

Gift

I like our new mortgage broker. I really do. She’s friendly and helpful and she’s found us more money at a lower payment than we expected. I only have one problem with her: like so many Americans today, she seems to have forgotten that the word “gift” is a noun and not a verb.

One does not “gift” something to someone else. One gives something to someone else. A gift, for example.

It’s an annoying trend that I trace to recent news stories about the practice of “re-gifting”, or recycling unwanted presents by wrapping them up and giving them to someone else. Corporate types have been saying idiotic things like “let’s interface” and “can we dialogue?” for years now. However, I think the real root of this nagging tendency to turn nouns into verbs goes back to the heinous “new way to office” ad campaign used by Kinko’s about ten years ago. That one was quickly followed by California Pizza Kitchen’s “cool new way to pizza”, which was even worse.

Even so, I can see how one might be tempted to use “office” or “pizza” as a verb in a commercial, because there’s not really a comparable term. “Work”, for example, is a little imprecise, and “work in an office” is a little wordy. But why stoop to such liguistic abuse when there’s already an appropriate word like “give”? It bugs me on the same level as “orientate” and “orientated”, which some people have a tendency to use when they mean “orient” and “oriented”.

I’d really like to conversation with some of these people about the way they’ve been misbehavioring with resepct to the English language. But that’s something I’ve already statemented on many occasions.

Not a Surprise

It’s absolutely insane that a decade of bickering over aesthetics now means that the eastern span of the Bay Bridge will not be completely rebuilt until a quarter of a century after the earthquake that originally damaged it. I’m glad I don’t have to drive across the damned thing anymore.

Notice that I said “insane” rather than “surprising”. There is, alas, nothing at all surprising about it.

The ‘Burbs

Funny, funny op-ed piece from my hometown paper:

he zoning laws are very strict concerning the naming of new residential communities. If you are well-funded and have the right lawyer, you can pretty much drop houses out of the sky wherever you please, but the name must be generated from the grid below by choosing one word from each of the columns, (e.g., “Hootenanny Hills Holler” or “Deer Droppings Down”).

I live in northwest Greensboro, which is zoned “HT-3,” meaning it is mandatory that a Harris-Teeter be located every three miles or else. Under municipal ordinances, if it is ever found that there is a greater than three mile distance between any two northwest Harris-Teeters, the city is empowered to build a deli and/or bakery in your residence until a new store can be constructed. Until they opened up the new Harris-Teeter on New Garden Road last month, my mom was forced to hang rotisserie chickens from her porch, and it caused a serious animal problem.

While driving around looking at houses with the hubby, I also like to come up with new subdivision and street names. Some of my favorites include numerous variants on “The ___ at ___ ____” and cute, little multi-word street names. Forget “The Shops at Peppercorn Point” or whatever. How about some of these?

  • The Projects at Piedmont Courts
  • The Prostitutes at Larkin Street Commons
  • Crystal Meth Marketplace at Ashley Point
  • The Check Cashers at Wal-Mart View Terrace
  • The White Trash of Dover

And in the vein of street names like “Timid Deer Lane” and “Spotted Oak Trail”, may I suggest the following:

  • Uncircumcised Penis Lane
  • Hempsmoke Heath
  • Lost Cherry Circle
  • Detached Retina Drive

More ideas welcome…

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

So now I’m all excited at the prospect that “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” (the TV series) may be coming to DVD soon. I loved that show; I used to watch it in re-runs every night on channel 18, right before “Nanny and the Professor”. And just like “Bewitched”, it had its own token homo, in the person of Charles Nelson Reilly…

Atlanta

I decided on Monday that there were several reasons why it was necessary for me to leave town for a few days. The water was going to be off all over my apartment complex, I have a promising interview later this week which might make future trips more difficult, and I just sort of felt like it.

So I went to Atlanta.

I just got home. I’m beat so I’m not going to tell any exiting stories about the trip tonight. OK, there weren’t really any REALLY exciting stories anyway, but still…