When it comes to shopping, Sargie's a girl on a mission.

May 6, 2020 - Wednesday

26 degrees/clear skies/calm winds

Pentoga Road

Ah, the calm before the storm. With highs expected near 60 degrees today, Carl the Weatherman is saying we might expect snow showers the day after tomorrow. If that occurs, Carl could rank right up there with Al Gore and our governor as being the least popular people in the UP, or at least on Pentoga Road. 

Onto another matter of greatest importance:

In my former life as a newspaper columnist, I never worried about mundane grammatical bits and pieces, things like apostrophes, commas, and the like. Somewhere, in a back room of the newspaper office, a place where typewriters clanged and the smell of printing ink was strong, there lurked a junior editor whose job was to clean up my lack of grammatical knowledge. He was the real unsung hero of the printed word.

That was then, but now is now.

I have a confession to make... but how to say it. 

I'm a retired educator, a professor, a man who was paid to think deep thoughts and possesses a minor in the English language. 

Dang it, I'll come right to the point.

I'M PLURAL POSSESSIVE PRONOUN CHALLEGED!

There, that feels better to get it off my chest.

Sometime ago, I asked Miss Jody, Mississippi Brother Garry's bride of well over fifty years, a retired fourth grade educator and English teacher, to PLEASE let me know anytime she saw a repeated grammatical error in my writing. 

Poor Miss Jody. She wouldn't hurt a flea and is the most kind and loving person I know and in general, hates to say anything that might hurt one's feelings. That being said, Miss Jody initially pointed out that I often misused the apostrophe in the word "it." Is it it's or its, etc. 

In an enthusiastic school marm manner, Miss Jody recently complimented me on the mending of my usage of the word, so much so, that I rewarded myself with a star on the grammar chart in the fourth grade room of my mind. 

Just when I thought I had this whole apostrophe thing down, I received the following text. My kind, loving, sister, the wife of Mississippi Brother Garry, had suddenly turned into the Attila the Hun of Fourth Grade personal pronoun apostrophes. 

Stunned and choking back the tears, I was tempted to shuffle to the back of my mental fourth grade room and scrape the star off the grammar chart.

Putting on my big boy pants, I called Miss Jody last night and took my plural possessive pronoun criticism and lesson. Wanting to please my grammatical mentor, I promised to try harder in my future compositions.

So, I begin my literary life this morning with a renewed purpose in mind, to learn the proper use of personal plural possessive nouns and pronouns. No more theirs, hers, or ours, with an apostrophe.

Thank you, Jody. I hope you'll continue to help me. Lord knows, I can use all you have to offer.

I love you too.

Meanwhile, onto life as we know it:

Yesterday was filled with shopping in Rhinelander. We spent untold millions on groceries, flower bulbs, Boston ferns, and other treasures, far too numerous to mention.

Home later in the afternoon, Yooper Brother Mark stopped by to help lift the several hundred pound lathe onto the stand I'd constructed the night before.

There are still a few other things to add to the lathe, but I hope to put the machine on and try it out for size by the end of today.

I'm going to visit the farmer from whom I purchase composted top soil later this morning. Several raised garden beds were destroyed while digging the pond last summer and it's time to think about resurrecting those.

There are flower bulbs to plant and a lathe to finish putting together. I'm hoping to take it for a test drive before day's end.

Just one last question before I leave. 

Miss Jody, can I PLEASE go outside for recess? I'll work really really hard on my plural possessive pronouns and nouns, I promise.

After all, a man's work is never done.

So are the tales from Pentoga Road...

Today's random Alaska picture:
Inupiaq kindergarteners from the coastal arctic whaling village of Kivalina. One of my favorite activities was getting down on the floor and playing with them. It usually resulted in a game of "Pile on Tom" that ended with me on the bottom and all of us laughing and giggling.