Today's Special!

For those of you who don't recognize it, that was the title of a particularly well-loved children's television program on Nickelodeon when I was a wee small lass (and Nate was a wee small lad- he remembers it, too!) (Okay, never mind; Nate now vehemently denies all such knowledge, other than "remembering the name," even though I could have sworn that in a previous place and time we had a conversation jointly exuberating over the fact that we BOTH watched that show!! Yay, something else in common!! Or, I guess now... Not. Anyway.) (And while we're in parenthetical-no-woman's-land, we might as well superfluously mention Belle & Sebastian, Pinwheel, and The Little Prince as pre-Blue's-Clues staples of early morning Nickolodean fare- though those of you out there who had the privilege to grow up in other lands have, by now, entirely no idea of what I'm talking about. Don't worry, if you missed early 80's cable in exchange for Africa, Pakistan, or Kuwait, can I just say- the exchange was well worth it?) (But now that the paragraph is ENTIRELY structurally shot by being chopped into zillions of itty bitty ideaological pieces with all these annoying PARENTHESES, we might as well also give a big shout-out to much beloved and sorely missed EVENING Nickelodeon programming, aptly titled "Nick at Nite" and boasting of such telecinematalogical gems as Mr. Ed, My Three Sons, Leave it to Beaver, Donna Reed, The Dick Van Dyke show, the Mary Tyler Moore show... Oh SWIZZLE STICKS [50's screen idols swore like that all the time], do I have to go and HYPERLINK every one of those for y'all...? Nah.) (Ooh ooh ooh one more thing, and then I'll end this sorry excuse for a Preface and start for Real, I promise I promise I promise... it's just that... um... *squeezing facial muscles really hard to remember the one last thing I was going to say* OH YEAH! :-D Um, I was just thinking, wouldn't it be cool if someday I wrote a long post about Television: its effect on my life past present and future; its role as Educator About Popular Culture and Distraction to Other Important Parts of Life; its Absence as a Sentient Life Form and Metaphoric Symbol in the contemporary Bush-Wentzel household; and, its extreme limitations (due to the lack of Cable) as a transtextual and iconoclastic [I have no idea what that means, it sounded good so I stuck it in] ideological springboard to discuss the socioeconomic and politicogustatorial struggles of semi-employed soon-to-be Graduate Students. Except now I've kind of screwed it up because the germ of the idea is buried here, in a Parenthetical Preface/Landfill, from whence it might never escape.)

Also!

I just realized (consciously; I've noticed it subconsciously before) that the internet has made me write run-on sentences purposely, as a literary style. I was trained in the avoidance of all things Splicey from an extremely young age, and still faithfully obey the Dictional Safety laws to avoid sentencial accidents and mishaps of all kinds, Run-on and otherwise, when I write formally or academically. (Brain Burp! An idea for children's software! A small java-scripted air-bag pops out every time the child types a run-on sentence! [My probably absurd misuse of the term "java-scripted" will clue in any who would be otherwise unaware that I am most definitively NOT the one to make the program. Still, wouldn't it be cute?] [I am hypertexting there just to decorate the text with a bit of blue.]) But anyway, with the atrocious grammatical habits of The Internet World, I have found myself succumbing to the flow of the narrative voice by using commas in places where there should be semi-colons. (Chris Long will now ask, "Really? Where? All your sentences look fine to me..." But he was raised in British System, without the benefit of semi-colons (and Nick. Jr.), so we really can't hold him responsible.)

(If, at this point in tonight's discourse, any of you [n=2?] are speculating what miraculous concoction of Substances have inspired tonight's musings, let me assure you all that a SINGLE CHOCOLATE PUDDING CUP is to be held solely responsible. And now, we return to the regularly scheduled programming.)

Oh yeah! Did anyone want to know WHY Today's Special? Well, today I skipped work to get my car fixed. It was an all-day kind of thing. Last month we spent over 700 on repairs to get her (her=Sylvia, the car) through registration, and then over the weekend Nate noticed oil leaking (again!) so today we got the gaskets replaced (again!) and a few other things (fuel filter, PCV valve, alignment). We are a bit concerned by the amount being spent on repairs but still don't think we're coming out TOO badly considering that we bought her pretty cheaply. I added up purchase price, maintenance, insurance, registration, and an estimate for gas, and it works out to about .25/mile that we spend on our car. AAA says a new car costs more like .56/mile, and standard mileage reimbursement is something like .40/mile, so I guess we're doing all right.

And while I waited for the car I walked across the street to the mall and shopped the JC Penney clearance racks for Nate. I bought him the Traditional Clearance Tacky Shirts that he loves, and mourned the lack of trendy clothing in size 2XLT. So many nice shirts that just aren't available in his size! :-( They DID have a tacky line of oversized T-shirts with cliched phrases about being Big (like, "Big People rule the world!" or something of that level of lack-of-originality). Honestly, don't they know that Big People have more to their lives than just the fact that they're big? (Like, occasionally, a sense of fashion?) It's not like they make clothes for short people that say, "Check it out! I'm short!" or clothes for skinny people that say, "Hey look! You might see my ribs!" or even clothes for average people that say, "Nothing special here! I'm just average!" So I don't know why an already-way-too-small section of a big department store would dedicate an entire precious rack of space to stereotypical Big People propaganda. How about some dress shirts in updated colors, instead?!

Anyway, Nate was just thrilled because one of The Cheap Shirts had snaps instead of buttons. Snaps, do you realize how exciting that is...?!?!?

Okay I have to get up in 8 hours so it is, by definition, Time for Bed.

Neb

PS That Also! thing? That was great, wasn't it? Well, I didn't come up with that; I ripped it from Finslippy, somewhere in the archives. Just bein' honest.