Apostrophe Man to the rescue!

Hello readers!
We're back in the thick of second semester and the weirdness has begun! We begin our tour with Christian Fundamentalism. Apparently a number of students at the Con think that Ruth Ann and I are Fundamentalist Christian. I don't know how this got started as to most of you who know us might agree: WE'RE NOT! Nobody said anything to us for a while until one of the other American bassoonists asked if I had become more religious since leaving Bloomington, IN. A member of the quintet we're in this semester was all excited because she being very, VERY liberal wanted to try and corrupt us. She was a bit disappointed when we said that, no, we're not Fundamentalists.

The next oddity in our recent past was a massive hailstorm. RA and I had just gotten a bag of M&Ms(peanut) and sat down by a window when it started pouring rain. We were very impressed and enjoying it until we remembered we had a lot of laundry on the clothes line. Since our heater caught on fire, we've had to dry our clothes very slowly in the apartment. The morning of this day was one of the first nice days out so we put out a lot laundry. To make matters more interesting, hail started falling. The ground got covered with an inch or two of hail stones and everyone here was so excited because "it looked like it SNOWED!!!!" There are a number of our friends who haven't seen snow. Our clothes stayed out several more days to dry out until the batty old lady upstairs wrote a snide note on the board to take them down(she's the one who was trimming the hedges at 11pm that one night).

Several fun, interesting times were had while working at the library. RA discovered that if you hit control, alt, up arrow, the screen on the circulation computers flipped upside down! Of course on my next shift I had to try it. I also tried control, alt, right arrow and that flips the screen on it's side. Delighted, I pressed control, alt, left arrow to see what would happen.......and the computer crashed! When I restarted it, there was some message about a graphics error or something.

Here in Australia there is this annoying habit on signs, emails, newspapers, etc, to make a word plural by adding apostrophe 's' to something. I don't remember seeing it in the US but rest assured, I'm sure we have many bad grammatical traditions. I asked the high school librarian(the is a high school attached to the Con and that library and the music library share the same space) who has an English degree about it and she said that it was just uneducated people being themselves. She said that in the newspaper a few years ago, a columnist advocated the use of Apostrophe Man! This involved putting your finger in the air, shouting 'Apostrophe Man to the rescue!' and taking a pen and scribbling out the apostrophe. The librarian said that RA and I had to invoke Apostrophe Man at least once before we go back.

These little events have amused us greatly in the last week. We also heard one of our new favorite quotes from the little old lady downstairs. When we were in Portland, she picked up our mail and took it inside so we baked her some cookies in return. When we brought them to her she said with a big grin "Oh, I am just PRONE to cookies!"

The next quiz is coming!!!!!

~Mike