Booking Thru Thursday

Kansas has tumbleweeds!   And you can buy there here at the Prairie tumbleweed farm.

You'll have to read yesterday's post if you want to understand my excitement with the Tumbleweed.

I am always a dollar short and a day late.

I could have started a business like this...there is a tumble weed in my yard right now!!
(I don't like them)
But seriously? Good for them. Because People actually buy tumbleweeds and Prairie tumbleweed farm is making money from them, while I am just irritated by them.

I sent this link (for the tumbleweeds) for Ms. enplace: she has never seen a tumbleweed (sadly, I have never seen Spanish Moss. Maybe would could do a vacation "switch" sometime. ~grins~ )

My friend Karen, of Karen Cooks, told me a sad tumbleweed story.
She said:

Good pics of the desert & the tumbleweeds. For Christmas one year, my folks made a giant snowman with stacked tumbleweeds and then covered it with cotton balls from the field. It was really cute until some wise-ass went by and threw a match on it. POOF! It went up in flames like nobody's business! LOL

That is really annoying (that's my nice word, because stuff like that really pisses me off. I don't understand vandalism....grrrrr.) I wish you had a picture of your tumbleweed snowman Karen.

I take my camera everywhere I go. All the time. Every day.....
Except last night when we went to eat at the Winnemucca Inn. It's too bad, because they served us the biggest and prettiest seafood platter I have ever seen.
We went out to eat with our Friday Night Friends, The Miltons.
And we ordered Seafood platters .... OMG! It took the Handyman and I all we had to eat the whole thing -- we shared one. (we did leave a few clams at the bottom--we just couldn't do it), there were lobsters and crabs and mussels and shrimp and clams and clarified butter and cocktail sauce....mmmmm...... It was really good. I have a seafood hangover this morning.


Robbie (Milton) said about the meal last night that it was pretty healthy. And then we looked down at their shared platter and the clarified butter had not been touched..... there sat the Handyman and I with buttery fingers and a drip or two on our chins. Obviously our butter had been touched.

Oh well....Monday we begin our early morning walking regiment again. ( I did the 3day-60mile breast cancer walk last September. Once that was over, I have not gone on one walk! It's time to begin again)
 
The reason for my post title---Booking Through Thursday   -- today is this....
I used to have a book blog--which wasn't all that exciting-- but I did like to answer the "memes" that are plentiful on book blogs. They have meme's all the time. Not so much on food blogs, but I am incorporating my blogging life, so.....here we go.


One of my favorite Meme's was "Booking Through Thursday", so, even tho it's Saturday, I'm going to answer it.
In honor of National Grammar Day … it IS “March Fourth” after all … do you have any grammar books? Punctuation? Writing guidelines? Style books?
More importantly, have you read them?
How do you feel about grammar in general? Important? Vital? Unnecessary? Fussy?

Well...as a matter of fact, I do.
Here are two of them...

Do You Speak American? by Robert MacNeil and William Cran

I LOVE regional differences in how we Americans speak the English Language. I love the nuances, the rhythm, the phrases only heard in certain counties of certain states (My friend Sally in Pennsylvania has 'dippy eggs'! We've never heard of dippy eggs out west. We do eat them, we just call them something different like basted eggs. And in Connecticut where my son and his wife are going to grad school, they say "carriage" for shopping cart. I've heard it with my own ears!).

This books deals with the questions: Is the American English in decline? Are regional dialects dying out? Is there a difference in how men and women adapt to linguistic variations?

I have not read all of this book...it's the kind of book I pick up and read a chapter here and a chapter there. I find it interesting, but a bit like reading a text book.
I still like the book tho.... it's one that will never get sold at a yard sale.

and....

The Mother Tongue: English and how it got that way by Bill Bryson.

I LOVE THIS BOOK!!! I love Bill Bryson.
This book was actually a book used for a class I took at the college a few years ago.

Believe it or not...there are actually a lot of food references in it....
The Italians, as we might expect, have over 500 names for different types of macaroni. Some of these, when translated, begin to sound distinctly unappetizing, like strozzapreti, which means strangled priests. Vermicelli means "little worms" and even spaghetti means "little strings". When you learn that muscatel in Italian means "wine with flies in it," you may conclude that the Italians are gastronomically out to lunch, so to speak, but really their names for foodstuffs are no more disgusting than our hot dogs or those Old English favorites, toad-in-the-hole, spotted dick, and faggots in gravy.
(from the book:  The Mother Tongue)

I've read all of this book. I love this book. But the question was, how important is grammar to me? It's semi-important. Certain things bug me...using the words seen and saw in the wrong place drives me crazy. So does using "who and that" .
For example....if you are talking about a person, later on in the paragraph NEVER USE "that" to describe or talk about said person..... the girl that likes tomatoes--WRONG! It's "the girl, who likes tomatoes".

But I really don't know as much as I should about grammar.
Except now I know that Thursday was National Grammar Day. Next year, we'll celebrate in style.