Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

My grandma lived basically across the street from the MTC (no, not in the temple, but close). One of the only rules she ever broke (to my knowledge) was when she brought freshly baked (still warm!) cookies to the MTC for me. I shared them with my district and everyone was happy.

John Keats is probably my favorite poet. I like most of the Romantics.

Billy Collins is great too though.

This seems like a useful book:
Gentlemen's Blood: A History of Dueling From Swords at Dawn to Pistols at Dusk

Perhaps this one as well:
The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy

Katya wrote:I finally saw Gravity!

You can only defy it for so long.

Gongoozler
a person who enjoys watching activity on the canals in the United Kingdom

Adding my thoughts on Frozen to round out my list for the year. Frozen (****) - Very good movie. The animation is remarkable, the characters are easy to relate to, and the issues of sibling bonding and isolation are very important. The heroines (two of them!) are complex and interesting and they act...

I found some money for my wife in Illinois! Don't forget to check all the states.

I watched a chick flick called Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! that I quite liked. Sweet Home Alabama on the other hand, was not so good.

I think I watched them both on the same day for some reason.

Marduk wrote:Both thou and you were second person singular. You is formal, thou is informal.

Well, what was plural then?

IANAL (I am not a linguist) Isn't part of the explanation that English dropped its second-person singular form 'thou' so we now use the plural form 'you' to refer to both singular and plural (thus losing the -est ending that we see in KJV English? (obviously we lost the -eth ending for third-person ...

My daughter is at that lovely age where she says things like "we was running" ... and other than sounding wrong, it doesn't actually impede communication much at all.

I took my three-year-old daughter to many of the animated flicks. It's a fun outing we do - I go mostly for the popcorn. The Croods (***) - This would be better for the 5 and up age. I'm not a fan of action films, and this was basically an action film - lots of sequences of being chased by saber-too...

fuzz (n.) 1590s, fusse, first attested in fusball "puff ball of tiny spores," of uncertain origin. Meaning "the police" is American English, 1929, underworld slang, origin and connection to the older word unknown. Perhaps a variant of fuss, with a notion of "hard to please....

Desideratum - Something wanted or needed.
(plural - desiderata)

Apparently 'desiderate' ('to wish or long for') is a word too (but not according to my spellchecker).

I had an alarm clock growing up that had three settings for 'relaxing sounds' to choose from. One was a train going down the tracks, one was waves on the ocean, and the third was water dripping from a faucet. I could never figure out how anyone was supposed to relax to water dripping from a faucet. ...

My daughter is going to be Tinkerbell. We had to make the dress ourselves, though, since Disney doesn't seem to produce a simple green dress for kids. Tinkerbell is not a princess, but boy do they try to make her one!

Anyways, I guess I'll get the old pirate costume out and be Capt. Hook.

Not sure if you have access to this resource, I got to it through my library's catalogue: http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/title/15414 . Anyways, it's an old manual on growing Cauliflower published in Michigan by A. A. Crozier in 1891. It has the following quote near the end of the cultivation sec...

Probably magic.

I had to parallel park in a tiny spot between two cars for my drivers ed test. I still to this day loathe parallel parking, I'm terrible at it, but on that day, somehow, magically, I successfully parked the car in the most beautiful maneuver ever. In fact, I was so busy being impressed with myself t...

I like the name either way.