Does Your Favorite Post Feel Neglected?

Hey readers,

I have absolutely no inspiration right now. I just read a post by The Byronic Man about being featured on Peg-o-Leg’s Ramblings, and that gave me an idea. Or rather, the idea is to steal this idea.

1978: A Rockin’ Year to be Seventeen

Image from http://www.fanpop.com

Evolution of X just had a post about her memories of 1978. She invited readers to do the same.

So, let’s see. Not in chronological order:

I Dream of Being Stephen King

In Spirit Lights the Way, a blog I follow, I read a post about a writing prompt for a short story to be written by two writers together:

Weekly Writing Challenge: Dad and Lilly and Me

This week’s Writing Challenge was to write about the picture below.

 

Oh Jeez, where the heck did you ever find that photo? Really? All these years?

Freshly Pressed: The Aftermath

Ah, it was wonderful, being Freshly Pressed. But it has its downside as well.

Before Being Freshly Pressed (BFP), I was perfectly content with my 72 followers, which meant that about an average of one new reader per week was joining. I was proud of my stats, which showed that my record number of visits in one day was 139. People from an average of ten countries visited my blog each day, and I enjoyed seeing them on Feedjit.

Oh my Gosh, I’m Freshly Pressed!

What an honor! Thank you WordPress. And thanks to everyone who visits my blog. I suddenly got so many likes and responses today that it will take me a while to visit all y’all’s blogs, but I will try. How exciting!

Nine First Lines And a Paragraph

One of my blogging friends–Fork in My Eye, go visit her–wrote a post about first lines of her favorite books and invited others to do the same. So here’s mine. My favorite books in English, that is.  Some of them. And literature. I’ll do another list with books from other languages, and also one from popular fiction. I’m not going to tell you which books the lines–and one paragraph, you’ll see why–are from. Some are obvious because a name gives it away. Let me know which ones you recognize. No looking them up, though. That would be cheating.

Stressed? Blog!

While B was in the hospital, or rather hospitals, blogging kept me from freaking out about things I had no control over. At first I still had several posts to do about the Rockies, and then I started blogging about the hospital experience.

U TTLY KWIM, Right?

Photo: Wikipedia

One of the many enjoyable things about translating is that I’m always learning something new, no matter how short the text. I just finished translating a sample from a Belgian novel for middle-school-aged girls, in which the characters communicate face-to-face, on the phone, via email and via texting. 

The Big No-no

photo: http://www.zazzle.com

Brace yourselves!

I am going to commit one of the biggest faux pas you can commit in America. I’m going to correct your grammar, Americans!

Yes, my Dutch friends, it’s considered impolite at best to correct anyone’s grammar here.When you do, people think you’re pedantic, rude, or a “grammar nazi”.

I will write about the inflation of the word “nazi” some other time.

So back to you, my American readers. Let me explain myself.

My Relationship With Dictionaries

The Daily Post today is about dictionaries. It concludes with the question what dictionaries are to me and if I have any favorites.

Well, it wasn’t love at first sight, I can tell you that. In fact, I avoided dictionaries as a youngster–too much hassle. I preferred the DIY method: inference through context.

As a student in library school I learned extensively about all imaginable dictionaries, but it was one of the most boring classes. Probably because the teacher had the stage presence of a bibliography of bibliographies. Dictionaries were a necessity, a useful tool, but I still wasn’t turned on.

The Interview

photo: lhwilkinson (flickr)

I’m so nervous. It’s 1933 and I’m about to interview Adolf Hitler. I have written him a letter telling him that I work for a Dutch newspaper, how much I admire him, and that I’d love to interview him.

Hi There!

(For my Dutch-English translating and proofreading business, please go to D-E Translating. You can also go to my D-E Translating WordPress site. Thank you.)

Welcome to my blog.

I’m an energetic, slim, reasonably pretty thirty-year-old. However, I reside in a rather shocking, obese, aching, apathetic 52-year-old body. I love living in Austin but I’m chock-full of criticism of America in general. The Rockies bring me to tears, but so does the health care system. I’ve adopted Thanksgiving, but not the Pledge of Allegiance. If I seem elated and unbearably grouchy in sometimes schizophrenically quick succession, this is why.

I love the usual: my husband, my children, my friends and our pets. I hate heat, stupidity, shoulder spurs, spiders and walking, cycling and stair-stepping in place.

I collect raft books and I’m currently developing a weird obsession with the bottoms of bridges.

When I lived in the Netherlands, eighteen years ago, I loved hot tea, wild camping in Great Britain, gardening, reading for days on end, and I walked and cycled everywhere. Now that I live in a pretty darn hot part of the US, with kids that have to be driven everywhere by car, I love reminiscing about hot tea, wild camping in Great Britain, gardening, reading for days on end and walking and cycling everywhere…

My blog is a crazy—some might say completely unhinged–collection of posts about any of the above-mentioned issues and then some. Nothing is sacred. I blatantly ignore all American no-nos. Which means I talk politics, religion, I don’t idolize  teachers and I swear (but not that much).

As you read my posts you might laugh, seethe, weep or shrug your shoulders. If you like a post, great. Let me know. If you hate a post, great, let me know. It’s all good. I’d like to think I’m always right, but don’t let that stop you from telling me if you disagree. We Dutch love a good argument.

If you want to know more about how I ended up in America and an overview of how that’s been, visit my Reading Guide.

Otherwise, have at it!

(In my posts, I refer to my husband as T, my 16-year-old son as B, and my 13-year-old daughter as R.)