I have reached the point in the semester when little annoyances evoke outsize responses; for instance, yesterday I may have publicly threatened to employ a flamethrower against students who spell my name incorrectly. (Fourteen weeks into the semester and they can't figure out how many u's are in my last name?)
PowerPoint slides with very small white text on a black background! Students who insist that they've "fixed" everything I marked on their drafts when they've corrected small errors but ignored the big stuff! A classroom thermostat that hisses, loudly, throughout a two-hour event! A new light fixture in the library that makes me want to distribute green visors to everyone forced to work under those harsh conditions! All these things have earned my ire in the past couple of days.
But probably my time would be better spent on a wild-emu chase. Actually I don't know whether the emus in question are wild or domesticated, and in fact I'm not entirely sure that emus respond to domestication, but I do know that people I know and trust, people who inherited a big chunk of my DNA, claim to have spotted emus in a fenced enclosure along a particular stretch of my daily commute. Every day since Thanksgiving I have looked for emus along that stretch of highway but I have not seen so much as a feather.
Well, I have seen some feathers, but they weren't on any emus. Yesterday a Carolina wren got into my house--who knows how?--and kept fluttering from room to room trying to find its way out. At one point it flew into our bedroom and hid behind a framed photograph of a ruby-crowned kinglet. Nice choice, but hiding in my bedroom is not a viable lifestyle for a wren.
So despite the cold weather we opened the back door wide, but the bird wouldn't come close while we were nearby. My husband left for an early meeting so I sat quietly, as far from the cold as I could get while still maintaining a clear view of the door, because otherwise I'd never know whether the bird got out of the house. (Once, years ago, we found a dead bird in a large plant pot downstairs. Who knows how long it had been in the house without our knowledge?) In the dead quiet I could hear the bird flittering here and there until finally it flew right out the back door, which made me happy because I'd had enough of letting the winter freeze invade my space.
Meanwhile, deer hunting season has started, prompting one of my students to comment on what a great sacrifice he was making just to be in class on Monday. Others didn't bother trying. I hope they'll bag their deer, but local bag limits were severely reduced after a disease ravaged the local deer population this fall. I told a colleague that some of my students seem to have deer flu and she asked, "What are the symptoms?" Look for massive outbreaks of camouflage and hunter orange.
Finally, my adorable daughter, who shares my interest in holiday music and punctuation, sent me a link to a charming YouTube video attempting to answer a burning question: Where does the comma go in "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"? Who can maintain an air of annoyance with such silliness about? Forget about the spelling errors, errant students, and emus; let's play with punctuation!
