idontbelieveingrammar

Something rare and unusual happened this year where I live.   Fall. Here, we usually we go straight from summer to a few ice storms that we like to call winter. Spring is also known as Tornado Season and then we go right back to summer’s so hot you can literally fry an egg on your driveway and make cookies on your dashboard. (I have done both).   But Autumn around here usually lasts about a week. That small sliver of time that Target takes down the Halloween decorations and puts up the Christmas ones. This year, however, the crisp weather has lasted a little bit longer. Even if it is erratic. One week I am bundled up in blankets, coats and hats in the freezing rain for my girl’s soccer game, and the next I am worried that I should have put sunscreen on her. Two Sundays ago my kids rolled up their pants, slipped off their shoes and played in the new fountains downtown for well over an hour. They were soaked. My son laid out his shirt to dry in the sun while we ...

I have zero interest in rocks. None. Unless it is one on my finger, and even then I don't really care that much about carrots or cut. Whoever wrote my degree plans, however, thought I should take a few geology classes in both undergrad and grad school. For multiple semesters in college I sat through lectures on rocks, the age of the Earth, talked about fossils and what really killed off the dinosaurs. I stayed awake. But. Just barely. I also remember in labs, having to classify types of rocks. chert, sandstone, obsidian. A few were pretty...but most were just brown stones to me. One of the ways we had to identify them was based on the Mohs scale of hardness. You would scratch the surface of one rock or mineral on another to see which one was harder. The values range from 1 - 10, depending on how easily it is scratched. In the hospital they always ask you to rate your pain. On a scale of 1-10. And those scales and numbers and ways of classifying things are...