Archive for November, 2008

Emily invited her readers to take part in a photo scavenger hunt. The idea is to look for everyday things to fit certain words and then post your pics. I have a baby sleeping in my lap, and I don’t want to wake her unnecessarily, so I decided to scavenge through pictures I’ve already taken. This is a wholly different exercise, but it was fun nonetheless. So here we go.

Breakfast

Sleepy

Manners

Winter

Waiting

Maybe later I’ll do it the real way, because that sounds fun too.

Comments from old blog

• Fun! I’m glad that you’re joining in. I can’t believe how fast Dagmar is growing – time seriously files.
  emily | 2008-11-29 17:46 | # 
• Welcome to the game!

  Dagmar looks so happy in her 9-10 week photos! Is her onesie ej sikke lej? Your so lucky to live in Denmark!
  Abby | 2008-11-30 16:37

Sean the Blogonaut tagged “two random readers of [his] blog,” and I’m taking that to mean me, because Dagmar is nursing and I’m not going anywhere for a while. 

These are the rules: 

1. Link to the person who tagged you. 
2. Post the rules on your blog. 
3. Write six random, arbitrary things about yourself. 
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them. 
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog. 
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up. 

6 Random Things: 

I scored an 800 on the analytical section of the GRE, back when it was still computerized multiple choice, and then got paid to take the new essay-style version to help them decide if they really should switch.
I made a colored pencil drawing of the hockey player Sergei Fedorov when I was in high school, and was forced to throw it away last year when my cat peed on it for the third time.
I can’t bring myself to give up my two pairs of clogs, even though I’ve been going barefoot long enough to know I will likely never even want to wear them again.
There’s construction going on in my building, and some guys came in to look at my radiators today. They said a bunch of stuff to me in Danish, and I smiled and nodded, hoping it wasn’t actually important.
I really like the boy’s name Jesper, but Thomas nixed it. We had a girl anyway.
I seriously can’t stand that movie A Christmas Story. It makes me uncomfortable to watch it, as if I were witnessing mass genocide or something. I don’t know why, but I just hate it intensely, and I’m so glad it’s virtually unknown in this country. 

I tag: tink, Rachel, slots, Meg, Melaina25, and dgtheory 

I’m pretty sure that’s the first time I’ve bothered to tag anyone.

Comments from old blog

• I can appreciate the Cat pee. Our cat is a dedicated sprayer.
  Sean the Blogonaut | 2008-11-27 14:44 | # 
• Ohh, don’t get me started on spraying, Yikes!

  I kind of agree with you on the movie. It really takes me back to my dysfunctional family life.
  Tins FCD | 2008-11-27 15:13 | # 

• I have tagged away…thanks for helping me not work 
  Melaina25 | 2008-11-27 16:06

I’ve been tagged by Hannah, just for having read her blog. Since I’ve also umbrella-tagged, I’ll honor hers.

1. WITNESS PROTECTION NAME: (mother’s & father’s middle names):
Ellen Wayne

2. NASCAR NAME: (first name of your mother’s dad, father’s dad):
Herman Paul

3. STAR WARS NAME: (the first 2 letters of your last name, first 4 letters of your first name):
Fa’Lorr

4. DETECTIVE NAME: (favorite color, favorite animal):
Yellow Tarsier

5. SOAP OPERA NAME: (middle name, city where you live):
Lee Herlev

6. SUPERHERO NAME: (2nd favorite color, favorite alcoholic drink, optionally add “THE” to the beginning):
Orange Lambic

7. FLY NAME: (first 2 letters of 1st name, last 2 letters of your last name):
Loen

8. GANGSTA NAME: (favorite ice cream flavor, favorite cookie):
Moose Tracks Chocolate Chip (not such a great one, there)

9. ROCK STAR NAME: (current pet’s name, current street name):
Lidja Herlev Hovedgade (also not so fab)

10. PORN NAME: (1st pet, street you grew up on):
Happy Longwood (would work better for my brothers, eh?)

I really, truly want to know this. How do you correct someone’s grammar, spelling, or usage in a nice way? 

For the record, if I screw something up, even if it’s just on my blog, I want to know. I want to know partially because I’m sure I make typos and have brain farts, and I’d like to fix them, and partially because if there’s some rule I don’t know about, I’d like to learn it. If you see something that isn’t right, feel free to tell me. I won’t be offended. 

This isn’t about some belief that everyone should want to be corrected. This is about those times when someone’s poor grasp of the written language is interfering with communication. I’ve gotten emails and read blog comments or forum postings that, for whatever reason, I want to respond to, even though I can barely figure out what they say. Perhaps it’s someone I know offline, or maybe I’ve been able to understand their previous posts and I’ve already formed a relationship with them. Then they post something that I can’t figure out at all, or requires so much effort to slog through that I’m questioning the value of doing so. If I have reason to believe that this person could write it more understandably if they took the time to, and their post is not the result of a mental defect or of English not being the first language, how do you go about asking them to do so without offending them? 

It seems like any post that boils down to, “your English isn’t very good” gets read as, “I think you’re stupid, because I’m an intolerant grammar nazi.” Although I do admit that I cringe upon seeing “Homeschooling mom’s rule!” I don’t actually think everyone who types poorly is stupid, and I don’t correct people just to make people think I’m smart. I’m not perfect either. If I spend more than five minutes trying to understand two sentences of text, though, I think I should be able to say something. 

Thoughts?

Comments from old blog

• I think the occasional typo is okay, but has no one ever heard of spell-check? When everything is misspelled or incorrectly punctuated it is super annoying.

  If you are posting on the internet you are asking to have your thoughts criticized or praised, so it is their own fault!

  (Also notice I have not used any contractions of “it is” just in case, because honestly, I still fluck up that rule myself)
  Melaina25 | 2008-11-24 11:07 | # 

• I am a grammar-Nazi and think that anyone who types poorly is either (1) a hooting imbecile, or (2) so apathetic that he desperately WANTS to be a hooting imbecile, and should therefore be accorded the same amount of respect as one.

  Going by the number of spelling errors one sees these days — not just in fora and other virtual locales, but in published mailings and even on billboards — it is obviously time for grammar-Nazis to break their silence and start screaming, “THERE ARE NO APOSTROPHES IN PLURALS, YOU SLOBBERING FLUFFHEADS!”

  But perhaps I am being too harsh, because I have a hunch that most of these errors were put there by virtual machines for the introduction of spelling errors, more commonly known as “spell-checkers.”
  A.A. | 2008-11-24 17:06 | # 

• I’m no genius when it comes to grammar – but I do try my best. I actually have a habit of spotting errors far more easily in someone else’s writing, rather than my own. 

  While I do have an urge to red-pen a lot of signs, posters, blogs, emails etc, I also find that people tend not to want to be told where they’ve gone wrong. 

  I think I’m going to take Lynne Truss up on her idea though, and carry around a couple of marker pens and blank stickers, specifically for the purpose of correcting the mistakes I spot around me.
  Hannah |  2008-11-27 17:21

I’ve read this in at least five blogs recently, so I’m not sure which one to give credit to. You’re all tagged too. 

1. Grab the nearest book. 
2. Open the book to page 56. 
3. Find the fifth sentence. 
4. Post the text of the next seven sentences in your journal along with these instructions. 
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST. 

Prolonged maternal body temperature of 102° F or higher is suspect. 
Suppose you just love relaxing in a warm bath and were accustomed to doing so before you realized you were pregnant. Don’t worry – most women automatically get out of hot water as soon as they become uncomfortably hot and long before their body temperature reaches 102° F, Recent studies have shown that a pregnant woman can stay in a bath with a water temperature of 102° F for fifteen minutes without her body temperature rising to harmful levels. Other studies show that during vigorous exercise, a pregnant woman’s body temperature is unlikely to reach 102° F for at least forty-five minutes (an unlikely length of time for a pregnant woman to exercise vigorously). These studies are the basis of the recommendation that pregnant women limit their exercise to a maximum of thirty minutes, especially in hot, humid weather. 
Saunas also seem to be safe if used wisely.

AWC had a bazaar, and we went with our friends Lars and Suchi, and their son Ro. Our awesome finds:

• Reese peanut butter cups (pack of 3) – 20 kr.
• swaddling blanket with Velcro closure – 5 kr.
• Barrel of Monkeys game – 10 kr.
• Cthulu hand puppet – 10 kr.

We discovered that the people selling the peanut butter cups were actually just people from SuperBest, a supermarket chain. The SuperBest in Hellerup, we soon learned, has an American/British import section. After the bazaar, we checked it out and spent another 500 kr. or so on Oreos, root beer, Hamburger Helper, and other items that are way more exciting when you live in Denmark than they ever were in the States. 

The swaddling blanket looked small, but at 5 kr. I didn’t care too much. It was indeed too small for Dagmar, but I worked out a way to combine it with another blanket to make it stay on better than the one blanket alone. And, more importantly, it is serving as a pattern for my mother-in-law to make a larger one. Woo hoo! 

The monkeys are for Thomas. I never had them as a kid and have no idea how to play, but he was excited. 

The puppet was a bit of a surprise. Is that Cthulu over in the kids’ section? Why yes it is! And in nearly new condition for a fraction of the retail price. We snapped it up. Shortly thereafter, a woman came over and gushed about how cute it was, saying she wanted to buy it but decided to eat lunch first, and she was disappointed (in a good-natured way) that we got it during her meal. She picked up a blue octopus plushie and asked if we wouldn’t be interested in that one instead. She clearly thought Cthulu was an octopus. With wings and feet. Guess she wasn’t looking very hard. 

It made no sense to me why she decided not to buy it when she decided she wanted it, but I was quite glad it didn’t go to someone who thought it was just a cute octopus. 

The bazaar was at Copenhagen International School, which apparently has a high-tech playground. Back in my day, kids amused themselves without needing such devices. I’ll need to blog more on that when I upload the pictures.

Comment from old blog

Isn’t it funny how the simplest things can seem so exciting when you don’t see them that often? I’m lucky that there’s a deli near our apartment that carries Reese’s Cups (but they sell out a lot). I did get extremely excited once when I found IBC Root Beer, and I paid something like $6 for a bottle.

And last week, a fellow ex-pat here at work made chili, and she gave me some. I’m not a chili fiend of anything, but I haven’t had it in years (and we eat so little meat) that it was like the food of the gods!

So was this a loppemarked? I’ve yet to go to one here, but I’ve been seeing the ads around town lately.

(And I’m glad that Cthulu found a good home!)
Meg | 2008-11-19 12:13

I know I’ve gone longer stretches without posting but for some reason, it feels like it’s been forever. Maybe because there were a couple times I wanted to blog, I was actually here in front of my computer, but I didn’t. Why? 

Last week, I had a blog disaster. I don’t know exactly when it happened, and I have no clue how, but I went to The Dagmar Diary and noticed that, though there were titles for all my entries, the actual content was not published. Once before, this happened with this site, but the entries were still happily stored in RapidWeaver. It was just a publishing bug that I managed to figure out. So I fired up RapidWeaver to fix the publishing error, and discovered the entries were actually missing. 

Maybe you heard about the recent Motrin babywearing ad debacle. You know what’s worse than being condescending about a mom’s parenting decisions? Deleting a mom’s blog entries chronicling the life and times of her child. I’ll just say I was not in my happy place. Thomas helped me recover the vast majority of the entries via Google and Yahoo! caches. After desperate attempts to recover the entirety of my birthing story, I remembered that I copy-pasted it into an iPhoto book. Whew! I had to rewrite the most recent two entries, but otherwise got everything back. Hallelujah, praise my husband! 

I do not know if this was a problem with RapidWeaver, or if the files got corrupted somehow externally, or what. So, I was scared to open this site in RapidWeaver, in case it would delete all my entries. These aren’t my mommy entries, and I might not cry as much if I lost them, but I still have no desire to do so. I felt ok about opening up to blog this morning only because my entire site has been wgotten as a back-up. Now I get to try to remember what I wanted to blog about before.

As an American with a blog, I suppose I’m expected to say something about the election. Here is a sign I saw Tuesday morning outside a 7-11. It says, “Mr. President” across the top, and the subtitle is (in Danish), “a few hours from the White House.” I thought that was pretty brave to print a full day before the results were announced. I mean, we all knew it was coming, but you can’t really know until it’s over. 

Fortunately for BT, and (IMO) for my country, they were right. I voted for Obama. I’m definitely glad he won. I even had a nightmare Tuesday night that McCain won, and I woke up in a panic to check the news and make sure it wasn’t real. But I don’t think the next four years will suddenly be all sunshine and puppies. 

I didn’t vote for Obama because I think he’s the awesomest thing since sliced bread. I don’t know if I’m the only one who can say that, or if all the people like me just aren’t talking about it, but I’m just not in love with the guy. He seems like a nice guy, but for the most part McCain seems like a nice guy too. I agree with some stuff each of them have to say, and disgree with some stuff each of them have to say. I tend to lean more towards Obama’s stuff to say, but really I only have two main reasons for voting for Obama: 1) I place a high importance on maintaining the availability of safe, legal abortions, and 2) Sarah Palin scares the crap out of me. Mainly #2, really. That’s why I had a nightmare about it, anyway. Otherwise, I’d have been able to say, “aw, bummer” if McCain had won. 

So, while I am, in all truthfulness, proud that my daughter’s eighth weekiversary was also the day we elected our first African American president, I can also admit that I’m not feeling any desire to move back to the States just yet, if I ever will. I kinda like watching what happens from afar, and putting my vote in the mail a month ahead of time. 

Though if they bring back real voting booths with curtains and levers, I’m all over that like gravy on a biscuit.

You may know that I have a special, fiery-passion kinda pet peeve for people who abuse apostrophes. (Did you know they are never used in plurals? Ever? In any case whatsoever? It’s true!) Danes do it too. 

Not that it isn’t still annoying, but I can understand a little bit when Danes abuse apostrophes in possessives. They’re exposed to a lot of English, and in English, we do use apostrophes with non-pronoun plurals. 

RIGHT: Dagmar’s smile is wonderful. 
WRONG: Dagmar’s smil er vidunderligt. 
RIGHT: Dagmars smil er vidunderligt. 

I guess that could be confusing, especially if you switch to English a lot. Thomas and I encountered a truly unforgivable apostrophe violation yesterday while having some keys copied. Our local heel and key* promises, right on their big main sign, to copy keys “men’s du venter.” For my Danish-impaired readers, that translates to “whil’e you wait.” Yes, friends. You read that correctly. The word for while is mens. It’s not some longer word that gets shortened to mens. It’s not somehow possessive. That’s just the word for it. Putting an apostrophe there would be like putting one in, say, circus. Actually, I think it’s worse because mens isn’t even a noun. It’s not even a verb! The presence of an s at the end of a word is not a reason to use an apostrophe, people! That goes for both Danish and English! 

* Don’t ask me why Danish key copiers always do heel repair as well. It’s probably the same reason that groceries always have a “napkins & candles” section.