Mistakes happen

It is inevitable that anyone who writes is going to make some sort of mistake in grammar, spelling, or punctuation.

I get paid to find the mistakes in grammar, spelling, and punctuation and other style issues in manuscripts written by physicians and other health care providers, as well as those written by my own husband, and I am reasonably good at it. Yet, I often later find mistakes in things I have written for this blog (and other stuff as well) that I simply did not see when I read the post for the “umpteenth” time before finally uploading it.

One of the most embarrassing mistakes I made occurred  when our boy was applying for a grant to attend the Vocational-Technical school: I spelled his name wrong on the application papers and we had to begin all over again, which caused some delay in the grant. So I get it that “mistakes happen.”

A few years ago, two young men, Jeff Michael Deck and Benjamin Douglas Herson, who called themselves “The Comma Bombers,” wrote a book about their cross-country quest to persuade the creators of signs with errors in them – signs of all sorts but mostly signs in businesses -- to fix the signs. Sometimes they were able to persuade the business owner to fix the sign, and sometimes not. 

And sometimes they took it upon themselves to fix the sign without permission, and once when they did that, they ended up in a spot of trouble. They corrected an apostrophe on a historic hand-painted sign near the Grand Canyon and were sentenced to a $3,000 fine and a year's probation by a federal judge.

Which brings me to a recent mistake I saw. One of our town’s best and brightest decided to add her personal opinion about someone to the back wall of one of the businesses in town. I say “her” because I am guessing this was a teenaged girl. I dunno, it just seems like something a teenaged girl would do.

I was walking the Mollynater down the alley behind the building when I happened to see this:

Which resulted in some laughter when I came home and told Richard about it. 

That in turn, led to what happened at the conversation we had yesterday. I had read on the National Public Radio Web site that guinea pig is being promoted as a good source of meat in South America because, among other things, it has a small carbon footprint and a good conversion ratio of food to meat, is economical to feed, is small, and easily housed. Groups like the Heifer Project, which tries to provide sustainable food sources for impoverished people in undeveloped countries, has added guinea pig to the list of animals it provides in South America.

I had guinea pigs as pets when I was a kid, and I remember them as delightful little animals. I like guinea pigs. In fact, not all that long ago I talked about getting a guinea pig for a pet.

Richard wanted to know if I wanted to start raising guinea pigs for us to eat.

Honestly, could you kill and eat a guinea pig?

Sure. Why not? I like chickens, and I killed them and ate them. I like ducks, and I killed and ate them. I have killed rabbits. Yeah.  I could kill a guinea pig and eat it.

He looked at me with a very straight face and said, 

“You’re a heartless bicth.”

And then we laughed and laughed.