Skull and Crossbones concert

Come to my concert! It's tonight (Friday) night, 7:30, at the Riverton City building on Redwood Road at 12830. We are playing lots of fun pirate-esque music- some familiar, some less familiar but still wonderful. Tickets are $7.50 or $20 for a family. I have a few 'buy 1 get 1 free' coupons, so let me know if you'd like one of those.

It really should be a good concert and the trombone section will be particularly outstanding, as always. Definitely worth hearing....

Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.

I wish I was the genius who wrote this, but I am not that cool. I am, however, just cool enough to think it is fabulous. Original found here.

Literary Rules

Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.

And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.

It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.

Avoid clichés like the plague. (They're old hat)

Also, always avoid annoying alliteration.

Be more or less specific.

Remarks in brackets (however relevant) are (usually) (but not always) unnecessary.

Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.

No sentence fragments.

Contractions aren't necessary and shouldn't be used.

Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.

Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.

One should NEVER generalize.

Comparisons are as bad as clichés.

Don't use no double negatives.

Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

One-word sentences? Eliminate.

Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.

The passive voice is to be ignored.

Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas.

Never use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice.

Kill all exclamation points!!!

Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.

Understatement is always the absolute best way to put forth earth shaking ideas.

Use the apostrophe in it's proper place and omit it when its not needed.

Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."

If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times: Resist hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it correctly.

Puns are for children, not groan readers.

Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.

Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.

Who needs rhetorical questions?

Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

Apples and more apples

Earlier this week we (me and Tyler + Becca and crew) had the opportunity to pick apples. Yay! We love apples and the many things that you can make with them, and free apples are the tastiest. Unsure of exactly how many we were going to be able to get, we loaded up the cars with buckets and headed to American Fork.

When we pulled up to the house and started unloading buckets I was feeling embarrassed at how presumptuous we looked with all our buckets- there was no way we could possibly fill that many. Umm. I was wrong. No need to be embarrassed. We filled 14 big buckets and 3 boxes in just over an hour. And we left at least that many on the trees. It was pretty incredible. Maybe someday I'll be cool enough to have trees like that. I think it helped that the lady is a beekeeper and had thousands and thousands of little tiny indentured pollinators.

If only we had stopped to think about the ramifications of picking that many apples. Picking them is easy. Canning them is not quite so simple. 2 days into the process and we think that we've hit the halfway point. Yikes. We are out of bottles, which is a problem- an easily rectifiable one. The less easily solved is our distinct lack of energy and enthusiasm.

Although we are totally exhausted, few things are as rewarding as the hours spent canning. The literal fruits of our labor are lined up in row after row of glistening bottles, practically winking at us and telling us that we'll be thankful later on, when we get to enjoy them throughout the year. I love looking at the shelves in my food storage room filling up and knowing that it's because of my hard work.