Hello. I'm going to stun you by writing a short blog tonight. WHY? I IS POOPED! I is so pooped that this is what happened last night. It's unbelievable, but true anyway. When I was talking about my sister digging for the Devil and she asked the neighbor, Are you the Devil?, 'cause she needed to know so she could quit digging, 'cause if he were the Devil, then she was digging "pointlessly"? 'Member that? Well, I really wanted to say she was digging IN VAIN, you know, to no avail, without effect and so on. But when I looked up that "V" word in Webster, V-E-I-N talked about tubes and lines and layers for blood and leaves and rocks, and other weird definitions, like how you act. So THAT, I told myself, was certainly not the correct spelling. Therefore, I looked up V-A-N-E, and that was all about weather and scientific gobbledy-gook. GONG. Well, I thought I was going C-A-R-A-Z-Y. I flipped between those two spellings millions of times and each time I stared at the definitions . . . nothing had altered . . . surprisingly. I was COUNTING on the CORRECT definition to mysteriously insert itself in-between one of my flips. But it didn't. SO FRUSTRATING and MIND-NUMBING. So I changed the word to "pointlessly," even though that word was a shabby substitute for conveying my point, ha, and I didn't even bother to look it up I was so put out. Also, I was on my last brain cell by then and needed to save it for pushing PUBLISH POST. But still, I knew that the "V" word used to mean what I still needed it to mean, even it Webster didn't say so, and that it would fit what I was trying to express about the futility of digging for the Devil when he was standing directly before you. And also that Webster was pretty dumb and uncooperative.

So today I "edited" the blog. My mother is smart and very good with words. I called her and said, How do you spell the word, like someone is doing something to no avail, like digging for the Devil in the alley? V-A-I-N, she says. Can you even believe that VAIN completely, COMPLETELY, eluded me last night? SAD. And THAT, my friends, is why I tell you I am too pooped to write much more tonight. Not to mention the English language must be nuts! Three different and distinct spellings of "v, long a, n." There are only a couple of pages of "V" words in the dictionary, and they're all wasted on "v, long a, n." SHEESH!

So, I will leave you with my sister's response to my Happy Birthday Laura blog. First she comments on her pure lack of intelligence for, yea, so many long days. Don't believe her! She is a brilliant tutor to dyslexic children, with specialized training and everything. She is very ept, which is the opposite of inept, but Webster doesn't seem to want to mention that either -- ept, that is. Webster is not my friend anymore. No more tea parties! Anyway, she says, and I quote,

I am living proof that Cream of Wheat doesn't stimulate brain cell growth.

Nonsense. Cream of Wheat should replace the little man on the front of the box with Laura's little girl angelic face. I have the image in mind, her one year old baby portrait. She looks old and wise in it. Think of the sales increase for Nabisco. Their new sales slogan could be,

LIVE ON CREAM OF WHEAT AND YOU, TOO, WILL NEVER HAVE TO TOUCH A
HORRID VEGETABLE AGAIN

Well, that's a little on the long side for a slogan, but, hey, what did you expect from me?? OH MY WORD! I just Googled (I LOOOVE Google) Nabisco's Cream of Wheat. I wanted to verify my memory of the C of W logo and, sure enough, there is the wide-smiling chef of my childhood holding the delicious steaming bowl of C of W. Hmmm. It WOULD be hard to do away with him, he's an American institution no doubt, like Aunt Jemimah and Betty Crocker. But this is what snagged my attention. Nabisco bought out Cream of Wheat in 1962, the very year my sister was born. Oh, rats, now you know how old I am. But that's okay, I sacrifice my VANITY for the sake of literary integrity. It's QUITE essential that I relay the marvelous coincidence that C of W became more widely distributed in the year of her birth, and in fact, is responsible for her love affair with it.

Short-Winded KEM