When did I get so picky about grammar?

Brothers Grimm Fairy Tale Rose, a photo by Clara Johnson on Flickr.

This bloom is on a bush called Brothers Grimm Fairy Tale Rose in the Stanley Park Rose Garden. It has a label on a post in the ground underneath it that says so, but it has a grammar problem. The label says Brother's Grimm Fairy Tale Rose.

This is wrong because there is an apostrophe in it. The way it reads on the sign is that a Brother owns a Grimm Fairy Tale Rose... or even funnier, Brother is a Grimm Fairy Tale Rose!

There were two brothers with the last name of Grimm. They wrote stories. The stories are by the Brothers Grimm. The people who bred this rose named it after their stories.

After being irked by the sign (I take photos of the signs to make sure I get the names of the flowers correct in Flickr) I googled the details and found I was correct about the inappropriateness of the apostrophe.

So how did I get from being a child who thought spelling a word only one way was a sign of a lack of creativity to an adult who is bothered by apostrophes?

Why do I unintentionally relax when I find the first typo in every book I read? I know they are there, and I seem to be so happy when I find this is yet another book proving my theory that there is no such thing as a book without a spelling or grammar error.

When did the speed bumps on the road to reading enjoyment start bothering me so much?

Maybe I've read too much? No such thing.

Maybe I've read too much drivel? That's a possibility. So many things to read, and not that many years left to do it in. I don't have any patience for drivel left. Thank goodness I don't have any of my writing from my youth around anymore!

Do we need to duck this time?

So was everyone expecting the world to end at the turn of the millennium?

Another satellite that was sent into orbit in the 1990s is about to land back on our planet. "Land" being a rather bland way of saying "hit very quickly while burning up and shattering into many pieces." And no one knows where it will land. 

Did no one in the 1990s think of what happens to objects in orbit after they've been up there for a while? They come back down. It's this gravity thing, you see... not really a new phenomenon, if people got the satellite up into orbit, they had a good understanding of the concept then, so they knew it would come back down eventually. Did they not care about the eventual crashing back on the planet?

Of course, this one is only the size of a car... the last one from the U.S. was the size of a bus. So much better. Really?

This latest satellite comes from Germany. The European Space Agency has a Space Debris Office. (That's a trashy job, ha, ha.) They say there is a 1 in 2,000 chance of hitting one of us monkeys with this satellite - the last satellite only had a 1 in 3,200 chance of hitting a monkey. 

A smaller, but better targeted piece of space debris.

This satellite has the added bonus of a mirror which the Space Debris Office says may not burn up before hitting the planet, meaning some serious shards may come flying off the debris when it hits.

Of course, the planet is mostly covered by water, so the satellite has a better chance of hitting fish than us monkeys. 

Any space aliens out there watching us must be wondering if we're just on a fishing trip with some really weird ways of catching fish.

Update: It landed in the Indian Ocean (probably) (hopefully). So it hit the body of water next to the largest population of humans possible. This could be the work of a super villain!

Is it Summer again?

The calendar says October 7. This weekend is Thanksgiving - the harvest festival time in Canada. So why is the Cox Bay Beach in Tofino covered in surfers? (There are more in the water.)

This is a screen shot from Tofino today. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.) (See the Long Beach Lodge Resort website for the live webcam.)

I'm not there myself, and I can't surf (but would love to), but it's 15 degrees Celsius on the beach! For Tofino, that's balmy! It's cold in that water... but it's cold all year round. Dry suits are the clothing of choice at all times of the year when surfing Tofino.

I've just spent a warm sunny afternoon cleaning up the plants on my balcony, and I had to come back inside because it was too hot!

We missed having a lot of hot sunny days this summer, so are we having it now? This weather does not make sense.