V-A-L-U-E-D in Everyday Ramblings

From Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer the chief copy editor at Random House…

Don’t use…very, rather, really, quite and in fact. Just, and so…pretty and of course and surely and that said and actually for a week.

I have been practicing not using these intensifying words and phrases and some of them are sneaky… (I would have preferred to type quite sneaky :) I use most of them to make my writing seem more conversational. And we live in a time and place where subtleties are not valued.

Oh and speaking of the word VALUED…I have decided that this is my word for 2019. It even contains my initials. My goal here is to feel valued as I move through the year. I listen to a lot of podcasts and two of my favorite, each by two women, Happier in Hollywood and #AmWriting (both about writing) have segments on picking a word for the New Year.

This bone cold gray New Year that is hovering in freezing fog ice territory but not there yet.

The picture is from Sunday. Mrs. Sherlock back from her six-day group trip snowshoeing in Washington was available for a hike and it was my choice. I think she enjoyed not being in charge as she has been leading these group hikes every three weeks and they are effortful to put together.

I picked a hill walk around Mt. Tabor Park. Portland is (the plaque says) the only city in the US with a volcano in it. That was true when the plaque was created, before we appropriated Hawaii. Mt Tabor is a dormant cinder cone and the park contains a number of reservoirs that provide soft marvelous water to a big chunk of the city.

The park, designed by the Olmstead brothers is full of things you might recognize from Central Park. The picture above is of one of their staircases up to a smaller reservoir that is currently empty.

We had a wonderful time. They put Frida on blood pressure medicine to take a load off her heart that is still working hard to compensate for the kidney damage and this was a good thing because the park itself has got to be the most dog intense space in Portland! We ran her just a bit at the summit but she was good the rest of the hike. We circumnavigated the park as well as walking through it and the views were lovely even though it wasn’t clear enough to see Mt Tabor’s sister volcanoes to the east.

Mrs. Sherlock had been to the park before but not the area around it and there is a lot of interesting history still visible. I’d never been to the park at all. The whole morning was a treat for me.

I have had a headache for a week and yesterday some intense intestinal cramping and for the first time in a long time not a lot of commitments. I have been puttering and taking baths and finished one frivolous book (vampires and witches) and started another, (murder mystery) as well as listening to Dreyer’s English, which is laugh out loud funny for a grammar book.

I was full of ambition for these four consecutive days off but it has not turned out that way. I can’t remember the last time I took an actual sick day from work, during my dental work I know I took a couple of vacation days to recover but an actual sick day… but today I got up and fed the cats and sat in the aforementioned poofy chair while Carlo finished and thought heck…I think I am going back to bed.

Instead of to the gym, where I had originally planned to go.

I think this may be a good sign; I am listing to the side and dragging dangerously close to the clear soft waters of human being instead of human doing. The cats are totally onboard with this turn of events.

Benjamin Dreyer says sentence fragments are perfectly okay. A grammarian after my own heart! Now if I can get used to how much he sounds like Andrew Solomon we will be good.

Last updated February 20, 2019