Link of the Day: Wet Paint, a beautifully written online journal. In her most recent entries, Chloe writes movingly about the sudden death of a friend and the aftermath.

Ghoti

Yesterday being Yom Kippur, all the local public schools were closed, and as a result the drive into Princeton was a breeze. Because of road construction on two of the three main routes into Princeton, the 25-minute drive has turned into a 45-minute nightmare ever since school started. Yesterday, however, we zipped into Princeton in 20 minutes. It was marvelous.

I've been feeling very frustrated lately about how much time the twins and I spend in the car. We all leave the house at 7:50 a.m. and Stephen, Matthew, and I don't get home until close to 9:30 after dropping off Tab at work in Princeton and Daniel at his school. In the afternoon, we leave at 4 to pick up Daniel and then drive back to Princeton to pick up Tab. We don't get home until 5:45 or later. In other words, the twins and I spend more than three hours every weekday in the car. What a colossal waste of time.

I wish we could get a used car for Tab to drive to and from work, but we just can't afford it right now, not if we are serious about buying another house and moving this year. But that's another whole issue....

My frustrations came to a head today when I was trying to get dinner ready, help Daniel with his homework, and keep the younger boys occupied and out of the kitchen, all at the same time. Tab, who usually takes the boys out for a walk while I'm making dinner, was upstairs lying on a heating pad. He's been having a great deal of pain along his sciatic nerve for the past few days. It wasn't his fault that he couldn't be of more help, but I was feeling stressed by trying to do everything at once.

"If only we had another car, if only I didn't have to spend half the day driving around, we would've had plenty of time to finish Daniel's homework before dinner," I thought, resentfully.

The assignment that I was helping Daniel with was spelling. His teacher gave his class a list of ten words. Daniel is supposed to look up each word in the dictionary, write down the proper spelling and the definition, and then use the word in a sentence. Unfortunately, she dictated the list of words to them, and Daniel's spelling is so creative, shall we say, that I could only interpret the first five words out of ten. Daniel couldn't remember what the other five were, either. Tomorrow I'll have to ask his teacher for the list of words.

Wanna see if you can do any better than me at deciphering the words? Check it out.

Daniel has been writing words for months, but the problem is that up until now the teachers at his school encouraged him to write words the way they sound to him rather than giving him the correct spelling. So now he has to unlearn that habit and memorize proper spelling.

And, of course, it doesn't help that English spelling is fiendishly illogical. Just ask George Bernard Shaw.

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