Wordstar, Mount Doom, and Commas

I have just finished helping my mother proof read (and edit) a fifteen-page letter to a local (Steubenville) parish. She is writing it, I need to add! And, if we recall my earlier posts, she lives in Colorado. What else do you do on a Monday night, when long distance is free, and your mother is in grammatical distress?

My Mum is the comma queen. She writes as she speaks, and her program does not often catch the grammatical errors. Neither does my father, who we suspect only pretended to proofread her letter. We must also factor in her word processing program - WORDSTAR. Many of my Dear Readers are younger than this antiquated program. I think we even find a reference to it in Genesis, right after God created animals and saw that they were good. (Why would God create bad animals, anyway? Then again, God did create my cat. She is of the devil.)

Getting back to my mother: Mum would love to learn a newer program. I would love it if she learned a new program. But in my parents' house, we have Computer Wars. The war is mainly because my father likes to kibitz around on the thing, which means my mother doesn't get to use it (he has a lot of khutzpe, doing that!) When she does manage to snag time, he gripes because he falls behind on work. The whole thing is just farbisine, because the man is hopelessly addicted to tinkering. He gets into Meshugine Mode (run in terror) when kicked off the thing, and that starts the mishigas flowing.

My God, to hear me talk, you'd think we were Jewish! Break out the nosh, because it's gonna be a megila. Oy vey!

My mother and I worked on the letter, and finally got it proofed and polished. I even taught her how to use MS Word (which means that I instructed her to roll her mouse over to the pictures in the upper left hand corner and click on the little icon that looks like a disk. I should work for AOL customer support! I would have to move to India, in that case.)

Mum's letter was very powerful - she is a talented woman! (Mum, look! I used a " - " in that sentence. I would use a comma. If it was necessary.)

I just spent five minutes trying to construct a really witty grammatical error (in that case, a run on sentence), but I have just now discovered that I am so damned anal retentive that my brain forbids me to do so! So much for trying to put a little "inside humor" into this post.

Why do I have the strangest mental image of my father sitting in their darkened office, hugging his monitor and purring "my Precious"?

It must be dinner. Jeff made an excellent pork chop (shut up, I'm Italian! I can eat those!), although I am feeling too lazy to actually go downstairs and put the leftover bits in the refrigerator. It has been a long day - two funerals! Not my own, although I will be facing death for this post! We simply had two members of our parish pass away this past week. Three, actually, and I am singing at that funeral as well.

There is a bright side to this wacky day! I actually sat down and wrote the first six pages of my newest book (also a Mum project.) Of course, I will wake up tomorrow and decide that it is all crap, and delete it. Vicious circle. I have exactly five "newest books" floating around on my hard drive. Two are nearly completed, and two are in just the plot tinkering stages. None are ever going to see publication, as I don't think they have any real merit (or market). "Decision" at least has the plot done for me (thanks Mum!) and just needs fleshing out. For those who are curious - it is an adaptation of a play that she wrote years back. On Wordstar - the same Wordstar she uses today. Moses helped her proof it (as my father was looking at CAD stuff for the arc... on the computer... with Noah.) Remember, Wordstar is in fact in Genesis, before Adam but after the animals. God saw that it was Good, and then He created Bill Gates.

What? You don't believe me about Wordstar? A Potted History of WordStar Check it for yourself! $8,500 and you, too, could have started MicroPro International Inc. (My father would be proud of me for knowing that! I'll be sure to tell him that, once Mum and I pry the computer out of his hands and throw it into the cracks of Mount Doom.)

I'm just joshing. My father rocks! He may be in his 70's, but the man can scratch build a computer better than most people my age. We don't sing "Daddy of the 9 USB Ports" at family functions for nothing! (If you never saw the cheesy Rankin-Bass cartoon, or have never heard the warbled "Frodo" song from it, you won't get that joke. It, like Wordstar, is before your time.)