Ugh. How do I respond to someone who seems perfectly nice but wrote me on okcupid and I have zero interest in? Side note: if you don't know the difference between "eludes" and "alludes" or "heel" and "heal", I WILL raise my eyebrows at you saying you want someone of "above-average intellect". IJS.

I get that, meara, but I do get emails from quite brilliant physicians and software engineers all the time that make me cringe for the abuse of language.

eta: also DH - brainy as can be, but never ever gets a there/their or then/than right. Makes me crazy.

I'm sorry, flea, but my memory for names sucks and I can't remember your real name.

You can email me at my profile address if you want.

One of my pet peeves is correcting one of those kinds of errors during the draft stage--elude/allude comes up pretty often, as does illusion/allusion, and then/than is endemic--and seeing it again in the final version. Or seeing it reappear in the portfolio, which gives them the chance to revise papers they've already turned in for a grade.

I have a handful that I refuse to accept. If your paper has a confusion with their/there/they're or two/too/to I will give you a zero. I call them fatal errors. I also will not accept a paper that does not have I capitalized, nor paragraphs indented. I am also a snarling bear about punctuating titles of works and capitalizing the first word of sentences.

My reasoning for giving them a zero and a fatal error is these are issues that my children, grade 1, have learned. My students have been taught these errors forever and I will not waste my time doing it again (especially because we go over them once at the beginning of the year where THEY identify the error and they know when it is wrong).

I want them to attend to details.

That's a great idea, Kat.

I love that. Fatal errors is great.

I do about three loads of laundry a week. I probably should do more if I treated my delicates properly but I am just learning about these girl things now. I did laundry tonight and I funded it and put it away, yay me. I also did dishes but didn't finish the last of it.

Tomorrow after our last student party we are headed to Sedona for a mini vacation surrounding Kat's niece's graduation. She's graduating in Flagstaff but the hotels are cheaper further out plus we like Sedona. It'll be a nice little break for us before the summer insanity begins. The SO will leave for tour immediately after that and the dog and I will follow in about a week. It was going to be longer for me, but the SO got us comps for the show of my favorite musician when I was a kid, who hasn't toured in, like, twenty years. His gig is in Tulsa the day after the first leg of the SO's tour wraps in OKC. So we'll hit that, then a recording internship, then board meeting. Then the rest of tour and I'll go see my folks. Then camp starts for the summer. Sheesh.

I love that. Fatal errors is great.

It would be so much fun to be able to return the correspondence I receive with a grade. Instead I have to cringe. The problem is the jolt that distracts me from the real content.

I get that email (and posts on the internet) are often written quickly and not subject to any review before sending. But school work or words written to impress prospective dates should be checked a whole lot more.

Wow Liese, that sounds both exhausting and a bunch of fun. No boredom in there!

I get that email (and posts on the internet) are often written quickly and not subject to any review before sending.

My boss' emails are riddled with spelling errors. He also ends most of his sentences with ellipses. It's quite irksome.