Because It's Mine, I Walk the Line

I have this teeny, tiny, very minor obsession with spelling. To the point that once, when I was at a Wendy's (mmm, Frosty . . .), I noticed a typo on the electric hand dryer as I was standing there drying my hands. And every time I see one of those family name signs in front of a house with an apostrophe before the "s," I want to rip it off and correct it with my red pen. Listen up, all you Smith's out there--no apostrophe before the "s." It's just a plural! Like "dogs"! Or "morons"! NO APOSTROPHE.

Ahem.

But this craziness has occasionally been useful. It enabled me to score high enough on a proofreading test to land the job that supported us while A. was in law school. And just yesterday, the craziness won me a prize.

Carrie over at Sparkerly (isn't that just the cutest blog name ever?) posted a little story riddled with misspellings that she has actually encountered in her work as a lawyer. She offered a prize to the first person who identified all the misspelled words. It was a greatly entertaining little story, and, well, it's not like I don't already catalog all misspellings in my head anyway. So I gave her what she asked for. And I was the ONLY one who did. So I won!

Like my dad says, sometimes showing up is all it takes.

My prize? A $25 Amazon gift certificate. Cha-CHING. Carrie sent it to me yesterday. I spent about two seconds debating whether I should use it to buy a Christmas present for someone else before deciding screw that--MINE. Then I spent another two seconds thinking if I wanted a cookbook, which would enable me to cook delicious meals for other people, or a CD, which would be selfishly ALL FOR ME. I went with selfish.

NICE

That right there is four whole CDs of Johnny Cash--pretty much his entire career. Thanks to Carrie, I now have my canning music for next summer, and the Man in Black lives on.

Life is good.