Can one quack lugubriously?

After last night's post I was talking to my brother, Shamus Van Nostrum, and he told me he was just waiting for me to slip up and miss a blog post, and then, kablamo! (he didn't actually say kablamo!, but I assume he would have, had he thought to at the time). So, my resolve to post everyday has been further strengthened, which is why I'm starting this one at 5:30am, because I'm not sure when today I might have time to actually write one. I figure, if nothing else, I have this paragraph, which is already pretty much awesome, because of the 2 instances of the word kablamo! (wait...3).

Oh, I also have a picture. Remember how I don't know how to work my cellphone? Well, in one of my many attempts to share the picture of my magic mug with the world, I tried to e-mail it to myself. Having never e-mailed from my cell, when it didn't arrive, I just assumed I'd messaged a random Sharon with my mug picture and would never see it again. But, through the magic of internet it arrived later last night, which makes me kind of wonder where it was hanging out for those hours in between. So, now I can share a slightly better fuzzy picture of my mug teetering precariously off my bottom shelf. As you look at it, remember that this is how it landed after falling off my desk and bouncing off the floor, but also be careful not to let it blow your mind.

So, this part of the post is no longer 5am, in case you're wondering. This is the midafternoon, "Hey, let's blog while I drink my coffee to keep me up for the rest of the day," part of the blog.

I spent my day at a school teaching small humans how to eat healthy. At the beginning of the day, I was given the all important job of helping them cook, of which the most important task was ensuring that no little fingers were lost, and if that was unavoidable, then to at least ensure they were not eaten. I'm happy to say that, despite little training, I was successful.

It had been a long time since I'd been in an elementary school. I was surprised to hear that they listen to the same a cappella recording of "O Canada" at the beginning of the school day as we did approximately 2 decades ago. I'm not sure what exactly it is about this particular recording that they think will engage the nationalistic spirit of our youngest citizens, but it still doesn't quite do it for me. Except, of course, for the addition of a punctuated "Ca-na-da" at the end, which is helpful to remind me which country it is I've been singing about for the last minute and a half ("What? I thought we were singing about Grenada. But that Canada thing does make the north reference easier to understand.")

They also had a list of synonyms for the word "sad" on the wall. No "happy", no "angry", just "sad". As a daydreamer who throughout a year in a classroom would read anything posted on the wall about 10000x on average (are you aware that "chemists do it in tubes"?), I have to imagine that an entire list of words meaning depression could really mess up a 12 year old's psyche. I'm not sure if the focus on improving the children's ability to express sadness was driven by a need to more accurately prescribe antidepressants, or whether the high schools had asked them to better prepare them so that their emo poems might be less repetitive to mark.

Example:

Pre-Project Sad Vocabulary:

I'm so sad.
No one understands me.
That makes me sad.

Post-Project Sad Vocabulary:

I'm so devastatingly miserable.
No one understands me.
That makes me lugubrious.

Forgive me if I misused the word lugubrious, not having been a part of Project Sad Vocabulary I've never been fully trained in the proper way to use it in a sentence. But, I was part of: Project When People Come to Farms They're Oinking at Cows and Quacking at Horses, We Seriously Need to Fix That. It has served me well when conferring with barnyard animals in my day to day life.