Earthquake!!!

OK, I've been holding back on the exclamation points lately but I really feel this post deserves the punctuation. So last night, around 8:15pm, I was lying on bed with my laptop, trying to work out the Big Oh for a matrix multiplication formula (that's not as much fun as it sounds!).  All of a sudden the bed started shaking - a fairly rare occurrence these days!- (enough already with the exclamation points!). I was looking around the room to see if anything else was going on but as we've no art up in the bedroom yet, I couldn't tell if the walls were shaking. All the while the bed is going - I don't just mean a gentle tremble...it was  a good shuddering - I was really jiggling (I had my own seismic event going on). Anyway, after about 30 seconds or so it stopped. I immediately checked the interweb for the skinny, and landed on the USGS site which had a link asking "Did you feel it?".

Even tho' I wasn't sure if it had actually been an earthquake I decided to report it and filled out the form. When I'd finished I refreshed the page and sure enough, it had happened.  I was 55km from the epicenter of a 3.8 earthquake.See the site for the quake I felt.

Ellipses

Ellipses might just be edging out exclamation points in terms of my favorite punctuation. There's that tantalizing "h" in the HTML entity for an ellipse - … - what's up with that? I dunno, they're more sophisticated somehow than exclaimation points, less needy, got a bit of mystery about them. Dontcha think …

Senior moment

So, having dropped some stuff off at the thrift store, I decide to have a bit of a look round, that being a nice little de-stresser for me. I happen upon a bowl by Thomas O'Brien and a knife from IKEA. When I went to pay for them, the cashier totaled my purchases and then said

Cashier: Oh wait, it's Tuesday, you get the seniors' discount.
Me (not quite understanding what she was saying, but hearing clearly the word "discount"): What discount?
Cashier: Senior discount -  10%.
Me: The simian discount?
Cashier: Sen-ior, Sen-ior, Sen-ior, Seeeeen-yooooour discount.
Me: Oh, the senior discount, yeah sure,  55 and over right?

I think it's time to do my roots.

It's not often one gets a chance to see the exact price of their dignity, to see in cold hard cash the value of their esteem. In my case it was 49¢ ; the amount my senior discount saved me. The bowl still makes me happy tho'.

Robbie Burns said it best - and he uses a lot of exclamation points, so you've got to love that.

 O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
An' ev'n devotion!

 (English Translation)

O would some Power the gift to give us

To see ourselves as others see us!

It would from many a blunder free us,

And foolish notion:

What airs in dress and gait would leave us,

And even devotion!

Robbert Burns, To A Louse, (1786)