Happy New Year! My, it has been a long time. The Quistilton Gang has been busy traveling to Massachoo for the holidays, attending Cornell Women’s Hockey games (The Wee One’s chant: “Let’s go Big Red let’s go clap clap!”), and I, personally, have been engrossed in some new activities of my own. First, I’ve been reading “Eats, Shoots and Leaves,” by Lynne Truss. My brother and my sister each gave me a copy this Christmas—should I take this as a hint? It’s a hilarious account of punctuation—yes, I used “hilarious” and “punctuation” in the same sentence (twice, actually)—by a woman whose rally cry is, “Sticklers Unite!” (Now I want to go check out the book and see if I punctuated that last sentence at all correctly.) She stood outside the premiere of “Two Weeks Notice” (if that makes you cringe, you’re a stickler) waving a giant apostrophe after the “s” in “Weeks.” She is also helping me feel confident in my persistent placement of commas and periods (she calls them “stops”) inside quotation marks—as in the previous sentence. Americans put them inside, and British folks put them outside. Here is an example of the British version:
Lynne Truss nearly got arrested for hitting someone on the head with a giant apostrophe at the premiere of “Two Weeks (which should be Weeks’) Notice”.

The fact that I so enjoy this book and another gift, the new illustrated Elements of Style (why won't Blogger let me underline?), is evidence that perhaps I should’ve been an English major. Or at least a spinsterish old grammarian. But the thing is, I was never taught grammar! Were you? They just sortof forgot to cover it, back in elementary school. All I remember is a lot of brainstorming going on. (Remember that? Brainstorming was the hugest thing to hit education since Skinner!) Sorry, this whole post is full of inside jokes and useless, boring information. I will commence with the good stuff.

The other activity which has been in the way of the blog has been flying. Yes, I am finally learning how to fly. I say “finally” because my first lesson happened 17 years ago, and I haven’t had another since. (Angst-ridden teenage Linnie plus well-intentioned pilot Dad in a small plane 3500 feet up—bad idea. We ended the session with an agreement to not try and have a conversation until I was 25. Happily, we have moved beyond this.) But “learning to fly” is still a stretch, at this point, since I haven’t yet passed my flight physical. In order to take one lesson at this school, I need to have a third-class medical certificate which requires an extensive physical with vision and hearing testing and all sorts of weighing and measuring of my poor child-destroyed body. Now, I am probably the only student pilot who nearly failed the vision exam because a toddler peed on her leg. The whole thing took so long that I had to leave the doctor’s office and go get the Wee One in the middle of it. Then, the nurse kept leaving me in the examining room while she went off to get snacks. I wouldn’t have minded so much if she had shared. I mean, really.

So anyway, two and a half hours after I initially got there (do doctors think we just have all day to spend in their offices?), I thought I was all done, only to find that one trip to the emergency room for an asthma attack three years ago might flub the whole thing. Now I have to get my doctor to write a letter assuring the FAA that I won’t start wheezing and fall out of the sky (knock wood).

This is certainly the most expensive, selfish hobby I have ever undertaken (my parents might argue that “college” would more aptly fit that description), but think of it—soaring up there, above the clouds in the clear blue with the whole world laid out before you—it’s heaven, both literally and figuratively.

Yeeha! Here’s to a magnificent 2006, filled with clear, artful punctuation and high-flying Mamas!