Another week of our new totally-not-normal is coming to a close. I’m pleased to say that of the three goals I set for myself during the quarantine, I’m going strong with around 2.5 of them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since I’ve been writing these posts every so often, I’m going to consider my “more creative output” goal as the .5. It’s something, but not what I was hoping for yet. On the exercise front, I’ve been (doing my version of) running for 2 miles every morning for probably a few weeks now, and I’ve been adding some sets of pushups throughout the day. I can always do more and add additional exercises, but that’s a win. And the beard? It’s still going strong and getting more and more comments on video conferences. A funny thing happened yesterday during a 1-on-1 video chat with an employee. My beard came up in conversation, and she said, “I don’t know why people are giving you shit about your beard, I think it looks good.” I paused for a second and said, “I…didn’t realize people were giving me shit about it.” She backtracked a little, saying, “Oh, I just thought you said people were commenting a lot or something like that…” We laughed, and I said that my wife likes it, and that’s all that matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Speaking of my lovely wife, I have a quick story about how she and I interpreted the same thing in different ways. This isn’t at the level of “meat helmets” or “the giant umbrella of Cox” since I think there are only two interpretations, but I wanted to share it. Sometime in the past year or two, I bought some coffee mugs from one of those sites that has thousands to choose from with different sayings, pop culture references, etc. For myself, I got one that says “Harry Otter” and has a picture of an otter with a lightning bolt scar on its forehead and holding a wand. It made me chuckle, so I got it. As a surprise, I got a mug for my lovely wife too. It said, “I read past my bedtime.” I thought it was perfect for her, because I can’t count the number of times over our many years living together that she’s sleepily said to me in the morning, “I read for too long last night.” So I thought nothing could be better than a mug full of coffee stating the reason that she needed said drink. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She liked the mug and starting using it with some frequency. It was soon after that she referenced it and I realized we were reading it differently. She sees, “I REED past my bedtime,” as an admission to those around her that she has this problem. As in, “Hi, my name is Peter’s Lovely Wife, and I read past my bedtime.” I see it as, “I RED past my bedtime,” and therefore need coffee. Both work, but they’re pretty different to me. Not too many verbs would allow for this ambiguity. If it said, “I watched too much Netflix last night” or “I play video games until dawn,” we’d know with certainty. I don’t want to give the mug makers too much credit and assume that they intentionally made the message ambiguous; I’m pretty sure they had one of those two readings (that’s “reedings”) in mind. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, gentle readers, which pronunciation did you first hear in your heads? And if it’s my wife’s version of the statement, what would yours say? I think mine would be, “I love this stuff and may also be addicted.” Have a good day, and stay healthy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Another week of our new totally-not-normal is coming to a close. I’m pleased to say that of the three goals I set for myself during the quarantine, I’m going strong with around 2.5 of them. Since I’ve been writing these posts every so often, I’m going to consider my “more creative output” goal as the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=930"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":931,"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930\/revisions\/931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/n2rh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}