TOTALED!!

What a marvelous ending to such a crazy story.

I received a call from the insurance company regarding my death-bombed Toyota pickup. The adjuster broke the sad news that after spending over $3000.00 to destenchify my truck, the cab still reeked of dead dog.

Apparently the mythbusters are correct. It's almost impossible to remove the smell of death after it is baked into the car in summer heat.

The adjuster said the insurance company was not going to do any more work on the truck and that rather they will consider it a TOTAL LOSS and pay me for it's value. Normally this is a crappy situation because you never get quite enough money to replace your totaled vehicle. Interestingly, in this case the compensation worked out to be more than the amount I paid for the truck new, two years ago.

In short, I should be able to replace this sucker with a better, newer, and less odorous vehicle.

KING OF THE WORLD!!

This afternoon, after days of toiling on the Delta skymiles site, I was able to obtain round trip SKYSAVER tickets from Savannah to Maui!! I feel like the champion of the skymiles system; like the man who fought the sytem, defyed the odds and came out smelling like roses.

Should I have started this post by saying that Delta SkySaver fares are REALLY hard to get? They are, and it's basically Delta's way of screwing it's customers out of their hard earned frequent flyer miles. If you are willing to spend double the skymiles they have SkyChoice fares available that are abundantly available and will allow you to fly when you want. The skysaver fares are so rare you basically have to get them 330 days in advance of your travel day. And even then, you get lucky if you are able to get 2 tickets on the same flight.

Had to share my jubilance....it made my day.

'H' and 'Emails'

While there are a number of quirks present in the English language, recent argument with my wife and brother have invoked the urge to vent my deep rooted resent of two particular oddities. Without further ado, here they are in all their odious glamour:

• The pronunciation of the letter 'H'.
• Use of the word email in cases refering to a singular electronic message.

First off, who came up with the pronunciation of the letter H? While the letter 'X' is understandably screwed and was advertised as such at the Kindergarten grade level, the letter 'H' was panned off as a pretty normal consonant. Well franctly it isn't. The correct pronunciation of the letter 'H' doesn't contain the consonant sound found in words like Hector or Huberous. The pronunciation is more akin to the sound found in the word agent. I have just now stumbled upon the problem associated with this consonant, due to my own self correction of how the letter is pronounced. It seems that in my efforts to avoid picking up a soft southern accent I have begun pronouncing it much like the 'H' in Hay.

I was first informed of my mispronunciation of this letter by my wife, who is also a Kindergarten teacher. I agree that her pronunciation is probably the widely accepted one, but mine sounds better, is more clear and actually contains the consonant sylable of the letter that it designates. What could be better? With this said, I think I will continue pronouncing 'H' as pronounched in the word Hay. I'm right and the rest of the world is wrong! Okay, enough 'h' already.

My second hang-up is with the widespread use of the word 'email' in instances where it refers to a singular electronic message. For example: " I sat at my desk sending dozens of emails today". The word 'email' was originally created to refer to electronic mail in the plural sense but when the masses got ahold of it in the mid 90's they simply couldn't grow their technical dictionary to also include words such as e-letters or e-messages. I didn't suffer from this retardation so I started using 'e-letter' and 'e-message' for quite a while after the advent of widespread internet. Funnily I suffered quite a bit of stigma from those who though email was the one and only allowable term for discretely packaged internet messaging. It got to the point where I had to purposely use email for the singular case to avoid idiots from being confused from my correctitude. It's been a while since I used the term 'e-letter', probably because I don't use e-mail very much and I find myself surrounded more and more by total idiots.

It's a shame that my infinite colloquial perfection doesn't rub off on the rest of the world. It would certainly be a better place.