A successful surprise after all

Tags

family, get togethers, postaday2013, surprise

Our cousin ended up being surprised after all so our road trip to Canandaigua was a success. We were very happy that we took the weekend to make the trip because if we hadn’t come, it wouldn’t have worked out to be much of a surprise after all. Carly’s boyfriend by mixing up the date had essentially guaranteed a very low turn out of friends and my hubby’s cousin’s other siblings couldn’t make it so Carly had us, her parents, her brothers and her boyfriend as the surprise givers. She was completely blown away by our presence.

Her older brother decided that the best way to surprise Carly was to bring the surprise to her, so we waited until right before the kitchen at the restaurant where she works was closing and we went in for dessert. The look of absolute surprise and happiness was more than worth it. Her smile lit up the room and our baby girl grabbed her in a big hug, it was heart warming to see the two girls so happy to see each other.

On another note, Jack is turning out to be a wonderful traveling dog. He met our cousins bigger dog Gabby and after several minutes of working through the dog appropriate sniffing and assessing, they got along famously. We had a quiet night in the hotel room, Jack didn’t bark at every noise so he wasn’t a disturbance and he didn’t have any accidents as of yet. This is a great sign for future trips.

Daily prompt: No, thank you

Tags

ban, blogging, postaday2013, words, writing

If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?

I am trying to think of my word pet peeves and I have a few, the word “ain’t” has long been a peeve of mine and when they decided to allow it into the dictionary, I wasn’t very happy about it. I also cringe when I hear the word “like” used in a sentence several times replacing a myriad of other words to describe whatever is being talked about. I realize that I am not the writer who should be in charge of criticizing others, I know that I make my fair share of mistakes, but I do take the time to try to speak as well as I can, if only because the English language is a pretty one and why shouldn’t it be used to its best advantage?

What else is there? Oh I almost forgot to mention the phrase “you know what I mean?” at the end of a train of thought, as a means to explain the aforementioned thought. I am often tempted to say “No, I don’t know what you mean” if only to move them to explain themselves clearly. My best friend’s husband said it almost at the end of every sentence he uttered and I finally started saying “no, I don’t” I gave up because he simply ignored me after awhile and kept doing it, so I started to tune it out. My poor best friend, the poor dear, after I pointed it out, she couldn’t help but notice and now she is forced to endure it because it drives her nuts as well. I couldn’t believe it, but before I had mentioned it, she hadn’t noticed it, his words just flew right by. I wondered what that meant, did she just agree with him because she was in love or was she not really paying attention because she was too busy, she didn’t have an answer when I asked her about it. After awhile we had a good laugh about it and how you couldn’t teach an old dog new tricks. I asked her if we were being too harsh on her husband, she thought for a few minutes about it and said no.