What happened to October 2019?

It came and it went. Even my autobiography got shoved aside. Monday, September 30th, I started teaching a new ESL student, referred to me by my previous ESL student. Luz comes twice a week, Wednesdays 10 to 11, and Fridays 4 to 5. Today, somehow, she didn't show up. Could have been because of the changes from October 24th to 31st. I had to cancel the Friday and Wednesday of that week. More about that in a few minutes. So, the ESL tutorials account for a "loss" of two hours a week writing time.

Much of my time was taken with preparing to go to the Surrey International Writers' Conference, October 24th to 27th. Not the writing I'd hoped to take with me, or to prepare to do there, just preparing to leave my husband alone for seven days. I wanted to have some "me-time" after the conference, stay with friends until the end of the month. Not doing that again. I was leaving on Thursday, October 24th and coming back on October 31st, flying home on my broomstick.

But first I had to arrange for someone to check in on my 86-year-old crippled husband once a day, help him get his shoes on if he wanted to go out, make sure he had his medicines, and at least make a sandwich for him for his lunch. Interior Health (the regional health service for this part of the province of British Columbia) assured me that a visiting nurse would come every morning between 9am and 11am. They pledged to do "dress assist" and "medicine assist" and "meal assist". We would pay $31 (and change) per hour or $72 per day whichever was less. I'm just waiting to see what the bill will say when it comes. Because: over 7 days, 6 "nurses" came (one came twice) but none of them were nurses. They were "care support workers". So--Frank attempted to be up every morning with at least most of his clothes on. Not once did any of these "workers" offer to put on his shoes. When he asked them to give him his morning pills, one of them (the one who came twice) didn't know how to open a blister pack, and when she checked with her supervisor, she was told not to give him any of his medicines. The second time she came, she had mastered the mysteries of the blister pack but would not set the Victoza pen to the correct dosage. Frank managed to get her to let him know when he had clicked to the correct dosage, so that was okay. (He's legally blind, so he can't see the numbers on the pen.)  All six women objected to giving him Tylenol-for-arthritis. Only one actually did give it to him because she reasoned that it was an over-the-counter medicine. But he had to promise not to tell on her as she wasn't supposed to. Because she wasn't a nurse. WE WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE NURSES. He's also supposed to have hydromorphone, but there was no use asking for that. As a result, he spent the week in pain because we didn't have nurses. Meal assist? One woman made him a peanut butter sandwich, but that was while I was still there and I told her to. One peanut butter sandwich was supposed to last him for seven days? Too much to ask that he be given one peanut butter sandwich every day for seven days? There were also half a dozen dinners from "meals on wheels" that the surveillance nurse said could be heated up for him. I still have all those dinners in the freezer in exactly the same spots that the MOW volunteer put them the day after I left. So, $31 an hour? Not one of these women stayed even 15 minutes, let alone the hour we were promised. What do you bet they try to charge us $31 X 7 days of "service"? Seven hours of nothing. But they're the government. However, when I mentioned to someone that I planned to write a letter of complaint, my friend suggested I send the letter to the newspaper. I think I will. As soon as I get that bill.

He did cope pretty well. Our son, Steve, came over several times, and helped him. They had meals at restaurants. They even went shopping and Frank cooked a big pack of sausages and had sausage sandwiches every day for supper. One night he added fried eggs. When I got home I was amazed that he hadn't created a bigger mess than the one that greeted me on my arrival. Next time I leave him alone, he's going into a respite centre whether he wants to or not.

pet grammatical peeve

So often, I find that what I want to blog about is one of my pet peeves. And so it is today. I don't know if I've posted this one before, but I just came across it in a book I purchased on Saturday at the Surrey International Writers' Conference. It's one of the for Dummies books, so that might account for this, but I don't think so.

My complaint is this. Many people who have university degrees in such things as creative writing or English literature, seem to think of themselves as experts in English grammar. Unfortunately, that is rarely the case.

My bachelor's degree is in linguistics. I took countless courses in literature: English, Canadian, French, French-Canadian, Russian (both classical and Soviet). None of the lit courses qualified me as a grammarian in any of those languages. My expertise (and I believe 40 years of experience does make me an expert) comes from teaching English as a Second Language.

Today, in Writing Children's Books for Dummies, I came across a section in Chapter 7 about creating compelling characters. Page 127, to be exact. The subtitle was "Toss out passivity and indefinites." I'm sure the gist of the advice was very good. My complaint is the constant misuse of the term "passive voice" in books and articles and journals, etc., directed at writers. So many of these people want to toss out the verb "to be" labelling it as "passive". NONSENSE

In The Grammar Book--an ESL/EFL Teacher's Course, by Marianne Celce-Murcia and Diane Larsen-Freeman (Newbury House Publishers, Inc., Rowley, Massachusetts 01969, USA, 1983) the passive voice is addressed in chapter 17. (That sentence was written in the passive voice.)

Unfortunately, I don't have the most recent edition, so the page number and chapter citation may be different in the newer editions. However, the grammar has not changed. In the second paragraph of the chapter, on page 221, there is this statement (NB, this is not in the passive voice as the Dummies book would have you believe): "...English is a 'subject-verb-object' language and that common alternatives to the S-V-O order are S-O-V and V-S-O." The text goes on to give an example for the active voice." I'll try to avoid direct quotes here as there are some comments that direct the reader to earlier chapters.

The point is this: "John sketched the picture." (Subject John, Verb sketched, Object the picture) is an example of a sentence in the active voice. If we say "The picture was sketched by John." we now have a passive voice sentence. We did this by putting the object in the position of the subject and gave it a form of the verb "to be" which was immediately followed by the past participle of the main verb. We could have left it like that if we didn't want to accuse John of sketching it. However, here we added the original subject as the object of the preposition "by"--thereby creating the typical passive voice sentence. Passives are particularly popular with newspapers and other places where the writer might wish to omit the name of the perpetrator of the action.

Just having a form of "to be" in a sentence does NOT make it passive.
I wish those who pretend to be grammarians would first check with those who truly are.
There. That's my pet peeve for today,