Cooking today. Blending various spices. I swear to GOD if I don't find the whole cumin...!

Anyway, I have a question about all these spice blends I'm making. They all call for a teaspoon of this, a tablespoon of that.

When I was a kid, I was taught that teaspoon was t and tablespoon was T. But now all the cookbooks seem to abbreviate them as ts and Tbs. When did that happen?

GUESS WHAT CAME IN THE MAIL TODAY?

Aw, I won't make you guess. My BIRTH CERTIFICATE!!!! I exist! I'm a real person! I was born somewhere, and I CAN PROVE IT!

Seriously, you have no idea what a hassle this lack of ID has been, and can't get an ID without the birth certificate... which they didn't want me getting without an ID.

BUT NOW I CAN!

What on earth is a scrubbing vacation? Is it some kinda Swedish thing?

We're reading Pippi Longstocking right now, and we just finished the chapter where Pippi goes on a picnic because of the school's Scrubbing Vacation. What does that even mean? I don't think it means a vacation for people to scrub, because that's what Pippi interpreted it as, and she's always wrong, right?

Seriously, if you had to describe Robert Burns in three or four sentences, what'd you say?

(Maybe five sentences.)

Because, I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I think summing the man up as "He wrote Auld Lang Syne" is a bit... a bit... I don't know, just incomplete! And sure, it's not an essay, but even if your audience can be assumed to have never heard of Rabbie Burns, couldn't you say something else? It's like describing Shakespeare (the other Bard, of course - but if you didn't know that I'm shocked!) as "that guy who wrote Romeo and Juliet". It's true, but is that really how we want to sum him up?

Anyway, he may have written Auld Lang Syne, but he wrote neither the words nor the tune we use today, so it's all moot anyway.

I'm being a bit overly snarky. I'm sorry.