Grammar!

From this link, the most difficult English grammar conundrums:

I or Me after a preposition and another person
The rule: Use “Me.”
Incorrect version: “She went to the store with Sally and I.”
Correct version: She went to the store with Sally and me.
Incorrect version: “Between you and I…”
Correct version: “Between you and me…”
“I tell people to imagine the sentence with only one person because that usually makes the pronoun choice clear,” says Mignon Fogarty, creator and host of the Grammar Girl podcast on the Quick and Dirty Tips network. So think of it this way: You wouldn’t say, “She went to the store with I,” right? “Adding Sally doesn’t change anything,” Fogarty says.

Effect versus Affect 
The rule: Effect is usually a noun, while affect is typically an verb.
Incorrect version: “The book really effected me.”
Correct version: “The book really affected me.”
Incorrect version: “The book had an affect on me.”
Correct version: “The book had an effect on me.”
“Mixing up ‘affect’ and ‘effect’ is one of the most common errors because not only do they sound alike, but they also have similar meanings,” Fogarty says. There are exceptions (such as “to effect change” or “a baffled affect”), but most of the time affect is a verb and effect is a noun, says Mary Norris, a page OK’er at The New Yorker magazine and the author of Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen.

Further versus Farther 
The rule: Farther refers to an actual distance, while further should be used for a figurative distance.
Incorrect version: “Macy’s is further away than Nordstrom.”
Correct version: “Macy’s is farther away than Nordstrom.”
“The traditional American thinking is that "farther" is for physical distance (e.g., "Macy's is farther than Nordstrom") and "further" is for figurative distance (e.g., "Don't bother me about this further"),” Fogarty says, “but in British English, people use the two more interchangeably, so that may be a reason that American speakers have trouble remembering the difference.
[The only one of these rules that I have some issues with is this one! I don't know why, but further and farther are just too similar for me.]

Lie versus Lay 
The rule: People lie, things lay.
Incorrect version: “I’m going to lay down for a few minutes.”
Correct version: “I’m going to lie down for a few minutes.”
“You lay an object somewhere, and you lie if you're taking action on your own,” Fogarty says. “I suspect people get confused because of the children's prayer "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep."

Impact as a verb 
The rule: Impact is a noun, not a verb.
Incorrect version: “The story really impacted me.”
Correct version: “The story really influenced me.”
“Eek, screech, agh! Even educated people now use ‘impact,’ as a verb. I’m a purist,” Norris says. “Impact should stay a noun unless you are talking about having an impacted wisdom tooth.” She suggests saying “influence” instead. Fogarty says she suspects the root of the issue might come back to number two—people don’t know whether to use affect or effect, so they (incorrectly) use impact instead. Her fix: “You'll almost always have a stronger sentence if you explain how it affected you instead: ‘The story changed the way I think about seahorses,’ or ‘The story made me stop what I was doing and call my mother to tell her I love her.’”

Fewer versus Less Than 
The rule: Use fewer for countable items (with some exceptions).
Incorrect version: “There are less than three pieces of pizza left.”
Correct version: “There are fewer than three pieces of pizza left.”
“Typically, ‘fewer’ is for things you can count, and ‘less’ is for things you can't count, but time, money, and distance are exceptions to the rule,” Fogarty says.


There you have it, grammar issues for Americans!

We're in the middle of a move that isn't going well (the new place, which is in the same building as our current place, is going through a bit of a remodel that's taking longer than anticipated!) and the weather is still frigidly cold, so trying to get through this winter. Spring is just around the corner ... I think ... even though it rained all day today and will rain pretty much all day tomorrow. Sigh.

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Journaling

To me, journaling has always been something of a hobby that I return to again and again. I don't return to it because I love it so much (though I do love it!); I return to it because I have this need in my life to get things down on paper and keep them for all eternity. I think I have a weird complex about this, in a sense.

My issue with journaling has always been that I invariably end up writing about things that piss me off (so, so much!) because I have a lot of anger that I hold on to (without expressing it in my everyday life, of course). When I look back on my journals, I toss a lot of them because all they seem to be is a collection of angry thoughts, written really heavy-handedly by a very angry me. I don't want my memories to all be angry! I want to remember the good AND the bad.

From this article from psychcentral, though, I apparently did know a thing about journaling:

University of Texas at Austin psychologist and researcher James Pennebaker contends that regular journaling strengthens immune cells, called T-lymphocytes. Other research indicates that journaling decreases the symptoms of asthma and rheumatoid arthritis. Pennebaker believes that writing about stressful events helps you come to terms with them, thus reducing the impact of these stressors on your physical health.

Okay, but writing about just the stressful events can't be good, right?? I don't regret throwing out my old journals because they were just cesspools of negativity! I want to be known as having been happy, not having been sad and depressed.

So my latest love is my Midori Traveler's Notebook (two of them, actually!), which I have wanted for a long, long time but didn't get previously because someone that I really didn't like has one and I didn't want anything in my life to be the same as theirs (see what I mean about the anger??). Since I haven't seen that person in years and I doubt I'll ever see them again, I asked my husband for one for my birthday this year. He bought me my brown one (the bigger one, in the back! I have no use for tiny little notebooks, which is his in the front) and I love it! My birthday is in the beginning of June, so I've had this for a while, but still adore it.

 

I love stickers (can't you tell??), and have been going all kinds of crazy buying stickers for my Midori. Sticker mania!!

 

The husband just laughs at me every time I buy more stickers or (washi) tape or anything, because he knows there's no stopping me! I love embellishments, and I'm not the type of person that can't use them (oh, I use them all the time!).

So recently, we bought two more (!!) Midori Travelers Notebooks, this time both in blue! This is supposedly a limited edition, but it seems to still be widely available online. These came with the little airplane charms you see below (the husband gifted me with the four-leaf clover on my brown one):

And the blue ones are embossed! So cute! (Though I much prefer my all-lowercase embossing to my husband's all-uppercase embossing, haha!) Click on the photo below for a bigger view:

In case you didn't know (who are you, anyway??), I have been Instagramming more frequently than blogging or Facebooking lately. I love Instagram because it's fast, it's easy, and it's just one photo per post with a short (or long) description. And it's always chronological! Facebook annoys me with its order, which seems to be what it thinks I want to see. How does it know?? And when I change it to sort by time, it re-sorts itself in a very short while! Argh...! so Instagram it is!

Out of all my journaling posts, this is the one that has the most likes:

 

I think maybe it's because of the flowers? I have no idea! (The flowers are from the invitation to a co-worker's wedding. I thought including this in my journal was a nice way to commemorate the wedding, even though I don't really like said co-worker all that much!) 

And this is just one more of my journaling posts, of which there are quite a few now:

 

I love writing in my journal, and I don't worry about mistakes. Who cares, right?? And mistakes are where you learn about yourself and how you grow as a person! That's what I'm telling myself, anyway!

And this is my most recent Instagram post about journaling, which is a work-in-progress:

As you can see, journaling seems to have taken over my life! (It hasn't, really, I promise ... I only journal maybe five minutes per day.) But I do think about it a lot more, and think about what I do every day, since I write it all down. It's a good thing, I feel, but journaling (diary-keeping?) has made me think that the days really go by too quickly! Time is so fleeting. Sniffle.

The weather here in Busan has been extremely hot and muggy for the past couple weeks, which is gross and makes me want to die, so I'm happily at the office at the moment, enjoying the (overly) air-conditioned rooms!

That's it for journaling ... for now. We'll see how long I can keep this up! I'm hoping for a really long while, since it's easy and I'm enjoying it.

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