Life rolls on, and we note it as it does.

       I opened the door of our bedroom this morning to allow Connie more easily to steer herself and her new rollator out to the hallway and into the living area of our house.  Connie is speedy once she gets going.

       I told her, "I feel like I'm letting the bulls into the lists."

       She laughed.

I think this must be a rare compliment

       "You've always made me feel safe," Connie said to me recently.

       I told her that made me feel very good.


       It does.

Oh, Don, that's too much; or is it just right?

      
       Connie does like having an orange and a half each morning, and her helpers and I feel obliged and sort of honored to present them to her in neatly cut portions circled around a plate.

       When Connie said to me, "No one does that as perfectly as you,"  I said, "Everyone loves beautiful order; otherwise I'd accuse them of being anti-symmetric."

For this twister we ask elephants' forgiveness.

       Lo and behold, returning with a single tongue twister to my blogly rounds, I immediately came across a truly malevolent one in an L.A. Times article about a local acting class.  One of the teacher's favorites to get her students' lips and teeth and tongues going with precisely articulated syllables (hmm, that's not a bad one itself) is a twister I had never run into before:

       "eleven malevolent elephants"

       Have a try on that, friends, and you too might take the stage and achieve Hamlet's advice to speak the speech "trippingly on the tongue."

       I personally fell acropper several times before I even got one out right.  For this baby, speed may come only after slow tries and then, possibly moderate ones?


 

"Honestly, officer, it wasn't the wine that made it hard to talk."

       Reading our new dishwasher manual, I discovered we had a special plastic gizmo to hold and keep wine glasses from breaking while neatly cleaning out vestiges of wine in the glasses' inner recess.

       Even better, it brought me an irresistible tongue twister:

             "stem safe shelf"
     
       Five times fast?  Three times?  Even two?