Author Archives: treshabarger

Weekly Photo Challenge: Dialogue

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Admittedly, these dialogues seem mostly one-sided, but I imagine they provoke plenty of verbiage not recorded.
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Halt! Who goes there?

A sign at a recycling business that reads: Attention. No employees or customers allowed.

Absolutely no one allowed, ever

And the person behind the counter was . . . an impostor? A cousin of E.T.? A tourist who was lost?

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Sign at a park pond that reads: No sittin or standin on rail. (The "g" of "ing" is missing on purpose.

No kiddin’

And now for the silly part: Technically, it should read: No sittin’ or standin’ on rail.

I tried to used double and single quotes in the above sentence, but those apostrophes confused the heck out of my annotation.

I considered these possibilities:

It should read (with double quotes at the start and end and single quotes around the phrase “sittin’ or standing, with the apostrophes also inserted): “No ‘sittin’ or standin’ ‘ on rail.”

Another effort: It should read (double quotes used twice): “No “sittin’ or standin’ ” on rail.”

Splitting up the two gerunds left me with: It should read: “No ‘sittin’ ‘ or ‘standin’ ‘ on rail. Or rather: “No “sittin’” or “standin‘” on rail.” (Oh dear, now I have two colons in one sentence.)

Just so you know, I typed the gerund “g” every single time for “sittin'” and “standin'” and then had to backspace to delete it. In my speech, I drop the gerund “g” most of the time but not in my writing. When we write in a style to mimic our dialect, we add the apostrophe (sittin’), indicating that it is the story’s character who is dropping the “g.”

In any case, the sign seems to be missing the “dropped g” apostrophes. Whew! A whole dialogue between me, myself, and I. (The Oxford comma: another dialogue for another time.)

Weekly Photo Challenge: Dialogue

Vinegar Collection

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I was looking for something in my pantry and happened to be wearing my glasses. Big mistake. How many times do I have to tell myself that?

I discovered that I have a vinegar collection. Oops.

A collection of vinegar bottles from my pantry

All together now

I know what happens, at least some of the time: I have a list of ingredients for a specific dish. I shop and buy those that I don’t already have. I return home and put away all the groceries. At mealtime, I decide I don’t want to cook and the new ingredients in the pantry fade into the background, become part of the landscape, as if they had always been there and should always be there, undisturbed. The new dish that I planned to prepare becomes part a distant past.

And, repeat.

I notice that the Alessi Balsamic Vinegar bottle boasts that it is aged four years in wood. Ha! That’s nothing compared to the time it will sit on my pantry shelf.