Turtle Nerd.

I have a confession to make.

I've turned into a nerd.

"A nerd?”, you say...

Yes. Quite.

You see, over the past number of weeks I've taken much delight in school... in English. Delight to the point that... well... I'm afraid to say it... well... OK.

I had work in Olds - a town about an hour north of Calgary - on Saturday night. As I went through the motions of what appeared to be quite a routine event, a wedding reception at the Olds College, I began to feel an itch.

It was an itch to crack the books.

So, once set up, I parked myself in Tim Hortons. I sat myself down with a long john, a blueberry apple fritter and a cup of coffee, double cream.

Here it comes... the nerd part:

I began to read - not in the fashion of the reference text it was, (looking up only that which was important) but rather, beginning at the first page as one would read a novel - the Broadview Handbook to Writing.

Yes, folks. I'm reading reference texts... for fun.

I say again...

I'm reading reference texts for fun.

I didn't make it "cover-to-cover" in the hour and a half I had at my disposal, probably because I was savouring each and every tasty morsal of "this is our idea of good and proper sentence structure".

I won't go into the disappointment I felt when I got home to discover my Speech text from the Radio course (1993) was not where I expected it to be!

*sigh*

Yes, I crave a re-visit to the days of thinking about WHAT one is going to say and HOW one is going to say it - BEFORE one opens one's mouth.

Turtle Nerd out.