I hate "donut spares"!

A lot of compact cars are so small that they come, not with a real sized spare tire, but these annoying little emergency "donut spares". Now, they're good if all you're going to do is to drive a few miles to get a flat tire repaired, but on Tuesday, I slid on the ice driving home from a physical therapy appointment and destroyed my front driver side tire and rim, necessitating putting the "donut spare" on just to get around. The trouble is that the dealership can't get me a new rim until sometime next week, meaning that I have to drive on this little "donut spare" for longer than I'd like. You cannot drive on the freeway with one of these on because they are only good for a maximum speed of between 35-50 miles per hour. I'm finding it particularly hard to control my car, especially on snowy or slushy roads (the damn thing has no traction to speak of!). We're expecting a major snowstorm that's supposed to be moving in tonight and lasting the better part of the weekend, meaning that going anywhere is going to be impossible driving around on the spare while I continue to wait for the new rim to come in. I'm well stocked for food and since I've been doing a lot more cooking at home lately, I'll have plenty to eat if I'm snowed in, but it just annoys me that they can't just provide you with a real spare tire instead of these ridiculous little donut tires. You can't always expect to just have to drive a few miles to get back in business and these things aren't meant for any kind of long term use, so I don't understand what the motive is behind equipping cars with them other than the idea of saving space in smaller vehicles. Other than that, they're fairly useless when it comes to something to drive around on.

A PET PEEVE

So I got this e-mail today from the "21st Century Democrats" with the subject heading, "You're Investment Paid Off". Sigh. Don't people know the difference between "your" and "you're"? I get so tired of seeing and hearing the English language mangled by people who really ought to know better (or DO they?) that it's just really beginning to grate on my nerves. Sure, I'll be the first to admit that I positively hate having my grammar corrected (which my mom will unfailingly do if I misspeak!), but I appreciate someone caring enough to do so in order to keep me from sounding like some kind of backwoods hillbilly. It's bad enough that we have, for the past eight years, had to put up with the Leader of the Free World sounding as if he had no idea how to construct a coherent sentence ("Is our childrens learning?", "They misunderestimated me", "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream" - just to name a few!), but to see it coming from a group of people who one supposes are intelligent enough to be Democrats and who favor a progressive agenda is just beyond the pale. I almost feel like writing them a "tsk, tsk" letter calling them on their incorrect grammar, but then, I suppose I'd sound far too much like some kind of old schoolmarm in so doing. Still, if no one corrects people, the language will continue its rapid deterioration (oh, and here's another thing that makes me nuts! - "its" vs. "it's"). Maybe there needs to be a league of "grammar police" to take people to task for misuse of the language and to gently guide them back to correct grammar. Of course, most of this abuse of our language probably comes from a lack of good teaching of English and grammar in schools nowadays. When I was a girl, we were forced (under duress, by nuns wielding steel rulers!) to diagram sentences. As much as I positively hated having to do so, I don't regret learning how to figure out the parts of a sentence and how to correctly construct one so as to sound intelligent and coherent and to be able to get my point across. But then, maybe I'm just "old school" about such things. But then, what's wrong with that? As far as I can tell.......nothing!