24-Year-Dash
Not much to tell today—and yes, I know, I say that constantly at the start of countless DLU posts and then ramble on and on—but, we'll see how it goes.
One aside: I'm currently reading a great book from the library called Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, and in it I learned that there is actually a keyboard command for a proper "em dash"—that is, the horizontal line punctuation seen in both this sentence and the preceding one—which, honestly, I should have gone out of my way to figure out years ago. Having no single key on any keyboard properly dedicated to the character, I have for years been settling for two double-dashes -- like so -- in place of it. But that's not correct!
Well, now all I have to do is press alt+0151 on a PC (or shift+option+dash on a Mac), and—voilá! Now I'm using it like crazy, and if you are a regular reader of my drivel you might start noticing it as I use it.
And you know what my favorite thing about it is? It saves three character spaces on Twitter! When you use an em dash properly, you do not put a space between it and the words preceding and following it. In the past when I used the double-dash to approximate it, I always included spaces -- so, that took up four character spaces between words. An em dash is only one character. You don't add spaces around it. So, just one character use instead of four. I love it so much!
Anyway. When I got home from work yesterday, unsurprisingly, Shobhit had the Democratic nominee debates on the TV. I watched some of it; had some of the lentil and rice he made for dinner (which was slightly spicy but stopped short of being too much so, giving it a kick I actually kind of liked); then retired to the bedroom for a while, but without turning on music so I could still hear a lot of the dialogue from the debates wafting across the condo.
But, I also wanted to gather all the 24 years' worth of photos and post them as a collection—"24 shots for 24 years"—to Facebook, in honor of Dad and Sherri's announcement that they are selling the Shipwreck Café and retiring.
A curious thing about this history of photos. It was never anything like it has been in the age of digital cameras, but even as a teenager and young adult, I took lots of pictures. Somehow, evidently, I never really took any pictures at the Shipwreck Café for the first ten years Dad and Sherri ran it. They took over the original location out near Nisqually back in February 1995, and somehow the oldest proper photo I can find in my own archives of the building, inside or out, is from 2005. That seems legitimately bizarre to me.
Well, I still figured out a way to add two images to the collection that reflected the early years: photos of actual old journal entries. I went to dig up the oldest one, from December 30, 1994, as it was a brief account of when I first learned Dad and Sherri had bought a restaurant of their own. Even in 1994, they had both been working at the Rib Eye (now called the "Martin Way Diner") for some twenty years, and until then I basically assumed that would be where they always worked. Now, Dad and Sherri have both spent roughly half their professional lives at the Rib Eye and then the next half at one or the other of two different locations of the Shipwreck Café.
Anyway, Brandi had left a comment convinced they took over the restaurant when she was 7, and I looked up the journal entry to prove she was mistaken: they took over the restaurant the very month Brandi turned 10. (You see how useful I am, with all my record keeping!) I then decided I would also find the journal entry in which I wrote about actually going to the restaurant for the first time, which did not happen until May 26, 1995. So, that made the second of two photos of journal entries, both just brief snippets, included in the photo album. In both cases it was during my Freshman year at WSU.
The rest of the album is actual photographs, spanning 2005 to 2019. It does make a great set of photos, though, if I do say so myself.
By the way, Dad and Sherri moved into the house they still live in now in 1993. The Rib Eye—and, still, the Martin Way Diner—was barely more than half a mile from the house. They lived super close to where they worked, for just a couple of years. But then they bought the Shipwreck, and work was suddenly seven miles away. When they bought the new location in 2009, it was the same distance away, in the opposite direction. Well, now all they have to worry about is how far away their travel destinations will be.
So I finished that up and shared it, and it got a predictably pretty positive response, and then Shobhit and I watched an episode of American Horror Story: Apocalypse and an episode of Cheers and then I went to bed.
[posted 12:27 pm]