I�m back outdoors today. It�s just too nice a day to stay inside. But it is so windy that I had to select my reference materials by weight today. Also I am being pelted with seeds from the linden tree overhead. Fortunately they are not too painful.

My next-door neighbor has been out of work since April. While they seem to be well off and are close to retirement age, I think he�s bored and driving his wife crazy. A couple of weeks ago he pulled everything out of his garage and staged an impromptu yard sale at which the chief items were a pile of old tires and a pile of old computer monitors. This week he�s pulled out all of his power tools and seems to be building furniture in his driveway, a process which inevitably begins as I�m putting AJ down for his afternoon nap. Still, it is not at all unpleasant to smell the sawdust, even if it is a bit loud. And it is certainly more tolerable than my husband�s former neighbors in Bucktown who appeared to run a small mechanics business out of their garage on the other side of the alley at which they only seemed to meet clients between the hours of 11 p.m. and 3 a.m.

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AJ has been trying out ever more complicated statements and is losing his caveman-in-an-ESL-class syntax. It�s fascinating to hear him acquire language skills and it gives me new insight into the quirkiness of the English language. For instance, he is beginning to get comfortable with the concept of pronouns. Until recently all possessives were discussed in the third person, as in, �AJ go play in AJ�s room.� or �Uh-oh Mommy�s glass.� In making the switch to possessives, he�s retained the possessive �s.� Instead of �The choo-choo is AJ�s� we get �It�s mines!� This makes absolutely perfect sense to me.

He�s also a little unclear as to the division between verbs and the prepositions that sometimes follow them. So instead of �Daddy�s coming up,� we get �Daddy�s comeupping.� Come to think of it, he only seems to do this with the word up. I�ve also heard him say �sittupping,� so perhaps the confusion is derived from hiccupping, which he knows is a word, since he�s currently asking us to read a story about hiccups over and over again. Still, I like the idea of comeupping being a verb. I�d like to push for jumpovering, slideundering and driveunderneathing. Then again, perhaps I should just start teaching him German.

Hey, a google search on �comeupping� actually found two sites. The first uses the word as a verb to mean causing a situation where the other guy gets his comeuppance. The second uses it as an adjective substitute for up-and-coming or something like that.

Just call me Harriet Safire. I�m godowning to work now.

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