Pumpkins Don’t Have Ankles

Here’s another fresh and original emoticon. After all of these new ones I’m compiling here, who needs to use the boring old conventional ones?
This one arrived via email from my friend Rebecca. (Thanks, Friend Rebecca!)
REBECCA
and, I got rid of hiccups … I just had to let them run their course … hopefully they will not [...]

My sister Heidi once expressed how she didn’t like classroom teaching. It wasn’t because she didn’t like children individually or in small groups. She said she just didn’t like children “in bulk.”
Well, Heidi, now I understand what you’re talking about.
On June 20 to June 21, some friends and I headed down to Sumpter, South Carolina [...]

Yep, here are some more from an email today. Can somebody say … too much time on our hands?
ME
Long-lost roommate! Can I crash your Taco Bell party with Rebecca tonight?
:=3) That’s a guy with a big flabby nose smiling at the thought of Taco Bell.
Uh, he’s not invited, though.
:=3( [...]

Emoticons. We all know what they are—those little faces made of colons and parenthesis and lower case p’s and all sorts of other symbols that don’t really look what like they supposedly represent, but we all pretend. Becky and I, in our many emails back and forth, have started experimenting and inventing our own system [...]

Yep, time for another grand adventure! I went with Christy and guide dog Reba to the Greenville Scottish Games, an annual outdoor festival held at Furman University, which has a tradition of being 1) always a great experience and 2) always in the middle of an extreme heat wave.

I came prepared for the festival. Not [...]

A grammar guru, that is. In my new job as an editor/writer/final authority on all things grammatical, I find myself as the one everyone comes to with the most nitpicky questions about punctuation, capitalization, abbreviation and dozens of other things that don’t end in –ation. For example:
QUESTIONING COWORKER: What is the proper way to abbreviate [...]