aadler | Another report from the road

So, back out on the truck. This is supposed to be my last week of training; once I finish that, and do a brief road/backing test at the terminal where I signed on, it’ll be time for me to find out what life is like as a company driver. It’ll be nice to get the pay boost (in training, I earn barely over minimum wage), and further experience can only be to my benefit. Mostly, though, I look forward to being out on my own. My trainer is a conscientious, tolerant, laid-back guy, and I have no problems or conflicts with him, but I just get tired of being accountable to someone else all the time.

Back at home, my daughter is dealing with a bit of complication regarding her departure from Ireland. She had to leave because she didn’t have approval to stay till she had satisfied other requirements … but now she has to prove she left, by a certain date, or the Irish authorities will issue a letter of deportation even though she’s already here. And, to complicate things further, she somehow left Ireland and entered the U.S. without receiving a stamp on her passport from either country. So now we’re trying to think of some form of proof that the Irish government will accept, and get it and send it to them quickly enough that they don’t fire a document that will prevent her ever again entering, not just Ireland, but Europe.

You gotta love bureaucracies.

When I got home last week, it was to find that my wife had picked up another dog from the pound. My natural question on that (though I couldn’t ask it aloud because it makes her mad) was Why? There were already three dogs in the house; weren’t three enough? This one is engaging and well-behaved — though not yet completely housetrained — but still, there ought to be a limit somewhere, and I firmly feel that the limit should include less than four. But then, that’s just me.

(Also is the fact that one of the four is the pit bull that — easygoing though he appears to be — killed two of our cats. After I’d gone back out on the road, I got word that he’d badly bitten one of the smaller dogs, over what we don’t know. He’s going back to his original owner, not quickly enough to suit me, and the latest word is that the smaller dog will be able to keep her eyeball, though vision there has yet to be confirmed.)

Drive and sleep. Drive and sleep. Sooner or later, I hope to have more to my life than that.

***

Grammar/language peeve of the day:
couple

There are actually two different areas here.

First, when you speak of ‘a couple’ of something, ‘couple’ means two. As in, a pair. Two things coupled together. It can be used such that the context makes it clear that an indeterminate number is being denoted — “I’ll just be a couple of minutes” — but ‘couple’ doesn’t mean the same thing as ‘few’. If you want to be pedantic (which seems to be my default state), you might observe that indeterminate-couple generally means an inexact but quite small number, say five or fewer, whereas ‘few’ is still a fairly small number but can encompass quite a bit more than two, rather than pretty-close-to-two.

Second, it really is a couple of something. You might hear someone say, “I saw a couple girls walking along”; that’s colloquial speech. You might reproduce that in dialogue, and catch the authentic flavor of casual talk. But don’t use it in exposition or formal writing, because it’s WRONG. ‘Couple’ is a noun (except when it’s used in its verb form), not an adjective.