Proofreading Day

Posted on March 8, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Another day commemorating a big part of my professional career.

I used to have an anonymous blog where I collected typos and other gaffes that I caught and fixed as an editor, but it was so anonymous that I can’t find it now, years later. The one I remember best from those days was a report about how the Everglades was being destroyed “at the hands of invasive snakes”—a terrifying image.

I have also seen references to “taking variegated classes for your major” and “a baroque antiseptic.” (Auto-incorrect strikes again—that one was supposed to be “antique.”)

Sometimes it’s not a misused word so much as bad structure. I changed a lot of photo cutlines that referred to things like “The mayor presented an award to Anderson Friday”—no doubt for his assistance to Robinson Crusoe.

And then there are those times where the word is right but fat fingers interfere. My own most common typo is probably the Untied States of America. My husband’s is “tge,” which isn’t as funny but is just as embarrassing.

So many typos are unfortunately off-color in nature. The embarrassing one you read about a lot is “pubic” for “public.” But a guy I used to work with turned red every time we mercilessly reminded him of the email he sent announcing that he was taking a “dick day.”

Auto-incorrect has provided the internet with all kinds of fun along these lines. Personally, I almost never mean to write “ducking.” The one time I did mean to use that word, in reference to a woman avoiding her boss, my phone changed it the other way, and the mutual friend with whom I was chatting was first scandalized and then greatly amused.

What’s the funniest error along these lines that you’ve encountered?

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Flapjack Day

Posted on March 7, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I never referred to pancakes as flapjacks, but my grandfather told me once that my great-great-grandfather called them that. This tracks with the Google AI factoid that people started using “pancake” in the 1870s. (Google also informed me that the terms are synonymous in the United States but that “flapjacks” in the UK are more like granola bars.) I remember my grandmother’s mother calling them “griddle cakes,” but she might have been doing that to make fun of me thinking she was old.

When I was a kid, pancakes meant Bisquick and Log Cabin syrup—when we had them at all, which wasn’t often because my mother doesn’t like syrup of any sort. We tended to have french toast, instead, slathered in butter and powdered sugar (and syrup, for my dad and me—a real diabetic nightmare). It took me forever to learn how to cook them for myself—I was generally working on my own before my dad was awake, so nobody was around to explain to me that the things should be more bubble than batter before flipping them. This took a lot of trial and error.

When I would visit my grandparents, my grandfather chose weekend pancake breakfasts as a field of experimentation. We had buckwheat pancakes, wheat germ pancakes, cornmeal cakes. He bought syrup in a dizzying array of shades and flavors. Some of these concoctions were great, but he never wrote anything down and we never had the same thing twice, so you literally had to be there.

My husband is a pancake perfectionist. Only maple syrup will do, not “pancake syrup.” He has his own special recipe. If there’s no buttermilk in the house, ain’t no pancakes on the table. But if you’re ever privileged enough to be here for this meal, you’ll see why he’s so particular. 

This is a stark contrast to the worst (and funniest) pancake experience of my life. A million years ago, before meeting my husband, I was dating this other guy, and it was serious enough that when his parents came to visit, we thought it would be nice if they met our parents. Various scheduling conflicts resulted in this having to be a brunch meeting, which was strike one for my parents, who rarely got up before 11 a.m. on weekends in those days, and we went to a place that was inconveniently located, which meant we all had to be up by 8 to be there by the 11 a.m. reservation.

We arrive and discover that it is a very frou-frou place. “Trying way too hard,” was the assessment later made by the boyfriend. Lots of flowers, no room on the tables for food. Teeny tiny drinking glasses. You get the picture. So I’m looking at the menu and it is … problematic for me and my mother, who have the culinary taste of toddlers. The egg dishes all had some unpalatable aspect —spinach, onions, tomatoes. French toast smothered in fruit. Waffles checkered with pecans. But—a ha! The description of the pancakes just said “pancakes. Maple syrup.” As I have already mentioned, my mother doesn’t like syrup. She can stomach pancakes with a ton of butter and bacon, but generally she’s more of an egg and Tabasco gal. Well, there was no bacon anywhere on this menu, but she asked for extra butter and that crisis was averted.

Until the pancakes arrived. I took a bite a microsecond before my mother and realized they were made with oranges—not my favorite flavor and actually a bit more offputting than you might expect for pancakes, but another complete nonstarter for my mother. Unfortunately, my mouth was full, so I couldn’t warn her before she took a bite and made eye contact just as the taste hit her.

If I had been a better daughter, I would have flashed her an apologetic look and muttered to my dad to take her to In-N-Out on the way home. But I am a terrible daughter, and the hangdog look of horror mixed with disappointment on my mom’s face was so hilarious that I burst out laughing and practically spit my food. This outburst gave her enough time to transfer the bite to her napkin, but of course then everyone else at the table was wondering what had gotten into me, and I ratted her out because it absolutely did not occur to me to do anything else. The boyfriend’s parents were (1) perplexed that anyone would hate oranges, and (2) very solicitous about suggesting she order something else, which only made things more excruciating for my mother, whose whole plan for the meal was to fly under the radar and say as little as possible to the Very Nice Country Club Presbyterians with whom she had almost nothing in common. She demurred and pushed the food around on her plate, guzzled water—after fishing out the lemon—and made faces at me for the rest of the meal.

I assume she went to In-N-Out on the way home. I know it was about a decade before she attempted brunch anywhere—and then she was more about the bloody marys and champagne (but not mimosas!) than the food.

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Oreo Day

Posted on March 6, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Oreos were a status symbol when I was a kid. My mom was an avowed Hydrox fan, so we usually got those when we did splurge on any sort of chocolate cookies. (Fun fact: Hydrox came before Oreos and at one point were considered the fancier cookie.) I was not a Hydrox fan, although I honestly don’t know if that’s because they weren’t as sweet, or if they had fallen out of fashion and all the other kids had Oreos, or if I simply had to play the contrarian to my mom. We were also borderline poor, so while I did always get cookies in my lunchbox, they were usually store-brand chocolate-chip or gingersnaps.

My husband likes to say that when he was a kid his ambition was to have Pepsi in the refrigerator at all times. My version of that probably involved Oreos, although as I got older, my taste for cookies diminished. I got snobby and made my own.

But Oreos still have a certain appeal. They are essential on road trips and hotel stays. Since I eat them in the car, I have spent a fair amount of time looking at the cookie pattern. There are a lot of conspiracy theories about it: The two-bar cross is from the Knights Templar; the dots make a Freemason star. I’m pretty sure these have been pretty well debunked. I remember reading an interview with the Oreo designer’s son a couple years ago (I couldn’t find it, or I’d link) that said basically the guy just made it a highly decorated cookie because the dough could hold the shape.

I’ve also seen things over the years about how the recipe has changed, the flavor has changed, things aren’t as good as the old days, blah blah. That could be true. I have no idea. I still like them. But I also drink milk, which I hear is also a minority taste these days. Your mileage may vary.

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Reel Film Day

Posted on March 5, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Thinking about this day generated a lot of memories for me. My dad was a librarian, and as I hope you all know, the library is about more than books. Most of them still have movie collections, but technology has advanced—some libraries these day even offer Rokus for checkout, which I think is pretty cool.

But when I was a kid, movies were clunkier affairs, with reels and projectors. It took a certain amount of skill to thread the film into the projector, as I recall, and I do remember the film snagging and scorching. But I was not privy to those mysteries, being under the age of 10 at the time. VCRs, their own kind of dinosaur, were the AV tool of choice when I was of an age to handle the technology.

What was entrusted to me in kindergarten and first grade, as the librarian’s daughter, was the job of movie mule. I guess the teachers at the little K-6 school I attended in California liked to show films, and somehow they roped my dad into delivering them. This meant I got to hump cans of varying sizes from my dad’s car at the parking lot drop-off to the headmistress’s office at the other end of the lot. Some were tiny—the size of my dad’s hand. Some were as big as my torso at the time. There actually was one day that the load was too heavy for me and my dad had to assist. The funny thing is, I don’t remember ever seeing movies myself in class. I suppose we must have, but it has fled my memory. I also don’t recall ever having to take movies home at the end of the day; I guess the school must have covered that part of the arrangement.

When I was in second grade, we moved to Illinois and I walked to school, so movie delivery was no longer required of me. When I was 7 or 8, I wanted a movie birthday party. It did not go as I anticipated—my dad brought home a projector and a bunch of old comedies: Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, the Three Stooges. It was not my most popular moment, but it did give me a love of Fields that I still possess. (A few years later, my parents relented and took me and my friends to a pizza parlor and a theater—an outing received much more favorably by my peers.)

But my favorite memory of old-time movie watching came when I was 10 or so. Someone—I assume my dad, since he did the talking—decided to showcase Hitchcock movies in a library program. It was a whole big thing for me. Going to my dad’s place of work at night. (I went all the time during the day—even Sundays, when it was closed.) Sitting in the library there IN the dark. And, most shocking of all, being served popcorn and being allowed to eat! And that was all before the movie started. Dad (or whoever) chose Rebecca and Shadow of a Doubt as the first two outings, neither of which I had ever seen. I went to both and was … wait for it … spellbound. (I’ll show myself out.) I don’t recall if there were other films or what they were. Either the program changed to a school night or I got in trouble and was grounded from going.

Eventually, the library shifted to laserdiscs, and then we moved to Florida and the library was harder for me to get to. Then we got a VCR. Then I got a boyfriend with a car and movies took on a different kind of attraction. But whenever Laurel and Hardy comes on TV or we fire up Rebecca on a streaming service or DVR, I miss those days and my dad. Somehow, no popcorn ever tastes as good as that library popcorn did.

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Grammar Day

Posted on March 4, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Here’s a little lesson: Grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured. Technically, spelling and punctuation are separate studies, although they do contribute to the mechanics of good writing and thus fall under the grammar umbrella.

People make fun of grammar nazis—I think they still do this, no?—which I have always thought missed the point. It’s not the grammar issue that riles people up—or at least, it shouldn’t be; wrong is wrong—it’s the manner and venue of correction. I have always said I don’t mark off for errors in texts or my own glass house would be sand, and these past few months have taught me I’m no hot shot at posting properly to Facebook from my phone (or, probably, even writing these blog posts on my laptop). My fat fingers and impatience give rise to things that I know are wrong but don’t see in the flurry and generally have to try to correct on the back end. On the other hand, if I’m reading a magazine article that refers to “Thomas Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb that died in 1931,” you can bet my brain is gonna immediately snark “aww, poor dead lightbulb. So when did Edison die?”

The short version of all that? Everyone Needs an Editor. Even Editors.

With all that said, here’s one grammar lesson that I wish more people knew: a singular container of a plural noun takes a singular verb. So, “A compilation of grammar errors is (not are) a useful teaching device.” “The classroom full of children was (not were) noisy.”

Thus endeth my nazi lesson. Anyone out there have their own pet peeves to share?

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National Anthem Day

Posted on March 3, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I follow a group on Facebook that shares misheard song lyrics. One that comes up a lot is from people who as kids wondered what a “donzerly light” was.

I never had that problem, because when I was a kid, my dad got me a record of patriotic songs with a lyrics sheet and the Star Spangled Banner got a little intro about how Francis Scott Key wrote it during the War of 1812 and set to the tune of a song about wine. It talked a little bit about how Congress passed a resolution making it the national anthem in 1931.

It did not, to my recollection, talk about how Key was a lawyer, owned slaves (leading some to say the song was about “the land of the free and the home of the enslaved”), or almost became an Episcopalian minister. It definitely did not mention that his kid had an affair with Dan Sickles’ wife or how Sickles killed him and was acquitted thank to the first use of the temporary insanity defense. It didn’t talk about how F. Scott Fitzgerald was Key’s namesake, or explain why the Key Bridge in Washington goes to Virginia instead of Maryland, where Key lived.

It also didn’t talk about how hard that song is to sing. I can’t tell you how many sporting events I’ve been to where these little Honey Boo Boo gals would trot out in too much makeup and sequins and butcher the anthem. I used to joke about calling social services on their mothers for allowing it. But then I’ve also heard it done magnificently: played on the violin, and once by an opera tenor.  I think the best rendition I ever heard was at Fenway when an a capella group of cops knocked it out of the park (hahaha, sorry); that was incredible.

And the anthem also creates camaraderie in unexpected ways—at Orioles games, the fans stress the “O;” at Capitals games, they stress the “red.” I assume other teams have other traditions, but these are the two I was part of the longest.

Being in marching band for high school and college, I played that song a lot. Now, don’t get me wrong, I never gave myself chills or anything, but it was one of the few songs that never got old despite the fact that I could literally play in my sleep. (A roommate attested to this; she watched my hands move and asked me when I woke up what song “goes like this” and wiggled her fingers, and I knew immediately.)

I suppose it is old-fashioned and in bad taste these days to celebrate things like the national anthem or patriotism or this nation’s history; it feels like a lot of people just want to burn it all down. I’m not even sure if they want to start over or just sit in the ashes and wait for something else to come along. Like so many things, the history behind the tradition has its bright spots and dark sides. As always, I will come down on the side of optimism and say tradition is important to maintain—to celebrate the bright spots and disinfect the dark sides.

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Read Across America Day

Posted on March 2, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Read Across America Day was created to encourage children to read more, and it is celebrated on or near Dr. Seuss’s birthday.

If pressed about what my favorite Dr. Seuss book is, I will betray my un-PC roots and tell you that it is And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. I’m an old crank, and this means that I refuse to change my answer even though the book has been canceled by the Seuss folks themselves. As a kid, I was way more interested in the animals than the Chinese guy, and I was way more tuned in to Marco’s imagination and the rhyming schemes than any cultural politics. (Frankly, I’m pretty sure I’m not alone on this.)

The NEA made a very public fuss in 2017 about shifting the event “away from being a Seuss-centric March 2 event to its year-round focus on sharing books that celebrate our diverse nation of readers.” Times change, I get it. But the thing is, I suspect if Seuss were writing in today’s climate, his material would be right in line with that mission statement, and that’s part of why that particular culture war bothered me so much. Like the people making those decisions were so busy staring at one vein on one leaf of one tree that they canceled an entire forest of ideas they actually probably agreed with.

And now, not even a decade later, the NEA’s big push is to fight the “banning” of books. In theory, this sounds great. Who doesn’t oppose the banning of books? More reading is better, right? Unless it’s Mulberry Street, I guess—and that right there is I’m only slightly less annoyed by this movement: It has its own problems, the biggest of which is a seemingly intentional misuse of the word “ban” to get people worked up, and the second of which is that this movement appears highly selective in the materials it champions.

My husband and I have talked about this a lot, so my thoughts are reasonably well formed here. First of all, a book not being available in a school library is not a “ban.” There are lots of books missing from school libraries, for lots of reason—space, funding, and demand being big ones, way ahead of “the school board doesn’t like it.” Furthermore, even if you hide a value judgment behind a budgetary one, it’s still not really a ban if a kid can get their hands on that book somewhere else—the public library, eBay, friends, you name it. Sure, it might be harder for some kids to find some books, but in this world of the internet, interlibrary loans, and used book stores selling stuff for a dollar, lack of access is not the issue it used to be.

My bigger complaint about this particular topic is that the people making the most noise about it this week are every bit as selective as the ones they are fighting with. If you truly oppose censorship, then you can’t say everyone should have access to All Boys Aren’t Blue and then one breath later say that school libraries should not be circulating The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

I don’t know. We are all products of the times and households in which we live. I cut my teeth on Dr. Seuss, Sesame Street, and Dr. Demento. My kid inherited a lot of Dr. Seuss, but he also got Jon Scieszka, the Wiggles, and Gwen Stefani. Is that better? Or will some future “Cheese Counts” group or “BO Is Beautiful” movement cancel the guy my kid loved as a wee sprog?

That’s supposed to be the great thing about reading—it exposes you to entire worlds outside your own. You can read a book and form opinions. But you don’t even have to stop there! You can read what other people have written about the book you just read! And then you can read what still other people wrote about what the first group of people had to say. You can spend years in one rabbit hole on one book if you choose to do so. (Anyone who has seen the fantastic movie Metropolitan knows what I’m talking about. And anyone who hasn’t seen it should drop everything and go watch it right now. I don’t endorse reading Trilling without reading Austen, my point is simply that both are there for the taking.)

Honestly, I think maybe we don’t need a Read Across America Day so much as we need a Critical Thinking Across America Day. I suggest that this effort start with the folks in charge of the NEA.

The important part of reading is not the ingestion. It’s the absorption. In another great book that became a great movie, Reuben, Reuben, a character is all excited about speed reading and getting through War and Peace in under an hour. The dismayed response sticks with you: “But he read the book the way the fertilizer man reads reports; he did not read it as a book. I, for example, would like to read Fitzgerald’s ‘Tender Is the Night’ as slowly as possible. In fact, I would pay vast sums for anyone to teach me to read the books I love at a snail’s pace.”

By all means, America, do keep reading. But please, read outside your comfort zone and then think about what that author is actually saying. You might just learn something.

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Sunkist Day

Posted on March 1, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Gotta be honest, I’m a Tropicana girl. I came of age in Florida, I went on my best dates at Tropicana Field, I spent a lot of time in Bradenton in my late 20s attempting to persuade the dude who became my husband that doing so would be in his best interest.

But if not for Sunkist, my life would have been very different. When I was in kindergarten, my mom got hired by them to do exporting paperwork.

She really liked the job. My mom’s work history, like a lot of other women her age, was punctuated by guys chasing her around the desk, or firing her when she wanted to take vacation (“fine! I’ll take it unpaid!”) after a year on the job, and so on. So she was excited in her mid-20s to get a job with a woman as her manager and work that did not involve a lot of schmoozing.

“My boss was great, an absolutely lovely lady from Cuba who learned English in New York. It was the weirdest accent I had ever heard and when I finally felt OK asking her about it—it was that weird!—she laughed and blamed the Bronx.”

As another example of how the workplace has changed, my mom was hired out of season for fruit exporting. “The first couple months were so boring. There was nothing to export and nothing to do. I couldn’t even practice typing because there was nothing to type. I pretty much just sat at my desk and waited for someone to give me anything to do. I begged my boss for work and she basically told me there wasn’t any but she needed to fill the position before the season began. But she did give me a file to memorize, which took me … oh, maybe a day? Then it was back to sitting and waiting. So then when the season kicked in, I rememorized that file and went on my merry way. I think they liked that didn’t have to babysit me.”

I guess her boss was impressed, because she kept trying to push her into a better job. “You have a degree! You shouldn’t be clerking, you should be in sales!” (I literally laughed when my mom said this, and my mom said, “Yeah, I had to break it to her that she didn’t know me very well and I didn’t do people. That was your dad’s job.”)

Mom said she learned a lot on the fly.  “That was the fun part of the job. I think they liked that they didn’t have to babysit me, and I liked figuring things out. I’d done exporting work before, but this was a lot more complicated. I got to deal with letters of credit, and the documentation for produce was way more complicated than the stuff I had done before. Plus, you know, you couldn’t be late on shipping or it wouldn’t exactly be FRESH fruit anymore.”

Sunkist exported a lot of material to Japan. One day, Mom got a call from a guy asking about “a change order for luby led.” After a few more exchanges, my mom figured out the guy wanted to increase an order for ruby red grapefruit. “Well, that was fine. We always liked to sell more!” It was supposed to all happen on paper, but “this guy was in a jam. So he called in changes and since the order wasn’t too far along—and wouldn’t overflow the boat—I just went ahead and handled the whole thing.”

It’s funny to hear that story because I’m pretty sure everything like that happens electronically—click a button, send an email; there probably isn’t some energetic 20-something waiting to spring in for an assist when the phone rings. My mom quit her job at Sunkist after about two years when we moved to Illinois, but she has said she probably would have retired from there if we had stayed. And she would have been just fine changing with the times—she probably would have even excelled at sales in an online format!

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Essay Day

Posted on February 28, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Let me be clear: I am well aware that my blog posts are NOT essays. Generally, they are musings. Sometimes they are stories. They meander. They generally have a point, but they are not structured or necessarily supported.

That said, I do know what goes into writing a good essay. Generally speaking, I can pull them off when needed. I’m super strong on two of the three required parts.

Essay introductions? No problem. I am fine with kickoffs. I’m enthusiastic, I’m engaged. I can zoom in from the general to the specific. I have always been decent at writing pithy thesis statements, although I have gotten better at that in my years editing obfuscatory copy for Thinkers Who Write the Way They Think. I suspect all this intro skill is part of why I am not bad at punching up query letters for publishing and cover letters for job applications.

Essay bodies? The easiest part. I love lists, thus I love outlines. I love research, thus I love supporting my arguments. I can structure my thoughts in logical order. I can keep it relevant. After several years of painful learning the hard way in my current job, I’m decent with constructing citations and bibliographic references in assorted styles.

But conclusions? I struggled mightily in school with conclusions. It seemed so weird to construct a piece of writing that went “I’m going to talk about X. So here I am, talking about X. Now, allow me to restate everything I just wrote about X.” Having made my arguments, restating them briefly just seemed utterly pointless. I always wanted to end my essays with “So, there you have it,” but was told in no uncertain terms that it was glib and unacceptable.

I still struggle with conclusions that are not punch lines.

So, there you have it.

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Strawberry Day

Posted on February 27, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I do not like strawberries. The taste is OK, but that weird texture of squishy and crunchy grosses me out. I’ll drink a milkshake, I’ll slurp the Jell-O, I’ll eat a PopTart. I make excellent strawberry jelly. (Ask anyone!)

But the real McCoy? No thanks.

Thus, it always amuses people to hear that my entire high school career took place in the Winter Strawberry Capital of the World, Plant City Florida. And every spring, Plant City holds a Strawberry Festival. It’s a big deal—there’s a parade, there’s a queen and her court, it runs for a week, there’s, like, 8 acres of festival grounds, and the event features carnival rides, crafts, concerts, livestock shows, and of course pretty much any kind of strawberry concoction imaginable. The concerts were generally about as interesting to me as the strawberries: It was all country acts—big names, but not my thing. The first year we lived in Florida, we were in Tampa, and my dad drove us the 25 miles and 1.5 hours with festival traffic to see Loretta Lynn. Then we moved out there and my attendance became compulsory.

As a member of the marching band, I was required to work in the pie booth, chopping berries, slopping glaze into pie shells, spraying Reddi Wip on slices of pie and tarts. It was actually not a bad gig; the smell didn’t bother me, but I had zero temptation to stuff my face. Honestly, I was more the type to inhale the nitrous out of the whipped cream cans, but all ,my band besties were much too wholesome for that, so I refrained. My dad was always jazzed about these outings and I was routinely tasked with buying and delivering a pie for him—the one time a year he was allowed to put that stuff in our refrigerator since my mother is even less of a fan than I am, and she insisted that fruit in the fridge “polluted” the iced tea.

In retrospect, the Festival music was a missed opportunity—I was aware that the acts during my years in town were the likes of Roy Clark, Ronnie Milsap, and Randy Travis, and that they were legends, but they weren’t my legends, so I didn’t go. (I just looked at this year’s lineup and organizers appear to have branched out a little—they’ve still got Reba and Baily Zimmerman, but they’ve also got country blends, like Nelly and John Fogerty.)

I was amused years later when my husband later confessed to me that although he lived in Florida at the time and had a deep and abiding love of not only strawberries but also country music, he went to the festival “maybe once” because it always coincided with the first weekend of spring training, and baseball trumped berries.

Instead, the rides were what sucked me in. Each opening Friday night, I would get my unlimited rides band for $20 and roam the midway. My friend Judi never forgave me when we hung upside down through an entire ride of the Rock-O-Plane. The funniest anecdote I have, though, is when a very Religious Friend (RF) of mine got on the Berry Wheel (a giant Ferris wheel with big six-seater cars) with me and another Laid-Back Friend (LBF) of hers, along with a guy in line behind us whom we’d never seen before. Now, I was aware that this ride was a popular way to get stoned while avoiding The Man, but I was still surprised when this complete stranger lit up in front of us. LBF and I were exchanging glances as we watched RF, who at first didn’t seem to realize what was going on, but made a tremendously disapproving face when the smell hit her and she figured it out. The poor Stoner Guy saw her and, misinterpreting, apologized for being stingy and offered her some. LBF and I just about fell out of the car laughing while RF stiffly declined. When the ride was over, SG wandered off and LBF had to go meet someone and bid us farewell. RF and I were about 100 feet from the ride when she spied a cop and huffed, “They’re never around when you need one!” I wish this story ended with RF becoming a tremendous pothead in college, but as far as I know, that did not occur. Maybe it was the ride that saved her.

Anyway, whatever your plant of choice, if you happen to be in Florida in March, check out the Strawberry Festival. It’s pretty great.

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