Random musings

Today has been one of those days...

The morning began with a marathon through Edinburgh, which just happened to run by my church. This meant that very few people could park near the building, which in turn meant that our numbers were down.

I left church at around 12:30 to beautiful skies and wet cement. Five minutes later, the heavens opened up. Then they closed. Then they reopened with two minutes of hail, followed by more rain. It's rained off an on all day, now, and the wind is horrible out there. (One of those "Why did I forget my ponytail holder?" days, indeed.)

I wanted to purchase a pedometer - I've been meaning to figure out how far I walk - but I had to hit up, in this order, EBS, Superdrug, Pound Savers, Boots, the sports store off Princes Street, the bigger Superdrug, and the bigger Boots before finding one. Even then, it's a crap model and only counts your steps, but thanks to a nifty map tool I found online, I've discovered that it's 0.75 miles from my door to Princes Mall, and that my after-dinner walk is in the 3-mile neighborhood.

Also, and this is completely unrelated to anything above, I'm reading a Bill Bryson book, Made in America, that explains many oddities about American English. One of those is the phrase "quarter of", which means fifteen minutes before the hour. Brits always use "quarter to", and so they get confused when we give them the time. According to Bryson, using 'of' instead of another preposition was actually a feature of Elizabethan English, and our method of telling time is just a relic of the practice. So there you have it, guys. It's archaic, but it works. Also, there has never been an American coin officially known as a penny - it's a cent - but the term is a holdover from the days of using British coins. The cent was originally one two-hundredth of a dollar, too, which makes absolutely no sense.