Yesterday, I walked out into my yard to take in the beauty of the Autumn day. Fallen leaves were everywhere, lying in piles strewn about. I raked some leaves and built a huge pile and then I lay down upon it and promptly fell asleep! I must have lain there forever, for it was dusk when I awoke. I was tired and didn’t get up right away, though, and while I was still lying there, my neighbor came out and started working in his yard. He was laying cobblestones down his pathway, finally finishing a gardening project that had gone on all summer and was now winding down. He laid one final cobblestone down and pumped his fist into the air in celebration. Then he noticed me and said, “How can you just lie there all day? Don’t you have anything better to do?”

I wrote that horrible little paragraph several years ago for one of my friends who asked me to explain "lie" to her. I am pretty sure I've captured all of the various conjugations.

And remember, "to get laid" is a saying because someone has laid you on a surface in order to frolic. It's an easy way to remember that "lay" is synonymous with "place", and "laid" is synonymous with "placed".

I swear I have a mental block against getting those words right.

I think I get it right about 75% of the time. It's one of those things that if I don't consciously think of which one to use, it turns into a grab bag. So, I'm more likely to get it right when writing than when speaking.

I believe it's time to link to this post again.

I believe it's time to link to this post again.

See, now I can read that a hundred times and still get it wrong in the next sentence I write as long as person is involved instead of a object.

My mother's voice in my head screams: "Hens lay!"

My sistah! Wait... my... sister?

I was just discussing that with my mom over the weekend as a parallel to why people are hanged and pictures are hung.

Our fucking power company just came and shut off the power to the house with no warning. Drew talked to the guy in the front lawn, who said he was "checking the meter" and didn't mention he was about to disconnect power. We figured that out five minutes later web he drove away and the entire house went dark. Drew did miss a bill while he was out of state, apparently, but give me a break! No disconnect notice? Seriously? It was an oversight, not a malicious attempt not to pay. Now he is trying to reach someone in the power company to come reconnect us since I'm, in theory, making a birthday dinner for a friend in a few hours. Grr.

That is terrible, Kristin! Hope you guys are able to get it back on soon.

Oh, Kristin, that sucks. And, yeah, they're supposed to send multiple warnings--you're so many weeks overdue, you have ten days, you have three days--before the actual cut-off (sadly, I know this because there've been times in the past when I deliberately ran our power bill right down to the wire, because I knew they'd give us notice and they wouldn't charge interest in the meantime).

I pronounce them fuckweasels.