Gaelic for Dummies

Did you know that when you write something in MSWord and then cut and paste it to your blog the punctuation behaves strangely? Well, it is true. The price you pay for spell check is that all words with an apostrophe appear to be in Gaelic. The pos��t I wrote last night, I wrote in Word and painstakingly erased and retyped every parentheses once I got online (and with the way I use parentheses this is quite a task - and now there is a very good chance that you now know I can't spell parentheses - unless, of course, I spelled it right in which case, nevermind...) and I forgot the apostrophes. Don't even get me started on ellipses...

So, questions have been raised about names. First of all, I have changed the names of my children for purposes of this blog so that if they should stumble across it someday I can say - "What are you, crazy? I never write about you. Now quit your complaining and go get mommy a fresca."

As for my blog name, it was created in haste at work. Brunhilde is after Wagner's DIE WALKURE. As he said in a letter to August Roeckel in 1854:

"Siegfried alone (man by himself) is not the complete human being: he is merely the half; it is only along with Bruennhilde that he becomes the redeemer. To the isolated being not all things are possible; there is need of more than one, and it is woman, suffering and willing to sacrifice herself, who becomes at last the real, conscious redeemer: for what is love itself but the "eternal feminine..."

And that, my friends, is me in a nutshell.

Okay, really it is because I cut out one of those funny viking hats like Bugs Bunny wears in "What's Opera Doc?" and laminated it on my work ID badge.

And Crow is my Native American name. In the words of painter Karen Danrich:

"Crow represents the keeper of true law. True law is founded upon karma, and karma determines the dance of relations in present time and in ascension. Karma holds a particular dance in place until it has been released and transcended in full. It is through transcendence that freedom from karmic relations is found."

Okay, really it is what I thought (in my haste to not be caught creating a blog when I should have been helping students or something) my last name would be if I married my spiritual robot husband Crow T. Robot, from Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Of course I realize only now that I should be called Brunhilde Robot.

But that sounds stupid.