The things I didn’t learn in Kindergarten, I learned from my children.

I have this unusual habit of staying in touch with every person I have ever met in my life. When I was about 27, single and had a good job, I wanted desperately to go on a nice vacation. Unfortunately, most of my friends didn’t have the funds or the vacation time to go with me. So I took a giant leap of faith and booked a trip BY MYSELF to Club Med in Cancun. (I first wanted to go to Martinique because I had always read about it when I was taking French, but the travel agent diplomatically told me that the Club Med in Martinique was kind of known for “swinging.”)

The night before my departure, if I could have canceled and gotten my money back, I would have. I was a nervous wreck. They were going to be putting me with a roommate. What if I hated her? What if she was going to be using her week to do her own swinging? Nevertheless, I swallowed my fear along with a couple of Dos Equis in the Club Med Lounge at the Miami airport and eventually boarded the plane to Cancun.

When I arrived, I found that my roommate, Barb, was a perfect fit for me. Barb was from San Francisco, was an English major with an interest in reading and was into having (relatively tame) fun. She happened to be traveling with a couple of her college buddies and before we knew it, Barb and I were the token girls in a group of about 10, I kid you not, GORGEOUS, fun guys. When our fun-filled week was over, we promised to stay in touch.

We wrote letters and visited one another. When e-mail became the mode of communication, we shared book recommendations along with love life laments. Hurley and I were actually on the way to the Miami airport to pick up Barb for a visit when he asked me to marry him!

Recently I did some freelance work for a friend in the Triangle and really enjoyed it. After that job was complete, my husband said, “Wow, it would be great if you could get more work like that. You really had a good time with it.” A couple days later, there was an e-mail from Barb telling me that the editor for the high-tech books her company publishes was stepping down. Within a week or so, I was editing chapters for books which contained alien phrases like microBGA, high-density interconnect, and through-via. Although I am still not quite certain what these things mean, I can usually identify verbs and nouns and the agreement between them (something the engineers who write the chapters seem to struggle with).

I have also become addicted to The Chicago Manual of Style, the Bible of editing and usage. As I look things up frequently, I add them to my little cheat sheet which includes hyphenations, abbreviations and usages. My 15-year-old daughter was looking at my sheet which included the following:

Affect – usually a verb
Effect – usually a noun

She started writing on my cheat sheet which started my heart racing and beads of sweat popping out of my forehead. But here is what she wrote down…the Raven rule (and since she recently got me addicted to One Tree Hill, whose basketball team is the Ravens, this is something that is easy to remember):

Remember
Affect
Verb
Effect
Noun

Who needs The Chicago Manual of Style when I’ve got a product of Wake County Public Schools?

Di appears every Saturday on TriangleMom2Mom. Read more about Di at her blog Live and Let Di.