Making an "all" of myself

The older I get, the more I realize I'm not all that. I am losing qualities and skills I once possessed in abundance- humility, grace, penmanship. And spelling.

In some on-line correspondences, I am forced to admit that my readers need translators to decipher what I write. Of course, I know what I intended to write; it should be obvious to everyone else what I wanted to say. Not so.

A perfect example occurred this morning. Stressful as Mondays go, with a meeting, a funeral, reports due, and two chapters of a book report due.... before 11:00 am. I found myself hurrying through the details of it all, not really excelling at anything.

Especially writing my reports.

Now, you have to understand that as I get older, and type faster, sometimes my brain outruns my fingers, sometimes resulting in some, well, odd words. I also get dyslexia digitalis, a condition in which the correct finger but on the wrong hand will push the keys to spell words. Usually this is quickly caught, either by my powerful skills of perception and observation, or by my spellchecker.

However, when you type the word "all" and encounter a sudden onset of dyslexia digitalis, it comes out as "ass".

Now this is where all my churchy friends get embarassed and aghast that I would reprint such a word here. Two things:
1) Balaam (in the Bible) had one, and
2) I tried 6 times to tell this story without using it, but it didn't make sense. Get over it.

Anyhow, when you spellcheck that, it obviously sails through without a problem. The problem arises when I submitted that mistake on a report- to my pastor- well, let's just say that I won't hear the end of that one for a long, long time.

It was even funny when pointed out to me in private- Pastor and I had a good laugh! When addressed before the entire ministerial staff- not so much. To the lady in my article, of whom I attempted to describe "her desire to give it her all", it was not funny. Not at all....