Grammarly.com, a review

A while ago I was approached to do a review for Grammarly.com, which is a resource that checks your grammar, and is supposed to be way better at it than Microsoft Word. Cambodia is full of the worst grammar, basically some of the worst as I like to call it "khmerlish" ever. All of the clothing they wear, the signs they post, even products that are being marketed are full of ridiculously incorrect grammar. So the hunt was on for some product with horrifically incorrect grammar to test.

At hotels here they often given you packets of shampoo to use. A while ago I received one that made me literally laugh out loud as I was reading it. I know they have this product written in khmer and they sell it all over my town, but this is the final English product that they're marketing to foreigners? It really could use some help. So I typed up what was written on the back into Grammarly's website to see what it would suggest.

This is exactly what the package of shampoo says. Amazing khmerlish, right? So after I plugged it into grammarly.com's Grammar Checker, this is what it showed me.

So I started working through all of the tools to fix it. The spelling, punctuation, and capitalization tools are awesome, as well as the synonyms tool. They offer you fixes right there and will replace it for you, which I really like. Then I can see what has been fixed. As I worked through the more hefty grammar problems it got a bit harder. I wish that they would give you suggestions to fix what is wrong with your actual sentence in addition to telling you what's wrong; mostly because I'm grammar lazy and don't want to figure out how to fix the sentence myself by reading about the problem and the examples of correct and incorrect sentences. Really though, it's great that it even recognizes such complex grammar points as a squinting modifier, which apparently existed in the first sentence.

After a couple of times fixing problems and then re-checking them in through their grammar review, only changing what the program suggested I change, I ended up with this.

As as you can see it's not 100% perfect, but I'd say the grammar is immensely better. There are still problems, but I think it makes a lot more sense than it did before. A native English speaker, or someone who has been speaking English for a long time probably wouldn't make most of the mistakes left in this document anyway.

Oh, and something else I found really cool about Grammarly is that it offers a plagiarism detector, and it will check your grammar according to the type of paper you're writing.

Overall, I think Grammarly.com offers a really great service. It would be great for possibly a business or foreign NGO, to offer their workers who are not particularly confident in their English writing skills, but have to write reports, or important e-mails. It would also be great for college students to use when writing essays for classes.

If you're interested, Grammarly offers a free 7-day trial, so you should try it out on an upcoming essay or important report and see how much it helps you.

Fill in the Blank Friday: Travel

1.   My favorite place i've ever traveled to is     New York, we had a short layover there on our honeymoon and we had such a blast in the city   .

2.    Scotland     is somewhere I'd love to go someday. (APRIL!!)

3.  I pass the time on a plane (or bus, or car ride or train) by     sleeping on hal, listening to music, and reading books or magazines until I get car sick      .

4.  My three must-haves when I travel are     a camera    ,    snacks   and     a cardigan   

5.  My favorite travel companion is    my husband Hal  .

6.  The craziest thing that ever happened to me while traveling is    We were flying home from California and they were searching our bag over and over again, pulling out all of our dirty underwear (literally) and then they found what they were looking for, a pocket knife, a gift from Hal's grandfather he had received on the trip. Oops, we thought we had left it at his brother's house. Needless to say, after many bad looks we checked that bag .

7.  The most exotic food I've ever tried while traveling is    frog or shark meat here in Cambodia  .

8.  If I could live anywhere else, I'd live in   Possibly Colorado, or Northern California  .

9.  I have been to    eleven  states in the U.S.

You can go check out Lauren's answers, and read about her adorable newborn on her blog, The little things we do

Meet My : favorite market girl and her adorable puppy

Today marks 6 months of us living in Cambodia. I can't believe I've been living away from home for 6 months. I had never been away from home for more than 2 weeks before coming here.

To celebrate out 6 months here in country I'm going to start a little feature called MEET MY. It's to let you get to know the people, things, and the area that we're living in. Hopefully this will help make this blog more personal about my Peace Corp service, so I can look back on it and remember these great moments.

Today's meet my will go along with the picture that was posted in my guest post on Tina's blog.
Today, MEET MY: favorite market girl, and her adorable puppy.

This little 7 year old girl knows more English than my host mom, or my host siblings. She is, in a word, adorable. She attends my co-teacher's private school, and gets out of class as I head into class to teach. One day I was having a particularly rotten day and was waiting for the classes to let out. I was on my phone when I felt a hand on my arm. There she was squatting in front of me. She looked at me with her big beautiful Cambodian eyes and asked "when are you going to come play with my puppy?"

I hope that just broke your heart like it did mine.

I told her I would go the next day, and she asked if I was going to buy "me", the Cambodian equivalent of Ramen Noodles. Oh she knows my purchases too well.

In training we had the most adorable puppy which our family bathed on a regular basis. This is the first puppy in my town, that I've found which they bathe. Yay! That means I can pet him and play with him to my hearts content.

The best bit: he has a name, which is rare for Cambodian dogs. His name in English means "little little". The family who owns this shop knows when they see me coming, they go into their house which is at the back of the store and they bring out the puppy. Can't beat service like that!

Why I joined the Peace Corps - Guest Post

Hey, There's a post up on Tina's blog : Girl With a New Life about why I decided to join the Peace Corps and Move to Cambodia. Go check it out here.

Second Christmas

Remember when I bragged about how blessed we were by our families for Christmas? Well, since it takes packages at least 2 weeks to get here, we were even more blessed thanks to our siblings, and we got to have Second Christmas. It's pretty much like second breakfast, but even better because we get lots of food.

First our very timely Christmas tree arrived.

Then we had a great package from Hal's brothers.

I'm pretty sure Hal ate those stake strips non stop for 3 days. He cut them up on put them on everything we ate. He shared some with our host mom and she said it was delicious, but they don't have meat like that in Cambodia. She was rather surprised when we told her it was beef.

And Jessi, I cannot believe all that you fit all of that in the package. We've been enjoying home made mashed potatoes, and wish that the gravy would never end, that was the perfect thing to send us!

Lastly, we had a great package from my sister

She sent me the ingredients to make these bad boys, and man I can't wait to make them! I've been saving to make them until another volunteer got his brown sugar and cinnamon pop tarts, and then we're going to have a food-estival. And good news, he just got them, so candy cane and white chocolate nutty buddies (puppy chow) coming our way! Hal was super stoked, usually he can never eat candy canes because he's allergic to red 40, but my sister sent organic ones!

Don't worry, he was going for the creepy look.

Planning a trip to Scotland

We've realized something lately. We're going to have to eventually ET, (that means early terminate) Because of Hal's acceptance to BYU's accounting program we have to be back in the US by August 2013, and we wouldn't officially be done with our service until early October 2013, so we'll to ET like a month and a half early. If you ET you can't opt for the money for your plane ticket and travel. You have to take the plane ticket directly home. That put a kink in our plans to hit Europe on our way home. But you know what? I have a month off from teaching school in April, and I have an amazing husband, who is taking me on my dream vacation. He's taking me here.

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I've been a wee bit obsessed with Scotland for as long as I can remember. Have you ever felt drawn to someplace? I feel drawn to Scotland.

So we've got the approval and have started planning our trip. Neither of us have ever been to Europe before, so we we need your advice. Have you ever been to Scotland? Have you ever been there in early April? What was your favorite thing you saw there? Have you ever rented a car in Europe before? 

We've decided to fly into Glasgow, rent a car and see the countryside. Here's a map of our tentative trip.

What do you think? We also have one night in London on layover. What's the best thing to do in London between 6 pm and 6 am? What's your favorite place to eat?

Please, give me your advice and share your stories of visiting the UK with us. We're so excited about this, we had to share our excitement with you all!

Update: Planning a trip yourself? See my Scotland tab to see what we actually did. We ended up flying into Glasgow, spending a day there. Then going from Glasgow to Edinburg, to meet my sister, spending a few days there, then back to Glasgow for another day, and on to our rental house in Colintraive where we stayed for almost a week did lots of day trips.
We found the best rental car deal from Alamo, and found the best rental house deal from vrbo.
We did day trips to Dunoon, Argyll, and Isle of Skye. If you do anything. DO drive through the highlands.

2011 in Review

I know this is a bit late. I just got back to blogging after the holidays and saw them on all of the blogs and thought it was so great to review what everyone has gone through in the last year. We had a pretty big year this year, so I thought it would be fun to do.

This year I did a photo shoot with Duston Todd

I went snowboarding for the first time with Hal

We both said goodbye and sent our little brothers off on missions

We went to San Fransisco and Sacramento with Hal's family

We bought a baby duck, and named it Sir Fitzwilliam Duckery, even though it's a girl

My friend Monica got married and I turned 24

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We went to the Redwoods with some of our favorite people

We joined the Peace Corps and moved to Cambodia

We celebrated 3 years of marriage

We became official Peace Corps Volunteers

We visited Angkor Wat

We spent our first holidays away from our families

Going through all of this again I can't believe we did all of this in one year. We really did have a life changing year. I'm so glad we made the decisions we did, and that we were able to have all of these incredible experiences. I can't wait to see all that 2012 has in store for us!

New Years in Sihanoukville

Have you ever counted down the New Year with fireworks lighting up the ocean while standing next to your husband on the Gulf of Thailand? I now can say that I have. Since we stayed at site for Christmas, we decided to treat ourselves  for New Years to a nice vacation in Sihanoukville, a big tourist spot in the Gulf of Thailand. We stayed on Otres Beach at the newly built Moonlight Rock Resort which is far away from the big foreigner and the khmer beaches, and is much more calm and relaxing. There weren't a lot of tourists there, but there was still delicious food, and even more beach for us to relax on.

We had the most fabulous time celebrating New Years on the beach. With all of the shenanigans we participated in on New Years Eve, it just goes to show you don't need a big fancy party to have the most fabulous time.

This was surely the worst trip we've been on for travel. Just in bus time it would take us over 11 hours from our site to get to Sihanoukville. Travel in Cambodia is hard enough, but add in New Years and you have people siting in the aisles of buses. Even with the tiring travel to get there, and back home I would do it all again in a heartbeat. It was seriously one of the best vacations we've had. Thank you to all of our fellow PCVs who joined us and made for such an adventurous trip. Those times back home where I just wanted to go on an adventure so badly; well, this weekend was one of those adventures I was looking for.