Weird, eh?

I am generally a very good speller and have been since I first learned to spell my three-syllable last name when I was five (it was quite an achievement). Except. Until relatively recently, I consistently misspelled the word weird. I thought the rule, "I before E except after C" was hard and fast, cut and dried, written in stone, you get the idea. When I was taught that rule, no one mentioned exceptions; back then there wasn't a clever Nissan commercial to tell me. It wasn't until I was emailing back and forth with a friend at work a year or two ago and I used the word "wierd" several times that she finally wrote back and said, "You do know that weird is spelled weird, not wierd, right?" Doh!