MASH notes (Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House)

so I'm learning that most of what myspace is and what facebook is turning into is exactly what all girls did between grades 4-10. I left out 11 and 12 because it changes, there's other stuff on your mind.

We send notes asking questions about each other. different schools called them different things. I remember a Slam book in one of my schools. Or MASH notes. But mostly it was between a couple girlfriends, you make up a note with questions and pass it around and analyze all the answers. You see, this trains a girl to become a woman who analyzes every response to every little question. And then turns around and analyzes the analyzing. geez, I really hate typing the word "analyzing"!!! No more.

So anyway, for your perusal, is one of these I picked off fresh from myspace tonight, you can see my responses. The theme is "First". So you answer each question with whatever first thing you did/see/had is appropriate. As I've stated many times before, the author is clearly a 15 year old girl somewhere.

Please, join me on my journey:
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1] Who was your FIRST prom date?
didn't go

[2] Do you still talk to your FIRST love?
nope.
sempre avanti my friend

[3] What was your FIRST alcoholic drink?
genesse cream ale :-D

[4] What was your FIRST job?
restaurant, not exciting, but had scary delivery men

[5] What was your FIRST car?
79 oldmobile supreme - it was a tank and I miss it! It had the ability to track aliens. I kid you not.


[6] Who was the FIRST person to text you today?
AT&T - thanks for the cell phone spam

[7] Who is the FIRST person you thought of this morning?
Patches. wondering where she was and did she make it through the night.


[8] Who was your FIRST grade teacher?
Mrs Sawyer? She used to let me go read by myself in the back of the class. One day a ladybug flew up my nose and I had to blow out ladybug parts onto a tissue....EEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW It caused great long-term damage to my psyche.


[9] Where did you go on your FIRST ride on an airplane?
St Paul, Minnesota, from Miami. I was pretty little, I have no memory of it, my mom just tells me we did.


[10] Who was your FIRST best friend and are you still friends with them?
Nella Dychdala, and no, but would love to get in touch with her, she was way cool

[11] What was your FIRST sport played?
other than recess? track

[12] Where was your FIRST sleep over?
have no idea, probably with Nella. I remember the first one at MY house - I invited all my little 5th girl friends, my mom baked a special shaped panda cake, we had all our little sleeping bags in my room and we watched Phantasm on late night tv. I'm thinking it was Nella, Laura, Lisa, Leeann....maybe others. I was SO excited to be hosting one.


[13] Who was the FIRST person you talked to today?
Bubbie

[14] Whose wedding were you in the FIRST time?
Jacque's. you would have thought I'd be cured of being bridesmaids by that one, but no, I'm a sucker. There's like 3 other dresses up there! I was going to toss them, but am now saving them for my niece to play dress-up in.


[15] What was the FIRST thing you did this morning?
laid in bed and thought about getting out of the bed
then I turned on the weather and channel 6
then I actually sat up, did some stretches for my shoulders and arms and stood up.


So standing is the first thing I truly DID this morning.


[16] what was the FIRST concert you ever went to?
I have no idea! I guarantee whatever it was, you couldn't pay me money to see it now.


[17] FIRST tattoo or piercing?
ears, or rather one ear. she shot the thing in, I jumped off the seat and was like NO WAY is she doing that again. Eventually I was pressured into continuing, and I got the other one done, but my hurtling into the air for the 1st one had made it shoot in crooked. so I let them close up and went back years later and it was no problem, pinch, pinch.


[18] FIRST foreign country you went to for vaca?
Canada.
we used to have relatives in buffalo

[19] What was your FIRST run in with the law?
none of your beeswax you nosy questionnaire.
don't you know stalkers on the internet read this kind of stuff and then know things about you??? better to divert with long boring stories

[20] When was your FIRST detention?
high school

[21] What was the FIRST state you lived in?
FL

[22] Who was the FIRST person to break your heart?
me, i take full responsibility

[23] Who was your FIRST roommate?
during or post school? My favorite school roommate was rachel clickner. I loved that girl to pieces. she wore the same black tights for weeks at a time. can you ask for more in a roommate? such self-confidence.


[24] Where did you go on your FIRST limo ride?
honestly can't remember!! I think a limo rides are overrated, I just prefer to be in the backseat of a lincoln if I'm getting driven somewhere, I still feel slightly like I know where i'm going and I don't have to literally crawl in and out of the car. yeah, I know, there's something wrong with me.
:-D

[25] Who will be the FIRST to repost this?
Well, I was, duh

To Can or Not to Can

I always feel like I should be canning something when this time of year rolls around. Not that I, personally, have ever canned anything, or even have the slightest idea of what canning entails. All I remember is that there are big pots, hot water, glass jars, metal lids and tons of food. How all those ingredients get combined to store stuff up for the winter is a total mystery to me. I guess it's slowing turning into a lost art, huh? Who needs to can food when you can just pop over to whole foods for some yummy sushi or soup?

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

A few weekends ago I was happily playing around with genealogy stuff, and it occurred to me to run a report to see what kind of funky names were in my files. I've learned a lot about how people like to name their children, especially when it comes to the Puritans. I have a lot of them in my ancestry.

For one thing, they liked to name their kids after themselves and their parents and siblings. Naturally this means you have the same 6 names occurring every generation. This makes it really fun and exciting for people like me who come along a few centuries later and try to figure it all out.

For instance, Thomas and Rebecca have as children, Thomas, Rebecca, Daniel, John. Those kids will have kids with all the same names, and so on and so on.

PLUS, they also had a habit of re-using a name if a child died young....so if Thomas and Rebecca had a Thomas, and he died as a baby, they would name their next kid Thomas!!!

It makes you REALLY appreciate it when someone gets creative with a name. Which I never thought I would do because I have always given my parents a hard time about my name, which is pretty unique. I never liked it because as a child I could never find things with my name on them like the other normal kids. No mini license plates for me....sigh.....I've since gotten over it and I use my name as a tool to know whether someone actually knows me or not...if you mis-pronounce my name I know you don't know me....pretty handy for the telemarketers....plus I really enjoy hearing them struggle over the name...:-D

Anyway, back to the unique names...so it's really SO handy when you are researching and you come across a unique name, for instance, I have this one guy, he is named "Squire Ide". And he named one of his daughters "Leaffe Ide". Now how about that?

And those puritans also liked to name their kids with abstract ideas, like:

Patience Alling
Thankful Andros
Deliverance Bliss
Freelove Bliss
Mercy Bliss
Preserved Capen
Wealthy Chase
Comfort Deming
Wait Hopkins
Deliverance Hayes
Experience Ide
Mindwell Mix
Love Royce

Well, I don't know how puritanical the people who named their kids "Wealthy" and "Freelove" were, but you get my point.

Those were the nice names though....I actually have people named this:

Lament Collins
Submit Collins
Savage Sutliff

You are going to name your kid "Lament"???? What a way to give them some nasty karma starting off in the world.

And then there are the people who clearly threw open the bible to a random page and pointed with their eyes closed:

Ithemar Andrus
Pelatiah Bliss
Zaccheus Bosworth
Zerviah Bowen
Asenath Collins
Keturah Collins
Manassah Collins
Ruhamah Collins
Zerujah Collins
Amasa Curtis
Keziah Hall
Jerusha Mather
Abinather Mix
Bathsheba Read
Benajah Royce
Huldah Royce
Hadassah Sprague

Now, come on. Did they hate their kids???

Finally it occurred to me to see how many relatives have my first name.....

I've got nearly 5,000 people in my database, going back more than a 1,000 years.

Want to know how many Leah's???

3.

Including me.

There are more people named "Experience" and "Huldah" than Leah.

Anyway...the point is, think about what you are going to call your kids, because there may be a genealogist a few hundred years from now either grateful for your uniqueness, or wondering what was wrong with you.....like I wonder about the parents of Moroni Miner.....

Laughter is the Best Medicine

So anyway, my sister had a baby last week (more on that in another post), and I just had to share this. When we first got to the hospital, they put us (me, my sister, and my brother-in-law) into a triage room where they made sure she really was having a baby before they admitted her. So there was some machine hooked up to her belly that was measuring contractions, and it would spew out a print-out showing nice little bell curves every time she had one.

Time passed.....(not that long, but hey, how long can you stare at the TV looking at Hurricane Gustav).....so I started poking around in the drawers and stuff in the room, seeing if there was anything cool or handy that I could appropriate for my own personal use.

And then it happened.....out of a bottom drawer in the cart holding the contraction-measuring thingy, I pull out from a huge pile, this long thin metal hook, about a foot+ long. It made me think of the hook they used to pull people off of a stage in the old days.

As I'm opening my mouth to ask my sister what it is, my eyes spy the name of the instrument on the package just as she's telling me. Something absolutely horrendous that had the words "amniotic" piercing" "death" destruction" "armageddon", stuff like that. In horror I threw it back on the pile of like HUNDREDS of them, and slammed the door shut.

Something about the whole little episode must have really tickled my sister's fancy because she busted out laughing at me and completely RUINED a perfectly good contraction. Hopefully there won't be long-term damage to Gracie in any way.

Below is a picture of the ruined contraction showing all the perfect contractions that preceded it. So now we all know what happens if you laugh while giving birth.