X is for eXhale

Upon wakening this morning, I got the sad news that my Aunt Debbie died last night in her sleep. Then came a big gasp. And an exhale before the tears started to flow.  My uncle had been sick for months and was recovering from one surgery and waiting to get strong enough for two others.  So, it was a surprise to hear that she was the one who passed.

My aunt never left my uncle's side during the weeks he spent at the hospital. After 63 years together, they still held hands in their matching wheelchairs and it made for a very sweet picture. She died at home sleeping beside my uncle, just where she wanted to be.

Aunt Debbie was a happy person with a great laugh and I always enjoyed being around her. Last year at a family gathering, she told a great story about when she and my uncle met that I shared with you. I'm going to share it again now as I remember Aunt Debbie's smile and laugh as she told the the tale.

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An Interesting Question

Last weekend I went to a family reunion on my father's side of the family. Besides the normal catching up, there was a theme throughout the day. How did your parents meet? This all started because I found a newspaper clipping in one of my mother's scrapbooks about my oldest aunt's wedding in 1948. It got me thinking that I had heard the story about how my parents had met, but none of the accounts of how my aunts and uncles first got together. I asked around and heard bits and pieces of stories from various cousins about their parents. However, I was able to get one of the stories straight from the source--Aunt Debbie and Uncle Alan.

Debbie and Alan told the story of when they first laid eyes on each other at a church Christmas play. Upon seeing my uncle standing at the back of the church in a leather jacket, my aunt declared that was the man she going to marry. It didn't seem to matter that her fiancee at the time was sitting right beside her. They wove a quite colorful story of the complications of fiancees and girlfriends with my aunt even telling my uncle that she was engaged, but only on weekends.

While I immensely enjoyed the tale of their first meeting and courtship, there was another part that I found even more interesting. My aunt asked each one of her suitors, including my uncle, a curious question, "If you were going to build a city, what would you do?" Among other things, Uncle Alan answered that he would design one like Washington, D.C., with a center circle and streets going out like spokes from there. I commented to my aunt that that must have been an acceptable answer and she said that Alan was the only one who ever gave her an answer. Her fiancee said she was never going to build a city, so it didn't matter.

Then I asked the obvious question, why did she ask about building a city? Aunt Debbie said that it told her if the suitor could make a plan and if they could dream about the future. I found that very smart of her to question her boyfriends in that way. It seemed to be a good test because she and my uncle have been married for almost 63 years now.

Rest in Peace,  Aunt Debbie.

X is for eXtra

X is for eXtra...

in that I need a little eXtra time to complete my blog post. We had a very busy day today and I'm ready for a little R and R.

So until next time, have an eXceptional evening.

W is for Work, Work, Work

When I was in high school, I used to babysit for a little girl named Rebecca. She was always fun and loved books and songs. Her mother was a kindergarten teacher and thought kids didn't need to read early, so Rebecca didn't read until she went to school. However as soon as someone unlocked the reading code for her, she was reading at an 8th grade level within a year or so.

In the meantime, she loved to have books read to her and had memorized many books even chapter books. She would say to me, "Let's read the book about horses," and then go to find it. Rebecca would return a short while later and say, "I can't find the book, but I'll read it to you anyway." And then she would recite the entire book word for word.

She especially liked the books she could listen to that had songs intertwined with the story. She delighted in acting them out for me. She would don her "performance hair" (a dish towel over her head with rubber bands to make pigtails) and her microphone hairbrush and perform an entire book. Besides reciting the story, she would belt out the songs in a strong voice. She was quite good, actually.

There is one song to this day that I still sing that I learned from Rebecca. It is one where Cinderella is lamenting about all of the work she has to do. The chorus and first verse are below:

Work, work, work
I try not to complain
Washing, mending, stretching, bending
Every day's the same

Once I was just little Ella
That's how it began
Now I am a Cinderella
Always in my cinder place with ashes on my hands and face, I am!

(Unfortunately, I was not able to find credits for this or the tune on YouTube to include for you. Maybe after I understand my smart devices a little more, I'll sing it for you some day.)

The great thing about this song is that it's a fun way to complain. It's easy to insert whatever kind of work you're doing as well as your own name and complain while singing a catchy tune. I do it all of the time. In fact, I was singing it earlier while I was doing the laundry. And I think I will do another verse when I go wash the dishes. :)

Until tomorrow, when X is for...?

V is for Vicki

V is for Vicki, sort of

While going to sleep last night, I composed an entire post for V in my head about names. I was going to talk about how trends in names seem to skip a generation but take on their own version when they reappear. For example, the nickname for Victoria was Vicki a generation or two ago. Now the nickname for Victoria is Tori. I had several other examples and personal experiences to relate about how I was named for a neighbor when they were getting ready to turn in the birth certificate. I was the third baby and the third girl in the family. They were sure I was going to be a boy and didn't have a girl's name picked out. And so on.  I've had a busy day and it's time to go to bed again. So as not to be writing a post all night in my head, I'm going to put a quick one out now.

Sometime during the day, I realized my personal example wouldn't work with my alias name, so I decided to go in a bit of a different direction. I'm going to give you a few statistics from the Social Security data base for names in the US.

 First some parameters.
--They have data from 1879-present, but most of it is only compiled through 2017
--Many people born before 1937 did not apply for a card, so that group is under represented.
--They only use the top 1000 names each year. This represents about 75% (plus or minus) of the data at any one time.
--Different spellings of the same name were counted as different names. For example, Kelli, Kelly, and Kelley were all counted separately instead as one name.

So what are the most popular names of the last 100 years (1918-2017)? James and Mary
How about for 2017? Liam and Emma

But the most important statistics for this post are below.

For the last 100 years here the rankings for the V names that made the list:
Virginia 45
Victoria 58
Vincent 95, the only V name on the boys side
(1 is the most popular and 100 is the least popular.)

If you like numbers and want to check out some of your family names or name trends, this is an interesting site to visit.  Be forewarned, that it's an easy place to get sucked in for some time before you realize it. Don't ask me how I know. :)

U is for Under or Over

It's been a busy day with a lot of brain taxing activities which have turned it to mush. So no Unusual posts today. Just a visit to the past when U was for Under or Over.

U is for Under or Over

or How does your toilet paper roll?

I've spoken about this issue before--how do you install a roll of toilet paper?  Do you put it on so it unrolls from the bottom or unrolls from the top? This seems to be an issue that generates much argument.

Google patents

Recently "new" data has surfaced* that some claim has important bearing on this under/over argument. The information comes from the original patent application for a roll of  perforated toilet paper by Seth Wheeler in 1891. The perforations were seen as an inexpensive way to help prevent the waste of paper. Before this, waste prevention was done by expensive holders that were awkward to use.

But it seems that no one these days is much interested in Wheeler's clever use of perforations to tear toilet paper. Everyone seems to be interested in the pictures that went with the patent. In those pictures, the paper is rolled from the top. The proponents of the over method say that this is definitive evidence that over is the correct way for a roll to flow.

However, the under proponents are holding fast to their beliefs. They are making arguments that the way the pictures were oriented was only to demonstrate the points of the invention and aren't necessarily an endorsement by Wheeler.

So the debate continues. Which side are you on ?


*Recently, I have seen this picture on several social media sites. This also happened last year at this time. Of course, it's not new data since it's been around since 1891.