~Sunday~ I had a relaxing morning, enjoying coffee, breakfast, and some online Scrabble with Robert. Refilling my “pill box” for the week, I found my last Nexium in the bottle, so got online and refilled the prescription via the K-Mart pharmacy website.
I spent a good portion of my late morning and early afternoon catching up my blog entries for Friday and Saturday. Saturday’s was particularly time-consuming and there was a lot more I wanted to capture about the day, such as a couple of the stories people shared about how they got their names and the “culturally significant artifacts” that people brought in.
Actually, I’m going to note a couple of those things now, starting with some notes about the names:
- More than one—actually more than two people, I believe—ended up with uncommon spellings of their names because one or both of their parents liked a name, but didn’t know how to spell it.
- At least one person, maybe two, were named after TV characters that one parent or another liked at the time.
- A couple of people were named as a result of friends or family members telling their mothers that they liked a particular name.
- One person said that they didn’t know why their parents named him what they did, but that it was the 78th most popular first name on Facebook. Just looking that up, I see that my first name is the most popular in the Top 100 First Names in Facebook list, with 1,037,972 Johns. But I digress…
- The story of my name was that I come from a huge Catholic family on my mother’s side. My great, great grandmother had 24 children—21 boys and 3 girls. My great grandmother had 18 children, of which four boys became priests and three girls became nuns. (For the record, my grandmother had eight, my mother three, and I had a vasectomy when I was 29, decreasing my chances of ever having any to 0%.) It’s my assumption that I was named after one of the apostles. That’s my story and it’s sticking to me.
As for the cultural artifacts, several were photos, mostly of family, but one with a friend. Other items included: a bible, handmade cloth art, a World War II veteran pin, and a drum—wasn’t physically there, but talked about. I brought in a liquor bottle that my grandmother brought back from the Azores on one of her few trips back to “the old country” that she made in her life. It has a twig in it, which used to be coated with sugar crystals that, over time, have all come of the twig settling at the bottom of the bottle.
I made it to the gym in the afternoon, where I did 60-minutes on the elliptical machine for an 1159-calorie burn. I listened to my “Retro Mix” playlist, and several times wondered if I was going to be able to do an entire hour, slowing down for a few minutes, but then picking it right back up.
I was assuming that since we didn’t have class last Wednesday that the person who was going to present then would present in tomorrow night’s class, and my presentation originally scheduled for tomorrow night would be pushed out to Wednesday. However, I re-read my professor’s class cancellation e-mail, which read: “We will try to squeeze two discussions in on Monday.” I spent most of my evening working on my presentation.