penguins are being fed

My real name is Nadine, and I get Renee all the time. (with a small helping of Natalie).

Yup, I'm back home, Nicole. We had an absolutely lovely and hilarious wake for my aunt.

Welcome home! I'm glad it was more enjoyable with a hint of sadness than sad with a hint of joy. Exactly the way it should be for a loved one that lived a long life. Still, {{{Sail}}}. Oh. One other thing, do you have a cell phone yet?

pre-game stuff for the first regular game of the Red Sox season

Have fun! As soon as D arrives, that is. I swear, half of the building just left for Opening Day, here.

I get Deborah sometimes. I guess it has the same key sounds - the d, thr r, the b - but it's still kind of odd.

yeah, but a totally different order!

do you have a cell phone yet?

No, and I really should get one. Once I figure out my income tax (yes, I'm a tax slacker and proud of it), I'll take some of it and look into plans.

My real name is 5 letters and I'm lucky if anyone ever hears it right. I get Helen at every resteraunt when I leave a name and sometimes even Allen. Those are the people I want to kick.

I respect anyone who attempts my last name. The people who say, "Ginger Uh Uh," are pronunciation wusses. Oddly, a number of people remember my name as Kathy. Two syllables? I somehow look like a Kathy?

Yup. My favourite was being told I both pronounced and spelt my name wrong. Some people just don't like to embrace new things.

Dear God, ita. What did you do with the body?

Americans have problems with my name (Fay is my middle name. Or one of them - I have four names altogether). When I was five I vividly remember a pair of 'old' (from my point of view) Americans who we met on holiday and who thought I was just darling (well, I was), but who were convinced that I couldn't pronounce my own name properly.

This was acutely frustrating.

My Christian name, for the record, is Nichola. Not, Nicholas - Nicholas is a boy's name, and I am most emphatically not a boy. Not Nicole. Nichola. This was a very popular girls' name in the UK in the 70s, for some reason. (There were 8 girls called Nichola in my class at school, and perhaps another 5 or 6 floating around the year group.) You pronounce it thus:

Nickle. Uh.

I'm philosophical about it being spelled any which way - there are various spellings of the name, and mine is not the most common. But it is not hard to say. It may be unfamiliar to USAians, but it is not hard to say. Really.

The number of times I was called Nicole, Nicholas and Nicolai in the first couple of months of working at this American school was simply mind-boggling to me.

It may be unfamiliar to USAians, but it is not hard to say. Really.

Do you pronounce it differently from Nicola?

What did you do with the body?

My favourite related delusion was the friend who insisted that I was pronouncing, spelling, and definining a word wrongly. "Gimpy," IIRC. Honestly didn't occur to her that I wasn't trying to say "gamey."

FWIW, Fay, I've always been a big fan of your real name. Of course, I'm an even bigger fan of "Nic", which (to my ears, anyway) sounds downright saucy on a girl.

I feel your pain, Fay. Mine's Ellen and besides getting the Helen and Allen, I get Eileen and Elaine frequently. It really doesn't bother me, I learned very young to speak up quickly to correct it after someone thought they heard me say Cherry Warren for Ellen Morin and wrote it that way on a name tag. Not that I didn't think Cherry wasn't a cute name, but it wasn't me.