Apparently his teacher did. It will meet in D.C., in the fall. According to the materials, it's for students who are (will be then) in the sixth and seventh grades.

give him my number in case he needs bail money. :) Seriously, you can give him my number in case he needs anything or gets lost or whatever.

Have any of you ever heard of the Junior National Young Leaders Conference (JrNYLC)? Apparently my son was nominated.

I haven't heard of it, but if the idea is to persuade you to buy a book, decline. That goes double if the letter identifies your son by a name that isn't even close to his (including gender). And that goes triple if, when you try to correct the name, the company sends an apology that apologizes for not referring to you as the grandparents of wrongname.

Fred Pete, are you running away from the National Library of Poetry people again?

Technical Communication Specialist

This is good. Speaking as a Technical Editor for the Evil Empire, that's a title I've seen on resumes around here.

Sox, it was a "Who's Who among American Teenagers" type thing. But I run away from anyone that thinks I'm Laura Jane Adams. Or any other name that's so radically different from my own.

I mean, I'm still a little befuddled by my genealogy research that suggests that an "e" was dropped from my family's last name during the 1920s.

...is there no good place for an E in your last name, Fred?

I just had a rather distressing lunchtime shopping experience. Less so for me than for others, but my heart was still racing: I was at Target (a two-level one) and walked past the escalators, looking at a dress, suddenly heard SCREAMIING. SCREAMING. This woman was going down the escalator with her kid (looked to be 3 or 4) and he'd gotten his foot stuck in the side of the escalator, and she was shrieking for someone to turn off the escalator as they continued to go down. Eventually she popped his foot out. She kept screaming, though. I couldn't tell how he was--she was still screaming, but the other people around seemed fairly calm (telling her to calm down) so I'm guessing he didn't look too bad (clearly no bleeding, but it could've been sprained or broken)--he was crying, but not bloodcurdlingly so.

Had me all shook up for a few minutes, and I'm not even a mother.

Oh, meara, that's awful.

...is there no good place for an E in your last name, Fred?

There's already one in the first syllable. But if the person I found actually was my grandfather, there used to be another "e" between the final "c" and "k." But somewhere between WWII and the 1930 census, he seems to have dropped the second "e." Which also means he dropped a whole syllable.

And egad about the escalator. At least there wasn't any miserable ending.

Oh yeah. It took me a moment to parse, but that's quite a different name. Huh.

When I was looking at the 1920 census, I discovered that my father used to have an entirely different first name. Ah, the things you discover when there's no one left to ask.