Hil, do you get the feeling you are ready for the hereafter? You'd like to know what you are here after?

I'd apologize, but I am utterly unrepentant.

I just realized that I got up half an hour ago to get a magazine from the other side of the room, and I somehow haven't made it there yet. There were too many distractions in between me and the magazine that's less than 20 feet away. This is utterly ridiculous.

Jeez Hil, sounds like your place is a MESS! You really should tidy up, or you'll never get cracking on that math you've been avoiding.

:: ducks & covers ::

Question for Librarians in the group: If one has stacks of magazines, is it worth calling public library to see if they would like them?

If one has stacks of magazines, is it worth calling public library to see if they would like them?

The library would probably only be interested in individual issues that they'd need to complete a set for binding. It's doubtful that they'd want the magazines otherwise. School libraries sometimes like recent issues of things they cannot otherwise afford to subscribe to, and elementary schools sometimes like the ones with good pictures for art projects.

For my whole 10+ year librarian career people have quoted $35 as the cost of putting a donated book on the shelf.

Nursing homes and senior centers usually like magazines. I've freecycled some, too. Sometimes I just leave a pile at my HMO, which is completely bereft of reading material.

Most of the big name changes I've been were within a year or so of immigration, where presumably the person just got fed up with no one being able to pronounce or spell their names the right way and just decided to go with the flow and spell or pronounce it the way everyone else was. Or, they just decided that the name wasn't working out, and picked something else.

My paternal grandfather changed his name some time during the 1920s, about 50 years after his parents immigrated and 25-30 years after he was born. He dropped an e, which changed the name from Czech to German. And oddly, made it easier to mispronounce.

My mother's family used "eh" and "he" interchangeably for quite a few generations until settling on "he."

Seconding Ginger, and adding hospitals, where there's not only the main waiting room in the lobby but, usually, smaller waiting rooms on every floor where any kind of procedures happen or where patients are taken to after any kind of procedures. At our hospital, the lobby waiting room is decent but the interior waiting rooms are, sadly, mostly full of copies of The Watchtower and a few of yesterday's Examiner.

If there's a help desk or greeter's desk or something in the lobby of any hospital, you can tell them the magazines are for the ICU waiting room or wherever, and save distressed family members from The Watchtower.

Anyone ever tried Raw Natural Beauty mineral foundation? I got a thing for a free trial (with a small shipping and handling charge, of course). Worth it?

Yesterday it was 98 degrees here. Today, this morning, it's 41. We're predicted to get a major snow storm in the mountains. Spring time in Utah is weird, but this is getting a bit weirder than usual.

Back to names for a second, my grandfather and his brother came over from Sweden in the early '20s to join their uncle (Gus, who was only a few years older than them and was raised by his brother, my great-grandfather, as their virtual brother). Gus had decided to change the spelling of the family name to "Ostrom" because trying to get the a-umlaut pronunciation from the average American was driving him nuts, so he changed the spelling to approximate the pronunciation. Grandpa and Uncle Phillip, OTOH, decided to keep the spelling of "Astrom" and change the pronunciation to "Ah-strom". Problem is that people still screw it up and pronounce the A as in apple.