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.

Seconding JZ on hospitals. I've started taking in a stack of magazines and any paperbacks I want to get rid of to work once a month. See if your local hospital has a Volunteer Services or similar department who takes donations--that's who puts magazines in the waiting rooms and runs the library cart at our hospital.

Anyone ever tried Raw Natural Beauty mineral foundation?

But your skin is so gorgeous, do you need any Raw Natural Beauty to add to it? :)

aw, thanks! I'm really just trying to find something to keep the shine down in the summer, and I understand that the mineral stuff stays on through sweat and whatnot. Plus, free.

I love the hivemind. I wouldn't have thought to dump magazines at a hospital.