Sleepy Wednesday and What's in a Name

 I am having a difficult week and that is okay.

Friends, I saw every hour on the clock last night. Lucy started moving around at four like she was thinking breakfast would be not a bad idea. Usually we tell her to shut the hell up and lie back down, but today I got up and let her out and fed her on the off chance that I might fall asleep and sleep a little past 6 a.m. which is more like her usual breakfast time. Didn't work, but oh well.

Fortunately I'd had one good night's sleep in the last three, so I was able to keep my composure throughout most of the day. I even managed not to giggle outwardly when a grade-six girl came up to me and said "I told Ms. R. that I found some swears in this book I borrowed. I found some more. Can you please tell her, and also I'd like to renew it please." Something along the lines of St. Augustine's prayer "Lord, grant me chastity and celibacy -- but not yet!"?

It's almost the end of NaBloPoMo and I still have a couple of random things I didn't manage to work into posts, so (Some Number) on a Wednesday it is:

Did somebody do a post about names? I have notes for a post about names. My sister and I never particularly liked our names, but I try not to complain because how the heck DOES one name a baby effectively? It's a total crapshoot. Both my kids like their names well enough - Angus Adams turns out to be a "really sick" baseball name, or so say numerous people including a couple of announcers on ESPN when he was at the Little League World Series (they also called him Double A). Then he went to Elmira and the team nicknamed him Beef. So proud. And Eve Adams? Well, MY last name isn't Adams, and I was in labour for sixty hours, that's my excuse for what her high school math teacher called "the whitest name ever". It's also the same name as a Conservative MP, who Eve wrote a really sweet letter to when she was little (ending "from, Eve Adams (me. Not you)."), and got a sweet letter back, and then we realized that Eve Adams was somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun and regretted letting Eve write the letter a little, BUT then there was a headline in the paper that read "Eve Adams told to behave", and come on, that's funny, right?

When they were in high school they were given names that were their first initial and the first four letters of their last name before the @ symbol. This had to be altered in a few notable situations - Emily Boland ended up with Ebola and Maryam Yassin was Myass. 

Completely awkward segue into last summer when we were at our friends' cottage, where you have to walk down a ten-minute switchback trail to the water and then back up, which results in everyone being newly hot and sweaty (and sucking wind to an embarrassing degree) by the time we get back up to the cottage. Someone realized that there is a hose on the lower deck, and thus was born.... The Hose Shower. We put little bottles of shampoo and soap on the railing and people who cared about getting clean before dinner (read: women, sorry for the stereotyping, but here we are) would stop for a refreshing interlude, in which the name was just part of the wonderfulness of the entire phenomenon. "Come on, let's get these hoes showered." "Into the shower, hoes!" 

I know, I know. Some of us have never had a headline warn us to behave, and it shows.