I reviewed the rosters for my spring semester classes and one of them has more students with unpronounceable first names than I've ever had in a class of 25. As someone with a name that is routinely misspelled and / or mispronounced, I completely "get" the need to be sensitive. It's common to have some students with unique or unfamiliar names in class, but this list isn't mostly international students, or simply parents choosing clever phonetic spelling or culturally inspired monikers. Something must have been going on twenty years ago. Maybe it was the impact of the millennium or hanging chads or 9/11. Really hoping several save me when I am stumbling over Jxldyrr and Zjnlee by suggesting I call them Jo and Zee.

Happy New Year! Didn't want to let January slide by without making a post. I've had several thoughts about things to write since my last post, but then never actually logged on and composed. The one that comes to mind right now: we watched two movies within the past few weeks. First, was Eat, Pray, Love. I can't believe we'd never seen it before. It is new to Netflix (I think) and it caught my attention in an email. It was entertaining (I guess) but also annoying. Why do we celebrate shallow things and act as if they are actually deep? The second is a fairly new movie, The Mule. Also entertaining, but seriously? Clint Eastwood is the star and yay to him still working, but why - even when a senior actress is cast in the role of his ex-wife - is there still a ridiculous gap in age - and she is the sickly, dying character?

Bob turned 60 a couple weeks ago. We always go to the movies for his birthday, because he likes going to a movie theatre. In the age of streaming I could skip it. Anyway, we couldn't make going to the theatre work for various reasons, so bought the Eastwood movie streaming on Amazon instead. I promised a rain check!