Down at the Museum Center in Union Terminal in Cincinnati there’s a big ol’ showing of the Romanov family stuff. You know the Romanovs. They were the last Tsar of Russia and his family. Yeah, those Romanovs.
“But why,” you ask “show I care?” Dunno. I was just making conversation. Also there was a picture of Nic and the fam in the paper on Sunday. They were a pretty bunch for royalty. All their ears and teeth were to actual scale for their actual heads and there’s a decided presence of chin. And they all have pretty names too. Almost all of them.
There’s the head guy Nicholas II (Electric Tsar-a-loo), his wife Alexandra and his boy Alexi and Nic and Lexi’s girl children Anastasia (the guy who invented the stuff to make you numb so you can have surgery and dental fun named it after her), Marie and Olga.
“Olga”. That’s what they named her. After all those other pretty names they had they saddle her with “Olga”. And you know it sounded really good with a Russian accent. “Olga”. Poor kid. But she was the first one and maybe the shipment of good names didn’t show up in time. But she was a Grand Duchess- Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna- so at least there was that.
There was that until 1918 anyway.
In other news: someone had the poor taste to have a birthday over the weekend. How are we supposed to say “Happy Birthday Snickers!” over the weekend? There’s no possible way. So I think the less said about that the better.
I got a kinda sorta weird first name myself. My sister and my brothers got common ol’ English type names, but not me. I’m also the middle kid. I always suspected I got weird named as a part of the middle kid shaft but now I see the oldest of the Czar’s family got saddled with Olga, so I guess that theory is shot all to heck. What is my first name you ask? It’s Lamon, pronounced Lay-mon, with a long “a”, southern style. It gets mispronounced and misspelled something awful a lot of times. I will correct people on the proper way to pronounce my name. If they choose to not listen and persist in doing it wrong, I pretend I don’t hear em when they pronounce my name. Then I say, " I’m sorry. Were you talkin’ to me? I didn’t hear you say my name. POed a college professor doing that. He threatened to take me to the Dean of Students over it. I told Professor Asshole that if he wanted to do that, I’d let it be known that he knew full well the proper pronunication of my name and persisted in mispronouncing it. I then asked him, who he thought would end up looking bad. He started pronouncing my name right. HAH!
In othe news, the power went off here for about 15 minutes. Apparently that’s been happening all over town this morning. Wonder if it has anything to do with it being 20 degrees here and everybody’s been crankin’ up the heat. Betcha it’ll be a big story on the Noon news.
-swampbear (I’m sorry. Were you talkin’ to me?)
OH! I did this already yesterday on that other message board, but here goes anyway.
<AHEM> CLEARING THROAT<AHEM>
HAAAAPPPPYYYY BIIIIRTHDAAAAY TOOOOO YOUUUUUU!!!
HAAAAPPPPYYYY BIIIIRTHDAAAAY TOOOOO YOUUUUUU!!!
HAAAAPPPPYYYY BIIIIRTHDAAAAY FAAAIIIIRRRRYYYYCHAAATTTTMOOOOMMMM!!!
HAAAAPPPPYYYY BIIIIRTHDAAAAY TOOOOO YOUUUUUU!!!
She’s six months and six days older than me.
In other news, despite the snow we did have the first every Albany DopeFest… and only **Anaamika **and I showed up. Oh, well. We had a great time, and I was still excited to have met at least ONE other Doper.
Since it was all cold and snowy, I made a creamy potato leek soup on Saturday and a crock pot of chicken and potato stuff on Sunday. Boy, was it nice to come in after cross-country skiing to a nice crock pot full of creamy goodness. Yummmm.
Now, on to the name thingy. I have a pretty normal first name for the times when I was a babe being named…specially when the demographics for your area were predominantly Irish (Kathleen). I knew lots of other girls my age with the same name. Made for some consternation in grade school where there were at least four of us with the same first name in my class.
The Princess[sup]TM[/sup] has a lovely Irish first name (Maura) and Lil Lestat[sup]TM[/sup] was given a manly name nobody could tease him about (Michael) and an interesting middle name (Connor). Neither of them has ever said they wished their names were something else so I guess they’re okay with that.
I like Lamon. It sounds very dashing and romantic.
It’s colder than the proverbial teat here this morning. Okay, it’s not as cold as it is in swampy’s neck of the woods, but it’s STILL just above freezing. We did go down to 25 degrees overnight but, hey, it’s warmin’ up. No snow, though, so I guess the signs are still workin’.
My grandmother was Swedish, who happen to share in the hideous name traditions of the Russians.
Grandma was born Anna Gunhild Christine Erickson. You’d think that with 3 names to go by, she’d use one of the nice sounding ones, but nooooo, she spent her 80+ years being called Gunhild or Gunnie. At least when she was called Gunnie, it wasn’t a Marine thing.
Hey, if it was good enough for Olga Korbut, it was good enough for the czar’s daughter.
I’ve always thought the odd name was the czar’s second daughter, Tatiana. Not sure how it’s pronounced, whether it’s a common name in Russian, or whether it has an equivalent in English (Tatty Ann, maybe?).
Well, the actress who played “Ashley” on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air ( ) is named Tatiana M. Ali. I haven’t heard it spoken out loud in a long time, so correct me, anyone, if I’m wrong, but I believe it’s just pronounced like: “TAH’tee-ana”.
I’ve seen it as a child’s name on several occasions, but it doesn’t seem common.
Aw, Olga’s not so bad. My grandma’s sister is Olga. Her mother (my great-grandma) was Ragna. Now there’s a family member I’m glad I didn’t have the honor of being named after! There are also such gems as Bertha and Alma in my family. Good, strong Norwegian names, I tell ya!
So Friday night my cat started himself on fire. The electricity went out for several hours Friday night and my husband and I rushed around lighting candles. My husband decided it would be a good idea to put one on the dryer in our back entryway. Then he proceeded to take the dog out. The cat always goes into the back entryway when the dog isn’t there. My husband came back in and began yelling, “What’s burning?” I told him how was I supposed to know … it was probably one of the 15 candles we’d just lit. I really didn’t smell anything until I went into the back entryway. Then we saw the cat lying on the kitchen floor, his tail all scorched. Poor kitty. He’s okay, though, and seems, in cat-like fashion, to have forgotten the whole incident. He went back to being king of the household and all is well.
See, that’s just crazy, having a Dopefest in Albany during the winter. I can’t imagine why all of us FloriDopers didn’t just fly up for it.
It was kind of cold here yesterday, just in the 50s (I think that’s what we’re getting here again today). Still it was sunny so The Boy and I drove out to Plant City for strawberries. We shared a big, goopy strawberry shortcake and a strawberry milkshake with lots of strawberries to clog up the straw (that’s why they’re called strawberries, I suppose).
So January and February should be for picking strawberries, not cold and snowstorms. At least if you do it right.
Why thank you Puggy. :o I’m just all flush from the compliment.
Shibb I have to wait all the way til Mid March to pick strawberries. It’s unfair! I likes pickin’ strawberries. I only have two little frozen quart baggies of strawberries left from last year’s pickin’. It’s sad.
Yeah, but without the snow there wouldn’t be any cross-country skiing or snowshoeing! And let me tell you, we really appreciaite the strawberries in June when they’re ripe around here! Besides, you don’t get to have the pleasure of coming in out of the cold to a nice hot cup of cocoa or some hot soup. When it’s below 0, that’s a really good feeling. (I was born during a snowstorm… I think it got in my blood.)
