Hodge Podge

I have a lot of material left over from the alphabet blogging challenge- half-typed posts saved as email drafts and the like. As that challenge put me over the edge on blogging and I'm now detoxing from the intense pressures I felt for a full month, enjoy some miscellaneous thoughts that weren't worthy of their own posts.

Name:

For all of 4th grade, I signed my name "Regina". Every paper, spelling test. I even got my gym teacher to write it on my Presidential Fitness Certificate. I thought it was extremely regal, and I also wanted to personally use the expression 'I usually go by my nickname'... which would have been my given name, Gina.

Over the years, people have additionally been shocked to hear that my full name isn't Virginia.

I came home excited in 5th grade to share that my name was in the word "original" and told my mom that it was going to inspire me to be my most original self. (She was very bemused at my early life-coach tendencies, if I remember her reaction correctly.)

I was slightly less enthusiastic when I hit "Family Life" class in junior high and the boys delighted in telling me that my name was not-so-well-hidden in the word for the lady nether-regions.

Vocabulary:

My dad had to miss my brother's first baseball game of the season because he was traveling. That night I listened to my mom give him a Dick Bremer-esque recap of every inning. It was unbelievable, if only because my mom seems to never know the specifics when she is at the game. One time, after witnessing a pitcher's sidearm style, she said "Oh, ISH." Apparently when she's attending by proxy and knows she'll be quizzed, she can give details like:

• They finally put T in a the mound, and he removed all doubt. 5 Ks in the first 2 innings, then another in the 3rd.
• Once he came out though, the other team's bats really started going. They were just rocking CC. And every hit to the gap- at least 4 runs scored in one inning. Just brutal.
• We were able to come back because they kind of fell apart in the 6th, a few errors and a pitcher that couldn't hit the third strike walked a few guys on full count.
• T hit a blooper but it was good enough to round in N from 3rd due to an overthrow
• Overall, it was a good game but it would've been a whole different game if we could get rid of these hometown umps.

I had my computer right by me so I could type her rant as I laughed hysterically. She definitely didn't absorb this much knowledge at the 12 years of dance competitions she attended.