It is Sunday, May 10 and there are just 15 days until Memorial Day, the unofficial beginning of summer.   Start slathering on the sun screen.  Today we recognize the birthdays of John Wilkes Booth, Taurean Blacque and Sid Vicious.  On this day in 1497 the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci left for his first voyage to the New World, in 1752 Benjamin Franklin first tested the lightening rod and in 1908 the first Mother’s Day was observed.  In Hong Kong it is Tin Hau’s Day. In Thailand they are celebrating the Ploughing Ceremony and in the US it is Mother’s Day.

I have discussed Mother’s Day in past episodes and do not want to bore you with the same details again.  This year I thought I would just toss out a few random facts I may have missed in the past.  Celebrations of mothers and motherhood can be traced back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who held festivals in honor of the mother goddesses Rhea and Cybele.  More phone calls are made on Mother’s Day than any other day of the year. These holiday chats with Mom often cause phone traffic to spike by as much as 37 percent.

The roots of the modern American Mother’s Day date back to the 19th century.  In the years before the Civil War (1861-65), Ann Reeves Jarvis of West Virginia helped start “Mothers’ Day Work Clubs” to teach local women how to properly care for their children. These clubs later became a unifying force in a region of the country still divided over the Civil War. In 1868 Jarvis organized “Mothers’ Friendship Day,” at which mothers gathered with former Union and Confederate soldiers to promote reconciliation.   As I said, I don’t want to bore you by repeating facts, so I just wanted to share these couple things to help round out your knowledge.

The lovely Elaine has decided that since we are planning to move at some point, there is no reason to wait until the last minute to start getting ready.  With that in mind I have started to clean out the garage.  I spent one full day so far and I am amazed at the number of things I had in there.  As I started carrying things out for bulk pick-up, I couldn’t help but think, repeatedly, “What the hell was I saving that for?”  I had pieces of paneling from when I did the bathroom a number of years ago.  There was some wood in there that I am not sure what project they were left over from or why I would have purchased them.  I could not think of what they were used for.  I am not even sure it isn’t stuff left over from the previous owner and I never noticed them until now.  Who knows (at this point I have shrugged my shoulders)?

Why did I shrug my shoulders?  What exactly is a shrug?  It is defined as the movement of raising and contracting the shoulders in a gesture expressing indifference; or, it is a short sweater or jacket that ends above or at the waist.  Does that mean that if you wear a shrug you are indifferent to how you look in it?  I have shrugged again.  But I digress …

So, there I was cleaning junk out of the garage.  There were two benefits to this chore.  One was that it got rid of stuff that should have gone a long time ago.  The other was that it gave me a chance to drag out my table saw so I could cut the large pieces of wood and paneling into smaller pieces that the garbage men would take.  We have a good system in my town.  The second garbage pick-up each week is considered bulk pick-up.  This means you can put out almost anything; however, if it is wood and paneling, it has to be in pieces no wider than 12 inches and no longer than four feet.  It also has to be tied in bundles.

So I got to run my table saw, cutting stuff up.  One of the nice things about this was that I did not have to make exact cuts.  I could just slap it on the table and push it by the blade.  The garbage men were not going to stand there examining the bundles and rejecting pieces that were not cut straight.  At least I do not think they would.  Also, by doing it in the driveway I didn’t have to worry about cleaning up the sawdust.  

Earlier in the week, the lovely Elaine and I went to a mall we had not been to in a while.  It was nice to shop there.  The stores had clothing that was not meant to be worn by rail thin people who had no taste in colors.  The shirts were geared more toward people like me who can be called a number of things, but thin is not one of them.   I also like the colors teal, red, blue, green, purple and brown, but not all in one shirt.  Some of the color combinations that have come out in plaids lately make me wonder if the designers are suffering from adverse affects to recreational drugs.

We went to the mall on our anniversary.  We decided to go to that mall because they had a Cinnabon and a Starbucks.  We felt that would make a great breakfast.  It did!  We did some shopping, the lovely Elaine found several things she wanted and I did not buy a shirt.  One of the drawbacks to leaving her alone, with no plan, is that she finds interesting things to do.  Specifically, she recently decided to count how many shirts I have.  In my defense let me say that I tend to perspire and usually only get one day’s wear out of a shirt, so I need to have a wardrobe that allows me the ability to wear clean shirts without having to do laundry every five or six days.  I do not need to divulge the actual number.  Suffice it to say that I may want to scale back the inventory a bit.

This week our fact tells us that in the last 50 years, the average working vocabulary of a 15 year old has decreased from 25,000 words to just 10,000 words.  The three top words they use, based on what I hear, are like, dude and awesome.  I mean, like, dude it would be awesome if they could say more, like, words and stuff.

Don’t forget to wish mom a Happy Mother’s Day!