It is Sunday, September 27 and there are only 89 days until Christmas.  Stores already have decorations out and one chain has already started advertising their lay-away services.  Today we remember the birthdays of Thomas Nast, George Raft and Wilford Brimley.  On this day in 1540 the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was founded by Ignatius Loyola, in 1787 the Constitution was submitted to the states for ratification and in 1963 at 10:59 AM the census clock recorded the US population at 190,000,000.  In South Belgium it is French Day, in Taiwan it is the Moon Festival and in the US it is Gold Star Mother’s Day.

I am sure that not everyone knows much about the Gold Star Mothers, so I thought I would give you a bit of information.  The American Gold Star Mothers, Inc. was formed in the US shortly after World War I to provide support for mothers who lost their sons or daughters in the war.  The name came from the custom of families of servicemen hanging a banner called a Service Flag in the window of their homes.  The service Flag had a star for each family member in the US Armed Forces.  Living servicemen were represented by a blue star, and those who had lost their lives were represented by a gold star. Gold Star Mothers are often socially active but are non-political. Today, membership in the Gold Star Mothers is open to any American woman who has lost a son or daughter in service to the United States.  Now you know a little bit about the Gold Star Mothers.

Recently, I came across the words unkempt and disheveled. They were used in a sentence describing a group of unsavory people inhabiting an area under a highway.  I thought the writer was being somewhat repetitive, considering both words are synonyms.  You are either unkempt (disheveled) or disheveled (unkempt).  Saying someone is both is like saying that a woman is a female.  I have found that this is an issue with reporters lately.  They do not use the English language properly.  They tend to overwrite things in an effort to sound  … but I digress.

Anyway, I thought that a person could be unkempt or disheveled.  My question was could they be kempt or sheveled?  Yes, they can be kempt and kempt is, as you may have already suspected, the opposite of unkempt.  You cannot; however, be sheveled.  There is no such word.  Why is that?  I looked into it a little further and found that if a word has dis it is not necessarily a prefix.  So you can be discouraged, but not couraged.  You can be distraught, but not traught.  You can be disheartened, but you can also be heartened.  You can be displeased or you can be pleased.  One has to wonder how much wine was consumed over the years as the language was developed and rules were created to explain away some of the discrepancies (and no there are no crepancies).  Is it any wonder people don’t want to learn English?

We have now been in the new house just a few days short of a month.  I know, where does the time go?  We continue to settle in and get adjusted to our new surroundings.  We have purchased a few items to help fill rooms that we never had, like our sun room.  We decided that we wanted at least one comfortable chair and hassock for the room.  We started our search on line, but the lovely Elaine felt that she did not want to buy a chair without sitting in it first.  I agreed that it would be a good thing.  Besides, I did not want to have the problem of having to load the chair into my car and carting it to the store when we found out that it was not anywhere near as comfortable as it looked.

We went to several stores and were surprised at the dearth of chairs with matching hassocks that were available.   We found several that were okay, but did not come in the color we were looking for.  We found salespeople that had no idea what their store had or what colors it came in.  We went to one store and the salesperson took us to see a chair.  She said it came in three colors, but it actually only came in two.  

One store we went to had a salesperson who took us to see two different chairs.  He then said he had something else to show us.  As we walked with him, we passed a chair that looked like a possibility.  When we asked he said that he had not even thought about that chair because he forgot they had it.  It turned out that only the floor model was available and it looked like it had been tried out a number of times.  We continued on to what he wanted to show us and it turned out to be mattresses.   Mattresses!  We came in and told him we were looking for a chair with a matching hassock and he took us to see mattresses.  We headed for the door while he was in the middle of his pitch.

Have you gone furniture shopping lately?  Why is it that a store does not have all of the same type of furniture in one area?  We went into several stores and the salesperson took us to one area to show us a chair.  Then we were led to another area to see another chair.  There were a couple stores where we walked all over the store so that we could look at three different chairs.  Why couldn’t we just be led into a room where all the chairs with and without hassocks were displayed?  That would have made things a lot easier.  But what do I know?  I’m just the guy who goes in looking for a chair and is shown a mattress.

This week our fact tells us that smearing a small amount of dog feces on an insect bite will relieve itching and swelling.  That is assuming that you just happen to have dog feces handy when you are bitten.  Of course, there are several over-the-counter remedies available that will also do the job AND you won’t smell nearly as bad if you use them.  Either way, I think I may have the mattress you want to help you ease the pain from that bite.