Today is Sunday, January 22 and there are only 337 days until Christmas.  If you ask me, now is as good a time as any to start playing Christmas music.  If you ask me.  Today we remember the birthdays of Francis Bacon, Ross Barnett and Steven Adler.  On this day in 1575 English queen Elizabeth I granted Thomas Tallis and William Byrd the music press monopoly, in 1857 the National Association of Baseball Players was founded and in 1971 John and Yoko recorded “Power to the People.”  Today is Ukrainian Day in, of all places, Ukraine and in the US it is National Blonde Brownie Day.

I wondered if bacon was named after one of today’s birthday boys or where the term came from.  My research shows a variety of answers.  All of them are entertaining, but I am not sure which is the actual explanation.  I will share a couple with you and you can decide.  One claim was that it was in fact named after Francis Bacon and another claim states it is named after Nathaniel Bacon; however, there is no supporting information to give as proof.  One claim states that bacon was a Middle English term used to refer to all pork in general.  The term bacon comes from various Germanic and French dialects.  It derives from the French bake, Common Germanic baking and old Teutonic backe, all of which refer to the back.  So there you have it.  We are no further along than we were before, but feel free to look into it and let me know what you find.

I was out on the highway recently and had the opportunity to once again observe the strange driving habits of people.  At the risk of repeating myself, I think most states could solve all their budget issues by enforcing traffic laws.  I would love to have the opportunity to talk to one of the many speeders I see when driving.  I would like to ask them where they are going in such a rush.  I also wonder why they feel the need to go at different levels of speed.  Is it that they just want to go 15 miles over whatever the limit is?  Do they ever consider the danger to themselves and others as they fly along?  Just curious.

I have seen something recently that has me puzzled.  As I drive, I occasionally look in my rear view mirrors.  From what I can tell, not too many others do that, but that is not what I wanted to discuss.  Sometimes when I look in the outside left mirror, I see a car coming up at a decent rate of speed.  Not a problem for me because they are in the outside lane and can pass me easily.  What puzzles me is that just after they pass, they come over into my lane and then slow down to under the speed limit.  Why would they do that?  Did they think they were late for something and then realized they were going to be early, so they had to slow down?   Were they simply not paying attention, singing along with a favorite song or chatting on the phone, when they suddenly realized they were way over the speed limit?  Is it because they just don’t want to be behind my car?  Whatever the reason, I wish they would quit doing it.

I have spent the past week or so trying to get my house undecorated after the holidays.  It has been tough for several reasons.  One is that I do not remember everything that I put out or where I put it.  So I go along thinking that I have everything and then discover that, in fact, I missed some knick knack or other and now have to find the box it goes in and put it away.  Another is that every time I decided to take down the outdoor stuff, it rained.  I finally put on a slicker, took the stuff down and then spread it out in the garage to dry.  Putting the tree away is another issue.  This past Christmas, when I took the tree out for the holiday, I found a couple ornaments that were still on the tree from the previous year.  This year, I took all the ornaments off and then left the tree alone for a day or two.  Then I took a bright flashlight and checked very carefully to be sure I had gotten them all.  We’ll see when I take out the tree this year.

The final problem is putting everything into the storage bins.  I have three plastic bins that all the decorations were stored in.  I took everything out, decorated and the house looked nice.  It would have looked better if I had put out everything I had, but that’s a story for another time.  When it came time to put everything away, the stuff did not fit in the bins it all came out of.
I tried stacking things in a variety of ways, but it took several days and my complete repertoire of profanities before it was finally all packed away.  I know that a couple days after I put the bins in the garage I will find something I missed, but I will deal with that when it happens.  What I may do is take pictures of the bins to assist in putting things away next year.

This week our fact tells us that 54.2% of us always wash our hands after using the toilet.  Let’s just hope that the other 45.8% are not dentists or do not work in the food service industry.