Today is Sunday, November 5 and there are only 50 days until Christmas.  Time for the decorations to go up and the planning for the holiday to start.  Pretty soon we will be seeing the Valentine’s Day candy coming out.  Today we remember the birthdays of Eugene V Debs, Roy Rogers and Art Garfunkel.  On this day in 1492 Christopher Columbus learned about maize from the Indians of Cuba, in 1875 Susan B Anthony was arrested for attempting to vote and in 1935 Parker Brothers launched the game of Monopoly.  In El Salvador it is First Cry of Independence Day, in England it is Guy Fawkes Day and in the US it is National Doughnut Day.

First let’s talk about November.  I know it is hard to believe that it has arrived already, but it has.  November is the eleventh and penultimate month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars and the fourth and last month to have the length of 30 days.  November was the ninth month of the ancient Roman calendar. November retained its name (from the Latin novem meaning "nine") when January and February were added to the Roman calendar.  November's birthstones are the topaz which symbolizes friendship and the citrine.  Its birth flower is the chrysanthemum.  

November holidays include National American Heritage Month, National Blog Posting Month, National Diabetes Month, Election Day, Veterans Day (which is also my birthday in case you haven’t shopped yet), Celebrate Freedom Week (week of November 11), International Stand Up To Bullying Day (third Friday) and Thanksgiving.  There are many others, so if you need reasons to celebrate, look it up.  There are plenty.

Now let’s move on to the controversy regarding National Doughnut Day.  National Doughnut Day is observed the first Friday of every June.  Curiously, a second National Doughnut Day pops up just five months later, on November 5.  It helps to know how the June date originated: During World War I, volunteers who wanted to support troops were charged with preparing food to deliver to soldiers on the front lines in France. The Salvation Army dispatched over 250 women there, who found that battle-tested helmets were perfect for frying up to seven doughnuts at a time.  In 1938, the Salvation Army decided to honor these proclaimed “doughnut lassies” by recognizing an annual pastry holiday that could also raise awareness (and money) for their charitable efforts. National Doughnut Day was born. 

Its calendar doppelganger is harder to trace. According to food holiday historian John Bryan Hopkins, who cataloged several fringe holidays for his site Foodimentary beginning in 2006, mentions of the November Doughnut Day could be found as early as the 1930s in copies of Ladies' Home Journal. Hopkins speculated that the November 5 date is close enough to Veterans Day on November 11 that a retail outlet likely introduced the date to acknowledge their service.  The June date is the generally accepted date, but I offered up the November one in case you need an excuse.

This past week has been interesting, but boring.  I spent the better part of the week waiting for things.  Monday was spent doing laundry and catching up on household chores.  Wednesday we sat around waiting for a service adviser to come and look at our hot water heater.  Lately I have noticed that when it is finished heating the water and it turns off there is a distinctive clang.  Now I am by no means a plumbing expert, but even I know that you should not hear a clang when the heater turns off.  I knew before the guy showed up that a new hot water heater was in my future.  He confirmed that and we set the installation up for the next day.

He showed up and started disconnecting the old one.  Then we sat around waiting for his helper to show up with the new one.  He arrived, the old one was removed and installation of the new one began.  Of course, there were parts needed that he did not have and he had to go get them.  In addition one of his tools broke and he had to get a replacement.  With all that foolishness, the actual installation and the paperwork, the job ended up taking almost nine hours from the time he walked in until the time he walked out.  He was a nice guy and he did great work, but I am sure I could have found something else to do for at least four of those hours.

The following day I spent part of the day waiting for an electrician to come by to verify what I suspected was the problem.  I have a GFI electrical outlet in my kitchen that would pop whenever I plugged in my individual cup coffee maker.  At first I thought there might be something wrong with the coffee maker, but when I reset the breaker, it did not pop.  Making it more interesting was the fact that it did not always pop when I plugged in.  The thing that finally convinced me was that, with nothing plugged in, the breaker popped while we were away for a few days.  At that point I figured that either someone had come into my house and made coffee or there was a problem with the outlet.  I checked my coffee inventory to be sure.  Finding none missing, I decided it was the outlet.

When you call places like plumbers and electricians, they tell you what day they will be there and then give you a two to three hour window for when they will appear.  I have noticed that they never quite make that window.  Maybe the worker is not aware of when he or she is supposed to be there.  They always call to tell you that he is just finishing up at his previous job and will be at your house shortly.  That’s good to know, but doesn’t really help when they call you at 3:45 and the appearance window closed at 2!  Of course, I know that if I assumed that the person would be off by an hour or so and ran a couple errands, I would come home to find a note saying he was sorry he missed me, please call the office to reschedule.

This week our fact tells us that supercalifrajilisticexpealidocous is actually a word in the English dictionary.  It means fantastic or beyond wonderful.  I would think that using beyond wonderful would be easier to say and would avoid the peculiar looks you would get from people when you used the longer word.