Today is Sunday, January 21 and there are only 70 days until Easter.  Start planning your Easter Egg Hunt and hiding the eggs now.  Today we remember the birthdays of Manuel Garcia, Alfred Henry Ackley and Neely Bruce.  On this day in 1799 Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccination was introduced, in 1853 the envelope-folding machine was patented by Russell Hawes and in 1998 Pope John Paul II visited Cuba.  In the Dominican Republic it is Nuestra Senora de Altagracia Day and in the US it is National Granola Bar Day and National Hugging Day.

I first want to apologize for being remiss.  I neglected to give any information on the month last week, so I will correct that now.  January is the first month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars and the first month with 31 days.  It is, on average, the coldest month of the year.  January is named after the Latin word for door (ianua), since it is the door to the year.

January’s birth stone is the garnet and the birth flower is the Dianthus caryophylus.  January is also Alzheimer’s Awareness Month, National Mentoring Month and National Healthy Weight Awareness Month.  That should get you current on the months.  

Now let’s move on to Nuestra Senora de Altagracia Day or just  Altagracia Day.  It is a day commemorating "Our Lady of Altagracia", patronal image and protector of the people of the Dominican Republic.  The festival was originally held on August 15, but was moved to January 21 to celebrate victory over the French in 1690.  So, now you have something to talk about while you are eating granola bars and hugging people.

I have spent the past few weeks bragging to people about how great it is to live in my community because I do not have to shovel snow from my sidewalk and driveway.  I should have learned by now that I need to be quiet about those kinds of things so I don’t hex myself.  This past week we had a snow fall and it all looked very nice.  That was until I realized that, because the amount was less than two inches, I would have to clean my sidewalk and driveway.  It was not really that hard to do.  The snow was light and there really was not much.  I got it done in a short time.  The point was that I was just saying how nice it was to have someone else do it.

I am amazed at the number of people who did not bother to clear their property, relying on the solar snow removal system.  As I drove around, there were a number of homes where they simply drove over the snow and did not worry about clearing their driveways.  They were lucky that we had a warm spell and the tire tracks did not freeze.  I think some enterprising teens could do very well offering to clear the snow from those houses.  Maybe I should set something up for the future – Snow Removal for the Old or Lazy - or something else clever like that.  We’ll see.

The other day I took another step further into the 21^st century.  I got a new thermostat!  I know, you are thinking, “Big Deal!”  Well, it is for me.  First let me say that I have never liked the one that I had.  It was a cheap one that I am sure only cost a couple dollars back when they were building this community.  The thing had no light in it, so you could not read it without turning on the main foyer light, which did not light the hallway where the thermostat was that well, or getting a flashlight.  The directions for setting it were so small that I would have had a difficult time reading them before I got old and needed glasses.  Setting the time required several steps and if you were a second or two slow, it reset and you had to start over again.  Programming the schedules for when the heat or air conditioner came on and went off required two hands.  This was difficult because the directions were printed on the back of the cover that you had to remove to get to the controls.

When the service tech came to do the thermostat, he offered me several options.  One was pretty much like the one I had, one was for old people – the numbers were large and there was no real programming involved – and then there was the one I ended up with.  I asked about a different one I had seen, but he said that I would need to get a new furnace for that one because it would not be able to communicate with the furnace I have now.  I used to think that it was a shame when two people couldn’t communicate, now we have a problem with electronic devices not being … but I digress.  I decided I really didn’t need a new furnace.

The one that I have now can be very easily programmed using one hand.  It can be set up to know when you are not home and automatically adjust the temperature to a preset holding temp.  It also has an app (of course it does) that allows me to control it from my phone or my iPad.  As if that is not lazy enough, I can also control it by calling out to my smart speaker.  That is the device that people have that can tell you how far it is to the moon or tell corny jokes like, “A magician was walking down the street one day and suddenly he turned into a grocery store.”

Anyway, I now have this new thermostat that can tell me the temperature in my house, outside my house, what time it is and what the relative humidity is.   I think that one of these days I should do some research to find out what the relative humidity has to do with anything.  It must be important, because it is always showing on anything that gives you weather information.

This week our fact tells us that there are more Barbie dolls in Italy than there are Canadians in Canada.  I have to be honest, I have a bit of a problem with this one.  As of 2016, the population of Canada was 36.29 million people.  I have a hard time believing that there are that many Barbies in Italy.  More importantly, how would anyone know?  Sure, you could get sales numbers, but what if some of them were mailed as presents to another country, like Canada?  Does this include dolls that were broken and thrown in the trash?  I will need to see more specific information before I will buy this one.