What's So Great...

 ...about Homecoming weekend?

Everything.  The kids are at the hotel, eating pizza and junk food and pestering football players for autographs and visiting the gym and eating huge breakfasts.

There is a parade, and decorations, and it's just plain fun.

What's not so fun this year is that Badlands Blackie, our resident bully/coward cat, has just been diagnosed as diabetic.  Plus we have kittens that have to be fed around the clock.  So mom is more at home than at the hotel, playing vet tech and bottle feeder.

It's okay, as i will go up there for the parade, then back home to feed everyone again, and Blackie, coward that he is, has not even noticed that twice a day while he is eating i stick that tiny needle in him.

Now if the home team can just win this one, it will be the (almost) perfect weekend.


Today is:

Area Code Day -- US (began 61 years ago today)

Day of Russian Militsiya -- Russia

Dia de la Tradicion -- Argentina (birth anniversary of Jose Hernandez)

Edmund Fitzgerald Memorial Beacon Lighting -- Split Rock Lighthouse, Two Harbors, MN, US (memorial for the Edmund Fitzgerald and all who have lost their lives in Great Lakes shipwrecks)

First Cry of Independence Day -- Panama (an official flag day)

Forget-Me-Not Day -- informal day to spend a bit of time with relatives you don't see often

Goddess of Reason's Day (Revolutionary France)

Hari Pahlawan -- Indonesia (Heroes' Day/Warrior's Day)

Lord Mayor's Day -- London, England (obs.)

Los Santos Uprising Day -- Panama

Martini -- Ancient Latvian Calendar (beginning of winter festival that starts on Martinmas Eve)

National Toothpaste Appreciation Day -- not official, but i'm sure the dentifrice industry loves this one

National Vanilla Cupcake Day

Sleep Dangerously Night -- internet generated, a night to switch sides of the bed with your spouse and see who falls out of bed first

St. Andrew Avellino's Day (Patron of apoplexics, for a holy death, stroke victims; Badlato, Naples, and Sicily, Italy; stroke victims; for a holy death; against apoplexy, strokes, and sudden death)

St. Martin's Eve -- Germany; Portugal (Martimas Eve)

USMC Day -- US (includes the Marine Corps Birthday Ball)

Wish-Spoiling Sports Day -- Fairy Calendar (Imps, Gremlins, and grumpy Goblins)


Anniversaries Today:

Debut of Sesame Street, 1969
Debut of Microsoft Windows, 1983


Birthdays Today:

Ellen Pompeo, 1969
MacKenzie Phillips, 1959
Donna Fargo, 1949
Tim Rice, 1944
Russel Means, 1939
Roy Scheider, 1932
Richard Burton, 1925
Jane Froman, 1907
Claude Rains, 1889
Martin Luther, 1483


Today in History:

Rene Descartes has the dreams that inspire his Meditations on First Philosophy, 1619
The Dutch formally cede New Netherlands to the English; it is renamed New York, 1674
France ends forced worship of God, substitute the Goddess of Reason, 1793
The US state of Kentucky outlaws dueling, 1801
Stanley presumes that he has met Livingston in Ujiji, Central Africa, 1871
The first Woman's Christian Temperance Union meeting is held in Boston, 1891
The first Gideon Bible is put in a hotel room, 1908
Hirohito ascends the throne as Emperor of Japan, 1928
The Hope Diamond is donated to the Smithsonian Institution by New York diamond merchant Harry Winston, 1958
The 729-foot-long freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald sinks during a storm on Lake Superior, killing all 29 crew on board, 1975
A 106-car Canadian Pacific freight train carrying explosive and poisonous chemicals from Windsor, Ontario, Canada derails in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada just west of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, causing a massive explosion and the largest peacetime evacuation in Canadian history and one of the largest in North American history, 1979
The communist regime of Bulgaria falls, 1989
The "Codex Leicester", the only Leonardo da Vinci manuscript owned in the United States and the only one in the world still in private hands, was sold at auction to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who paid $30.8 million, 1994