Dirt Transplant

"Hi, mom!"

#1 Son walked into the kitchen from work, and when i glanced up from the dishes i was washing i did a bit of a double take.  He looked like he had done a dirt transplant onto his pants!

What happened? i asked.

"Oh, yeah," he said.  "Well, I spend about 8 hours on my knees today, scrubbing every inch of the undersides and legs of everything in the kitchen and dining area.  So all this is dirt from the floor, which we mop daily, but it's a kitchen floor, so it gets dirty again every day.  Then I spent a couple of hours on a ladder, dusting all of the light fixtures that are 15 feet up.  And I kept almost forgetting I was on a ladder and almost stepping off.  That would have been bad.

"Oh, and this was a great day to wear my brand new work pants, look!"

He pointed out the rip in what had been, until that morning, pristine khaki pants.

"Now I'm not so sure what I'm going to do.  It's not in my budget to get new ones until next payday, and my old ones aren't exactly acceptable any more, either.  I hate that the day I wear the nice, new ones they make me do this stuff!"

It's okay, i said as i pulled out a new pair i had just bought for him that morning.  When you told me your old ones were too old and you were only going to have one pair for a while, i went and got you another pair.

"Wow!  Thanks!" he said, with a huge grin.  "How do you always seem to know?"

Mommies are magic, i reminded him as he walked toward his room with the new pants.


Today is

Be a Millionaire Day - now we all can go for that

Blue Jeans Day -- Levi Strauss and David Jacobs received the patent for their denim pants with riveted pockets on this day in 1873

Dainty-Four Remembrance Day  -- Fairy Calendar

Eliza Doolittle Day* -- in honor of Shaw and his famous fictional character, to encourage proper use of one's native language

Emancipation Day -- Florida, US

Festival of Mjollnir -- Ancient Norse Calendar (feast of Thor's Hammer, date approximate)

Flying Solo Day -- Lindberg began his historic flight on this day in 1927

Grudie Rosnoe -- Slavic Pagan/Asatru (ten days of sacrifices to Rod for rain and good harvests)

Independence Day -- East Timor(2002)

Hari Kebangkitan Nasional Indonesia -- Indonesia (Indonesian National Awakening Day)

Mecklenburg Day -- North Carolina, US (commemoration of the signing of a declaration of independence from England by the citizens of Mecklenburg County on this day in 1775)

National Day -- Cameroon

National Quiche Lorraine Day

Norman Rockwell Day -- his first Saturday Evening Post cover appeared this day in 1916

Pick Strawberries Day

RHS Chelsea Flower Show -- Chelsea, London, England (the world's greatest flower show celebrates its 101st anniversary;through Saturday)

St. Bernadine of Siena's Day (Patron of advertising and advertisers, communications personnel, compulsive gamblers/gambling addicts, public relations work and personnel; Italy; Aquila, Italy; Capri, Italy; Castelspina, Italy; Trevignano, Italy; the diocese of San Bernardino, California; against compulsive gambling, chest, lung, and respiratory problems and hoarseness of the throat)

St. Ives' Day (an honest lawyer; in the Anglican tradition, Patron of abandoned children and orphans, advocates, canon lawyers, judges, lawyers, and notaries; in the Roman Catholic tradition, Patron of Saint Ives, Cambridgeshire, England)

T'veer Chong Kamhaeng -- Cambodia (Day of Remembrance, anniversary of Khmer Rouge regime takeover in 1975, a day to remember all who died at their hands and work for peace)

Weights and Measures Day / World Metrology Day -- anniversary of the treaty in 1875 which established the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, France

**"One evening the King will say, "Oh, Liza, old thing,
I want all of England your praises to sing,
Next week on the twentieth of May,
I proclaim Liza Doolittle Day."


Birthdays Today:

Tahmoh Penikett, 1975
Tony Stewart, 1971
Tony Goldwyn, 1960
Bronson Pinchot, 1959
Ronald Prescott Reagan, 1958
David Paterson, 1954
Cher, 1946
Joe Cocker, 1944
Stan Mikita, 1940
Anthony Zerbe, 1936
George Gobel, 1919
Jimmy Stewart, 1908
Henri Julien Felix Rousseau, 1844
William Fargo, 1818
John Stuart Mill, 1806
Honore de Balzac, 1799
Dolly Madison, 1768


Debuting/Premiering Today:

"Elegie für junge Liebende / Elegy for Young Lovers(Opera), 1961
Norman Rockwell's First Saturday Evening Post Cover, 1916


Today in History:

The first Ecumenical Council in the Christian Church, the Council of Nicea, opens, 325
An earthquake kills about 300,000 people in Syria and Antiochia, 526
John Cabot sets sail from Bristol, England, on his ship  Matthew looking for a route to the west, 1497
Cartographer  Abraham Ortelius issues the first modern atlas, 1570
Shakespeare's Sonnets  are first published in London, 1609
Napoleon Bonaparte reinstates slavery in the French colonies, revoking its abolition in the French Revolution, 1802
Otto is named the first modern king of Greece, 1835
HMS Erebus and HMS Terror with 134 men under John Franklin sail from the River Thames in England, beginning a disastrous expedition to find the Northwest Passage in which all hands are lost, 1845
U.S. President Abraham Lincoln signs the Homestead Act into law, 1862
Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis receive a U.S. patent for blue jeans with copper rivets, 1873
The Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy is formed, 1882
Krakatoa begins to erupt (the volcano's final and most notable explosion will occur on August 26), 1883
The first public display of Thomas Edison's prototype kinetoscope, 1891
Cuba gains independence from the United States, 1902
The Saturday Evening Post publishes its first cover with a Norman Rockwell painting ("Boy with Baby Carriage"), 1916
Montreal, Quebec radio station XWA broadcasts the first regularly scheduled radio programming in North America, 1920
By the Treaty of Jedda, the United Kingdom recognizes the sovereignty of King Ibn Saud in the Kingdoms of Hejaz and Nejd, which later merge to become the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 1927
At 07:52 Charles Lindbergh takes off from Roosevelt Field in Long Island, New York, on the world's first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, 1927
Amelia Earhart takes off from Newfoundland to begin the world's first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean by a female pilot, 1932
In a referendum in Quebec, the population rejects by a 60% vote the proposal from its government to move towards independence from Canada, 1980
First publications of the discovery of the HIV virus that causes AIDS in the journal Science by Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo individually, 1983
The Chinese authorities declare martial law in the face of pro-democracy demonstrations, setting the scene for the Tiananmen Square massacre, 1989
In a second referendum in Quebec, the population rejects by a slight majority the proposal from its government to move towards independence from Canada, 1995
The independence of East Timor is recognized by Portugal, formally ending 23 years of Indonesian rule and 3 years of provisional UN administration (Portugal itself is the former colonizer of East Timor until 1976), 2002
Scientists at the Craig J. Venter Institute announce they have successfully created the world's first artificial life form by transplanting a synthesized genome into an existing cell, 2010