Monday, 5/22

A few random things to start the week, the first being that this headache can go away any time soon.

I've had a really annoying sinus headache the past few days, and it doesn't seem to show any signs of letting up. It's kind of surprising; when I was younger, I used to get a bad case of hay fever every spring which would invariably be accompanied by an annoying sinus headache. Well, I've found that one of the few things that's good about getting older is that my hay fever seems to have diminished each year.

Except, of course, for this year.

I don't know why it's so bad this year. I don't know if it's the very warm winter followed by the very cold spring we've had, or if it's just all the plants & trees sprouting at once (and as an entirely unrelated side note to daily blog reader Betsy in Reese—the lilacs should be in full bloom when you're up here this weekend!). All I know is that my head is full of gunk, so much gunk that I can almost feel it slosh around when I turn said head.

So I just hope it goes away soon.

Secondly, I don't know if you've seen this yet, but Time magazine has a cute little feature on their website that allows you to see what your name would be if you were born today.

How does it do it? Well, it determines the popularity of your name the year you were born. For instance, the year I was born, “James” was the third most popular name for a baby boy. So it takes where your name ranked in popularity and then extrapolates to 2016, because the Social Security people just released their list of the most popular baby names of the year. So, if I was born last year and still had been given the third most popular name of the year, I would no longer be “Jim”.

Nope. My name would be Mason. You know—like the jar.

Of course, Loraine had a much bigger laugh than did I. The year she was born her name was the 607^th most popular girl's name, so if she had been born last year and was still given the girl's name that ranked 607, her name would've been Averi. Yes, with an “i” on the end.

Mason & Averi. Well, I guess we now know our names if we ever need to go undercover or something!

(jim@wmqt.com) (aka Mason)