OT: I identify with.....

Oh My Gosh! I have to day it again.... MEGA DITTO!! Sounds like my mother (gosh, the stories I could tell too) and me (wt & other "bad" habits). I'm attacking the weight thing anew -- yoga or stretching for @ least 1.5 hrs per day (hard to fit it in, but I don't want to be my mother! & aching & complaining all the time) AND when we take our 20th anniversary trip (18 days from now), DH and I have agreed, no naughty foods or beer until we've walked 10,000 steps on my new pedometer!!!! Wishing all of us with those cranky, unmotivated, .... relatives a calm and peaceful holiday season (do what we do! just spend a couple of hours with the icky ones & spend a lot more time with the non-ickies in your life). EG

Caryn, retract the talons.....head hurting today, sweetie?

Ellice - who hopes we're all well

Good one. There's another great French noble woman, whose name I'll have to think of. But, at her chateau in the Loire, when all the nobility were having heads chopped off, the locals protected her as she'd actually helped to encourage a better life for the villagers, etc. I can see the chateau - been there, but cannot think of the name. It has 4 lovely round towers in the forecourt.

Then there's always Catherine d'Medici - who manipulated, organized, and generally ran some kings, and more.

ellice

Hiya Rosemary - how ta doing?

Pat

It`s not all honey, being an only child, is it? I mean - you get the LOT - both sides of the coin! Dad was the moaner and griper in our family - Mum was fine most of the time. I often wished I had siblings - if only to take the pressure off a little! LOL! As it was, I used to keep out of the way as much as possible.

Pat

I think it`s quite another part of her anatomy that has a pain - as does mine! LOL!

Pat

Not wanting to whine about it. Life is not easy at the moment, let's leave it at that here, I can fill you in in email if you wish.

Caryn

I wonder if you can still get Negroids. Very politically incorrect I suppose, but we used to like them. Quite powerful, too.

Pat

Two of my favourites there. Anyone seen "The Lion in Winter"? I thought that Katherine Hepburn was ideal as Eleanor.

Pat

Catherine the Great of Russia is another strong, scary woman! lol

Caryn

That's a favorite movie of mine!

Cheryl

Changing subjects....something occurred to me and I thought it might be an interesting offshoot.

Has anybody got a name based on their ancestry?

Caryn is Welsh, I have Welsh, Scots, French and Russian ancestry.

I'm glad Mom went with Caryn and not Morag (pure Scots), Clarabell (French) or Olga (Russian).

My poor brother got stuck with "Gregor" and has to constantly fight people who add the "Y" to the end thinking it's a typo!

Caryn (not the typical Karen, the German Karin, or the creative Karyn)

Well, we did chose the kids' names based on the German spelling.....

Cheryl

Well, my name isn't based on my ancestry in a truly historical way... my first name is the feminine version of my dad's, although my mother swears I was named for the song "Hey Paula". My middle name is for my maternal great-grandmother, but it's definitely from their English heritage :).

What has always irked me about my name, though, are the people who swear that my first name is a nickname or shortened version of Pauline. It's not. at. all. My first grade teacher insisted that this was the case (her first name was Pauline) and couldn't understand why I wouldn't answer when she called me Pauline. At that age, I wasn't being smart, I just truly didn't realize she was talking to me! But it really gave me grounds for disliking people who try to impose their narrow and rigid view of how the world should be on others!

Being of German, Cherokee, Scots, and English descent, I guess I did come out of the "name game" pretty unscathed... lol

Paula

snipped-for-privacy@aol.com wrote:

It's one of the ones I watch over and over. I also think Kathryn Hepburn was not only ideal as Eleanor, she was ideal as nearly anything she tried.

Lucille

Understood - feel free to use the mail or the phone...

ellice

A great movie. When I was at geeky undergrad school, I also did drama stuff

- and I think the first or second show I was the "full" producer for (not to mention chief set designer with a great set builder head carpenter guy, and head make-up person) was Lion in Winter. And, we only had 1 cast member not from the university (someone who was somehow related to the school, but a woman, and a little older -as in maybe 28?) who did the Eleanor role. We actually won some Southern Drmaa award for the production (oh, so long ago)

- it was so much fun. Amazingly - last month at break-fast for Yom Kippur - the boyfriend of the ex-wife of one of our friends (it's a very extended family) who is from Atlanta was talking to me about Atlanta - and asking me people that I might know - mostly not as he's a few years older and I was a student living on campus. Then he brings up "Eric..." - and darn if it's not the guy that played Phillip - and did it fabulously. And we were friends for years, and I gave his mom my stuffed cabbage recipe. I think the guy at dinner about flipped when my response was "yeah - he played Phillip the French King in Lion in Winter...."

I used to like to go also to Hever Castle - and do Anne Boleyn's walk - it's kind of eerie and lovely.

ellice