Stuff On My Mind

My mother joined us for dinner on Friday night.  After the kids went to bed, we sat in the family room discussing this and that.  I started talking about something I'd come across the other day when researching words that have crossed over into English from the Chinook Jargon—a trade language that developed in the Pacific Northwest.

Thelma commented that I know the strangest stuff and she has no idea where I get it from.  She told my mom how we had been visiting Vancouver earlier in the week to soak in the Olympic atmosphere.  As we were walking from the torch to the train station, we came across a small mass of people and cameras buzzing around somebody outside the media center.  We stopped to see who it was and I recognized the man at the center of the crowd as Gordon Campbell, the Premier of British Columbia.

"I don't know how he knows this stuff," Thelma said.

I couldn't tell if she was impressed or mocking me.  More than once, Thelma has reminded me that I can remember seemingly irrelevant points about irrelevant things, but I can't remember the names of all my cousins.

I guess my head is so full of stuff that I don't have room for it all.  So, in hopes of making room for another cousin's name in my mental rolodex, here's a list of stuff that has been on my mind lately.

• The cot-caught merger.
• Home turf advantage in the Olympics.
• State education funding and the legislative process.
• Live versus tape-delayed coverage of sporting events.
• Proper mechanics when officiating a basketball game.
• The conversion process.
• A comparison of past Olympic pictograms.
• Cemeteries in and around Appleton, Wisconsin.
• The Levitical priesthood.
• The tribe of Ephraim.
• How to spend more time with my family.
• When to fertilize next.
• The correct concentration of weed killer.
• Mother's Day.

...plus a bunch of other stuff I never seem to have enough time to finish thinking about. Maybe I'll write a blog post about some of it so I can make more room.