life.

Last night we went to Bartlesville to get Miranda an outfit for the IBS fall dinner. I do not see how the mall stays in business. It's never very busy. Of course it was a Thursday night but still.

On the way home we stopped by Hastings and I picked up an Irish dictionary. After looking through it though, I've lost some of my desire. It's yet another language with masculine and feminine nouns. What rubbish! Here are my choices for gender neutral languages. It includes Quenya and Sindarin, which is silly because they are man made languages. They were both invented for Lord of The Rings (the books and not the movies). J.R.R. Tolkien was quite a linguist. I'm leaning toward Basque or Finnish. The Finnish part should be fairly obvious choice for me.

For those of you who were totally lost on that last sentence, I will explain. We had a baby in 2003 that didn't live. Well, he lived, but only for 5 days. We called him Paul Teemu Allen. The Teemu caused quite a stir. Teemu is a Finnish name. Here's where I got it. Yup. An ice hockey player. But... I hear you sigh with great relief... "At least the first name was Paul!" Yes it was. Paul Kariya and Teemu Selänne were the one-two duo for the Anaheim Ducks (my team). The year Teemu was born, the Ducks went to the Stanley Cup Finals but didn't win. Neither did Teemu. I miss the little guy to this day. Luckily we have two other great children.

Tonight is the IBS dinner. They don't have babysitters this year so Angie is bringing over her kids to play with Patrick and Nellie.

On further research, I'm not too sure about Finnish. Apparently there are 2,253 variations of the word for "shop". If you are interested, they are listed here. More research will be required.

nc