What's in a name?

I hate doing taxes. I don’t mind doing my own as much, because I can usually whip them out quickly but I particularly loathe doing other people’s taxes. For whatever reason, people assume that a licensed CPA knows the ins and outs of the tax system, including state and local city situations. Nothing could be further from the truth – unless you are a TAX accountant (which I am NOT). On the CPA exam, we cover the basics of individual returns, but that’s it. The other part of doing someone else’s return is the liability. You do someone a favor, but Lord help you if it is incorrect. Anyway, I managed to make it through this season fairly unscathed. Good grief.

Well, the Miss USA pageant last night, was, well, your typical beauty pageant. Thank goodness for the DVR so I could fast forward through most of the crep – watching Barbies parade around in swimsuits with their heads bobbing to and fro was quite entertaining in the fast forward mode, I should add. As I mentioned before, the only reason for me to watch it this year was that I knew the Miss Kansas “delegate” (the word actually used this year – like this is the U.N. for Beauty or something). Poor Miss Kansas – she didn’t even make it to the Top 15 (I can’t wait to hear the back story, though!). I did watch the rest of the show, although I could have cared less who won. I thought their listed “hobbies” were hilarious, though. Some of them were things such as “discussing current events”, “shopping”, “surfing the Internet” and my favorite one, a sad, hopeless attempt for wholesome appeal “spending time with my family”.

DNA Project - Status Report:
I will start labeling the kid updates in a separate section so it can be skipped if desired – not everyone wants to hear this stuff, after all. Again, I will keep gory details to a minimum. So, I had lunch with BOTH of my grandmothers on Saturday. Like, we ate a meal in a restaurant together AT THE SAME TIME. While I love them both dearly, they are an interesting juxtaposition of repression and like to live in parallel worlds of Pretend where reality is altered at their whim. It was an exhausting game as they tag-teamed me into submission. Furthermore, they are obsessed with the Freeloader possibly being a girl. You see, after 2 grandsons (and another on the way in May), the family is rabid for a child of the female persuasion. To compound my agony, I made the mistake of telling them that if the Freeloader was indeed a she, that her MIDDLE name would be Lily (after X’s mother, who passed away 4 years unexpectedly, at way too early of an age). I thought that by throwing them a bone to gnaw on, I could breathe for awhile and hunker down to my food. My, how wrong was I – and gravely so at that. Now, I stressed MIDDLE name, but they have determined that Lily is not an appropriate middle name and I am now being inundated with strings of names that include Lily as the FIRST name – despite my firm statement that X doesn’t want his daughter to be named directly after his dead mother because in his words, “that would be creepy”. After the kid is born – be it boy or girl, I fear we will have to do bag searches when they leave the house to ensure they haven’t taken off with what will surely be a poorly-named, starved and under-clothed child. These 2 gals are nuts. And I share a bloodline with them, which is quite disturbing.

Speaking of names, if one more person asks me if we are going to give our child a "normal" name or an Indian name, I will spit nails. Seriously. With all the phonic nightmares out there in the realm of baby names, who the hell is going to notice a kid with a REAL Indian name?