When his granddaughter was named, my uncle asked his daughter if there was a Saint Madison. Which there is not. But there is a Saint Kevin who lived in the 7th century. But he wasn't canonized until the 20th century, so it's really a new name and the Germans are right to be offended.
In the mid-90s, my niece had a German bf named Kevin, who'd been born in the early 80s.
I have very snobbish thoughts about the names now being given by white families in rural areas to their male children. But mostly I only see this through Facebook.
Little genius and my favorite British soccer player Kevin Keegan twice won the Balon d'Or (best European football player) playing for Hamburg in 1978 and 1979. Got to have been at least a few German kids named for him.
My family emigrated from Poland in the 60s, and somehow none of the extended family still there told me that Home Alone has become a veritable Polish Christmas tradition. Then again, we never put a carp in the bathtub or hay under the tablecloth, though we did all the other stuff.
We now have only a walk-in shower, so our carp is very bereft.
Growing up, I was led to believe it was a Brooklyn Jewish thing.
There's a great/trashy kdrama about a woman who has an affair with an evil Korean-American athlete, who (SPOILER!!) later ends up dead. Anyway, the guy's name is Kevin Lee. He has a Korean name too, but whenever they refer to him, which is constantly, they call him by his full American name, all run together and with equal emphasis on each syllable: KEVINLY. I think the name is mostly intended to signal his Americanness, and when they say his name (which, again, they do constantly), it's supposed to sound sinister, but how sinister can it really sound to my American ears? His name is Kevinly!
Sounds like a horror to us.
Merry Christmas, reprobates.
Carp in the tub at home is emphatically not just a US Jewish tradition. It's been a traditional Christmas main dish in CZ since maybe the 1600s, and was part of the holiday for centuries before, sold live in barrels in cities and kept in a tub or cooking pot at home before the meal since before indoor plumbing. The rural ponds that were stocked with carp started being built in the 1300s there, combination food source, flood control (still effective, certainly longer lasting than levees built in the sixties), and a source of fertilizer. Carp were a source of relatively cheap protein for a mostly peasant population that usually couldn't afford meat. Medieval christmas meals there probably emphasized numerous courses, many courses being a menu metonym for wealth in the coming year, plus if a family could manage a lucky number, so much the better.
I started to respond to the OP by finding profiles of kids named Jordynn or Rambo, but they just seem like regular people whose parents gave them impulsive names.
I had thought that the fish in the tub thing was a thing done by Polish Jews.
You want stupid Christmas? I give you Christmas Adam: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/22/us/christmas-adam-dec-23.html
At an Uzbek restaurant* for Christmas Eve, as one does.
Just opened in my daughter's town.
15: Wow. Although at first I thought it was going to be some Men's Rights thing, so I was actually pleasantly surprised.
That reminds me, a shockingly high percentage of people think men have fewer ribs than women.
Women sometimes order half a rack though. Men always a full.
On average, men's bodies contain fewer ribs.
15: Best part is guy trolling the Times by claiming he eats a McRib on December 23 every year. That's not how McRibs work
Where did the houseboat thread end up? It just occurred to me that I never got my answers.
God, condensed milk is so delicious. I could just eat this whole can.
1: I feel like the only correct response to your uncle was, "Bro, she's only X days old. Sainthood takes time."
Heh. He probably would have loved that.
huh! Pokey just came out to me. But I can't tell Jammies because he said he wanted to have that conversation with dad himself? And so I'm bursting and processing and have nowhere to park it. Ace has a very LGBTQ=rainbow sense of personal style, and somehow it hadn't crossed my mind about Pokey.
Why does it feel like good news? It should be neutral news. Maybe I'm just happy to have a good relationship with him where he felt comfy telling me? Maybe I just want to be smug about my progressive street cred.*
*kidding, that was my grandmother who desperately wanted the liberal street cred of having a gay grandson and would complain mightily that my cousin hadn't had a proper coming out conversation with her where she could bestow her beneficence upon him and tell all her friends.
Heebie, your children have made excellent choice of parents.
22: The houseboat thread fell off the page or maybe floated off the edge of the world. Pretty much the same result.
27: Aw, that's sweet! I hope he's able to talk to Jammies soon, it's hard to sit solo with such things. Elke, now 13, just confided in us about the girl at school that a) she has a crush on; b) is obviously flirting with her; except c) she has no idea if the girl is just toying with her or what, and while no one including the girl in question is likely to have a definitive answer on that one, it did also make me feel happy that she wanted to share.
Just before the houseboat thread floated away my advice was to read Offshore and I'll give it one more time. It's much shorter than House of Leaves.
Robert Earl Keene says Merry Christmas From the Family.
Well thanks lourdes, those both sound deeply depressing.
15: I've written about, teach about, and am related to US evangelicals, but they still confuse me. I remember when my sister told me her church didn't have services on Christmas Day, even if fell on a Sunday, and I couldn't believe it. "The pastors want to spend the day celebrating with their families."
Now I'm just waiting for them to start celebrating "Easter Noah" on Fat Tuesday. /crankycradlecatholic
Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah, all! Heebie, you should definitely not elbow and wink at Pokey while emphasizing certain words of "Deck the Halls" to show how accepting and approving you are.
32: I think just the general provenance of how he came to be on one, and how he likes it.
The floating house guy is back. There is a long back story as to how I ended up on a floating house but I will try to address the more recent things that got me here.
I had been living in Eastern Oregon for the last 25 years owned a couple small businesses there and when I had saved enough money I intended to sell everything and retire. I wanted to go back to backpacking in the mountains and taking long wilderness canoe trips like I did in my twenties and early thirties before I started working all the time to be responsible and save some money for retirement. I sold one business in 2018 and took some time to go snowshoeing in the high country of Rocky Mountain national park and I about keeled over from lack of oxygen. I thought I was just out of shape. A few months later my younger brother died from Pulmonary Fibrosis when there was a glitch in his oxygen delivery. A month later in 2019 I was diagnosed with the same thing. My pulmonologist figured I had a genetic predisposition fibrosis and as fast as my brother died, I figured I didn't have much time left.
My wife M always said she wanted to visit Antarctica since she was seven years old. I suggested we take the trip, and we scheduled it for February 2020. We left Argentina for Antarctica in early February and were totally disconnected from the world for two weeks. When we got back to Argentina, we discovered the pandemic was on. We had set aside a few days to run around Buenos Ares after our return, but we ended up sick with what ended up being covid although we didn't think so at the time. We spent a couple days sick in our room in the Palermo area of Buenos Ares before catching one of the last flights out of Argentina before everything shut down. We made it back and M got better but I got seriously ill.
The floating house guy is back. There is a long back story as to how I ended up on a floating house but I will try to address the more recent things that got me here.
I had been living in Eastern Oregon for the last 25 years owned a couple small businesses there and when I had saved enough money I intended to sell everything and retire. I wanted to go back to backpacking in the mountains and taking long wilderness canoe trips like I did in my twenties and early thirties before I started working all the time to be responsible and save some money for retirement. I sold one business in 2018 and took some time to go snowshoeing in the high country of Rocky Mountain national park and I about keeled over from lack of oxygen. I thought I was just out of shape. A few months later my younger brother died from Pulmonary Fibrosis when there was a glitch in his oxygen delivery. A month later in 2019 I was diagnosed with the same thing. My pulmonologist figured I had a genetic predisposition fibrosis and as fast as my brother died, I figured I didn't have much time left.
My wife M always said she wanted to visit Antarctica since she was seven years old. I suggested we take the trip, and we scheduled it for February 2020. We left Argentina for Antarctica in early February and were totally disconnected from the world for two weeks. When we got back to Argentina, we discovered the pandemic was on. We had set aside a few days to run around Buenos Ares after our return, but we ended up sick with what ended up being covid although we didn't think so at the time. We spent a couple days sick in our room in the Palermo area of Buenos Ares before catching one of the last flights out of Argentina before everything shut down. We made it back and M got better but I got seriously ill.
Dang, I didn't think it went the first time.
I hope there's a second installment coming!
Anyway, I got so bad I couldn't even walk a block, but I thought it was the fibrosis getting worse and my time was about up. Then, over the next three years I gradually felt better. It turns out, I had extensive covid lung damage in addition to the fibrosis and some of the covid damage was gradually getting better although the fibrosis was also gradually getting worse. All this is to say I am down to about 50% of normal lung diffusion capacity and my high-altitude backpacking days are over. I am now on a drug that seems to have stopped the progression of the fibrosis and I can function pretty well at low altitude and the retail price for the drug is "only" a little less than $14,000 a month. Your money or your life I guess. My Medicare supplement is through United Health Care and they delayed approving my prescription for two months. I guess they hoped I would die. But I digress. I can't get much lower altitude than this house. I also need to avoid poor air quality and we only had one poor air quality day here this past year.
Wow. That's a wild story. Being in Antartica when Covid hits is really some sci-fi shit!
But as to how I came to settle on a floating house, I wanted to live near the coast for the lower altitude and the better air quality. I also think the coastal Northwest is going to suffer less from climate change. The only negatives I could see is the eventual big earthquake off the coast or eruptions from the three sleeping volcanoes I can see from my house (Saint Helens, Adams, Hood). But as I stated in the other thread, regular housing that ticked the boxes was crazy expensive.
I bought a sailboat in 2017 to dink around with and I brought it down the Columbia last fall to a marina berth west of Portland for the winter since it rarely freezes here. While walking the docks, I passed quite a number of floating houses. I thought this was actually really nice place so I looked into floating houses. A real-estate agent showed me a couple houses that were for sale and they were also pretty expensive. Then she came to this house and said it was for sale but she didn't want to show it because it had some problems and couldn't be financed. M and I wanted to take a look anyway, so she showed it to us and it was a little rough. The previous owner was in his late 80s and had let maintenance slide. I was hesitant since I had fixed up old houses before and you never know what sort of a mess you will have until you open it up, but M wanted to buy it. It is hard to find people that will work on floating houses, but I got some recommendations and had some inspections done and got quotes to fix the major problems. We took the plunge and made a cash offer just a little over half of the asking price and it was accepted. With further inspection, we found some other issues and knocked another $10,000 off the price. So here we are.
Since we bought the house, we have spent about $100,000 for repairs to fix all of the structural issues including a new roof and some new windows but we are far from done with the interior. Just as an aside, one of the first things we did was have tug bring a small barge that we tied up to the house and then we loaded it with 10,000 lbs of the previous owner's junk to dispose of. The house floated a little higher after that.
To inspect underwater you hire a diver who specializes in floating houses. He does an inspection and writes up a report. If your house starts sitting too low in the water or you placed your grand piano on one side of the house and it makes your eggs all run to the side of the pan, you call the diver and he can position big Styrofoam blocks under the logs in the right place to make everything good again.
Actually, in this case, there was an underwater inspection report included with the listing. A bank won't finance a floating house without a satisfactory inspection report. The report for this house showed rot on some of the stringers that cross on top of the logs. The stringers are drifted to the logs and in this case had an estimated life of ten years. The drifts are just big nails that are 2.5 to 3 feet long and are pounded through the stringers and into the logs with a jack hammer. Maybe John Henry used to do it with a sledge, but we are not that tough anymore. I believe a bank requires a 25-year estimated life before they will finance. We replaced all of the old stringers with new 6x12 by 35-foot treated stringers giving the house a 30+ year estimated life.
I wonder how many floating houses include diver skeletons held up by giant blocks of styrofoam.
Kevinismus sounds as if it should involve standing with your hand out for the time it takes for a bird to build a nest in it and fledge its chicks. St. Kevin must have done other miraculous stuff, but I've no idea what.
Visit Glendalough, site of Kevin's monastery, if you can. It's an awesome place, though sadly commercialised these days.
Kevin as a German name codes to me as an East German name, probably someone born in the 1980s or possibly 1990s. In the '80s, choosing an obviously Anglophone name was a way to signal non-conformity without (by then) risking overt penalties. I'm not sure what the deal would have been in the '90s. Maybe news was slow to arrive in some parts of the former GDR; maybe some people just liked the vibe.
Omg! here's all the houseboat stuff I was looking for.
Oh wait. No. This is the houseboat resurrection, with new interesting content.
48 makes me think of the Modest Mouse styrofoam boots song, which they were actually playing at the climbing gym the other day.
I wonder how many floating houses include diver skeletons held up by giant blocks of styrofoam.
(looks round furtively)
None. None at all. Why, what have you heard?
I am sorry if I kind of monopolized the comments here, but I knew nothing about house boats a year ago and it has been an education. It is a whole other world.
56 no need to apologize whatsoever, it was fascinating and exactly the kind of thing that makes this community great
13, carp cultivation: Inland upland!
Houseboat stuff: Inshore up...grade? No, but seriously, that was a heck of a story, Abe Speckle.
If you want to know anything more, just ask, but I have pretty much exhausted my meager pool of knowledge
Assume you've read and/or seen* Kesey's Sometimes A Great Notion for Oregon river living. if not, book is overlong but some good parts, movies is so-so, but has one really great scene.
*I think some cuts are titled Never Give an Inch,
I spent a lot of time in the first couple of years I was post fruit basket looking for a live-aboard both because it was cool and as a way of not buying at the property bubble peak as was. The ones worth looking at on the Thames are invariably big Dutch sailing barges that are iron or steel built; those will usually sail. The usual points apply that the vessel is doing her best to sink as soon as launched, but the big problem which overwhelms all others is where to moor the thing; as a rule you can be told to move on at any time. There are a few places with more security of contract, one is just downriver from Tower Bridge and James "Novara Media" Butler lives there.
I remember having scouted that community and going to scrabble along a concrete dockwall and down a plank in Deptford Creek to look at another barge. Access was through a gate in a sheet of corrugated iron in a car park behind an old warehouse on Deptford High Street, it looked like a location from The Long Good Friday. The seller described himself as a scrap dealer who lived in Sloane Square. We didn't do it and, I imagine, Jim got my slot. The place in Deptford is now the back yard of Trinity Laban dance college.
Meanwhile this is TOTAL PORNOGRAPHY: Only click if you want a sailing barge fetish
I always like the narrow boats better.
Those are some beautiful boats. I considered living aboard a normal boat, but it is almost impossible to find someplace to live aboard in the Northwest. I have also gotten soft in my old age and would need a lot more comfortable boat than I used to be able to tolerate.
I rent dock space for my house, and it is fairly expensive but does include water, sewer, garbage, and all non-house maintenance. In order renew the dock lease when I bought the house, I had to bring everything up to code and make it financeable before he would lease space to me. He is a pretty decent guy, and the maintenance of the facilities is meticulous, but he said Oregon rental law is so renter friendly that once you are in it is almost impossible to get rid of you. This may contribute to some homelessness. I have a friend with a lower end apartment complex that is pretty fussy about who she rents to. She avoids renting to subsidized tenets because in her experience, when their subsidy stops after six months or so, they stop paying rent and it can take a couple years to get rid of them. It really dinged her retirement.
64: You disgust me, you filthy perverted animal
She avoids renting to subsidized tenets because in her experience, when their subsidy stops after six months or so, they
...go through the special machine, reverse their personal timeline, and get another six months' accommodation, finally moving out on the same day they moved in and claiming they don't have to pay any rent at all.
She is a 60-year-old previous employee of mine with serious health issues who works part time and rents five units in an old mansion that has definitely seen better days. She is not very financially savvy but is fiercely independent. I check in on her every so often.
Oregon isn't on the Pacific Northwest Trail, but it is on the Pacific Crest Trail. So in theory, I'm interested in walking across it.
I have day hiked portions of it years ago. My favorite part was the north cascades in Washington near the Canadian border but maybe the glaciers are all gone now.