Brought to you by the letter "e"

Greetings friends and family. Hope it’s a nice day wherever you are. Here in DC it’s a gorgeous day. 70 degrees and sunny. Today Susanne and I went to the Birthing Center for a checkup and she is officially 33 weeks pregnant! Everything was fine at this morning’s visit and it won’t be too much longer before we become parents. We can’t wait!

Su is finally getting some relief from the hip pain she’s been experiencing at night. She’s gone to a chiropractor several times now who is specially trained to work with pregnant women. The doc also has 5 children of her own so that give her a bit of credibility right there too ;-) The first recommendation was to get a wedge pillow to support Su's belly while laying on her side. That has helped a lot, as have some of the other stretches and manipulations.

The best trick Su has discovered through, is laying on her side and letting her top leg drop off the side of the bed a little bit. She really can’t roll off, but this position stretches her hip right where she needs it. Here’s to sleeping through the night! (Well almost through the night. Nature does call you know—and not just for the pregnant one ;-)

Let’s see? What else is new? Um…the letter “e” on my keyboard is fading away. I find this interesting as all the other letters look fine. Do I use the “e” so much more than the other letters? Do I strike it particularly savagely? Hmmm…?

Did you know that the keyboard that we all know and love today could be much more efficiently laid out? Instead of typing 70 wpm we could all type 150. But will we learn the new system? No way. We like the way we do it now. Do you know why the letters are located where they are on keyboards? You see, back in the old days when you’d type, a metal rod with the letter embossed on it would rise up and strike the paper. (There was messy ribbon involved too.) Anyway, often these rods would get jammed up and you’d have to stop and “unstick” them to continue typing. So someone figured out the most commonly used letters and placed them strategically so that they’d be coming from the ends of the typewriter rather then the center which caused fewer letter collisions. This was like 100 years ago (I’m guessing on that number).

Again, if we would be open to learning a new way to type, we could be much more efficient. Of course if we in the U.S. were really open to being efficient, we’d use the metric system too. Just another example of doing things the way we always have.

On the bright side, even if my letter “e” fades away to nothing, my brain still knows exactly where it is ;-) -Monica