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Day 2 ~ The meaning behind your blog name.

Ummmmmm . . . which name do they mean? The name of the blog or the name you post under? Whatever, you get both.

Veriladaine - Comes from a book . . . sort of. My senior year of high school I was introduced to a great new author - Tamora Pierce. She writes fun, highly enjoyable YA fantasies, and I spent a good chunk of the year devouring her books. The next year at college I joined the forums at starwars.com - because I was 1) that much of a loner and 2) that much of a geek - and after trying a few other screen names that were taken I remembered there was this one character named Veralidaine and I thought it was a cool name (note: not one I would ever saddle a poor unfortunate actual child with, but a great name for a fantasy book) so I used it. Except . . . you may have noticed a slight difference in spelling. I couldn't remember quite how to spell it and got it kind of wrong. I was seriously kicking myself . . . but let's be honest - NOBODY is going to notice that I flipped a couple of letters. Am I right, or am I right? Plus, this since it is misspelled that's, like, an instant guarantee that no one else will be using it, so I use it in a few places online. Not all of them . . . not even a lot of them anymore. But some.

L.Jo - Senior year again. One of my classes was Stage Tech. Officially we were supposed to be learning about how things like the sound systems and light systems work and stuff like that. Honestly, I have no idea who thought that the people signing up for that class would do so to learn those things - every last one of us were already techies to some degree and knew everything that was described in the course description. So the class was actually more like "hang out with your friends whilst building set pieces for upcoming productions 101" because that's all we did. Not that we didn't work hard - that was the year we did Joseph, and we all kept a spare set of clothes in the dressing rooms and my pants came to be known as Lacey's Amazing Technicolor Dream Jeans. Because, well, . . . they were. Very worn, and very multicolored by the end of the trimester. Anyway, one day we were painting our paper mache rocks for the Shakespeare competition and for some reason one of the guys decided he wanted to know everyone's middle name. He started by trying to guess, and when he got around the circle to me he guessed Lacey Jo. Which is wrong, but when I told him that he said he liked the sound of Lacey Jo better, so that was my name now. And proceeded to call me that for the rest of the year, which was fine by me. A few of my other friends picked it up too, and it was nice - made me feel almost popular or something - especially considering the only other nickname I'd ever had was Spacey Lacey, bestowed on me by an uncle when I was a baby.

Anyway . . . flash forward to freshman year of college again. Instant messaging - or IMing, if you will - is still kind of new and therefore kind of cool so naturally I download msn messenger on my craptop. Initially my screen name there was Lacey Jo, but this was also the time that Jennifer Lopez was totally going by J.Lo and one day I had the stroke of genius to flip a couple more letters, and voila! L.Jo! And that became my screen name from then on and it got to the point that I had friends telling me they saw a headline with "J.Lo" in it and thought "L.Jo" and I felt totally famous. :-) And like Veriladaine, I still use it here and there. Obviously.

P. ost S. cript
Charlie Brown's kite has got nothing on this kid's. If I didn't know better I'd think it had some sort of vendetta against humankind . . .