All this speculation and judgment has me thinking that a lot can get wrapped up in a person’s name. In many ways it’s one of the first things someone knows about you from the moment you say hello. And whether it’s fair or not, if you tell me your name is De-BOR-ah, I’m going to make some quick assumptions about you.

My cousin has bright red hair and is named Sinderella Marie (yes, with an S). When she was a little girl my grandmother asked her what her name was and when she told her Grandma said, “that’s nice honey, what’s your real name?”. As an adult, she makes a point to hide anything with her legal name on it, preferring to just go by Sindy.

As more people create “handles” for themselves (from blog titles to MMORPG characters to SCA personas), the name on one’s drivers license is not nearly as relevant.

So for our next Living Out Loud project, I want you to tell us all about your name(s). How do you introduce yourself to others? What do most people call you? Do you like the name your parents gave you? Do you even go by that name? Are there names you have that only an elite few are allowed to use? What kind of power does your name give you?

Think of all those fairy tales where speaking someone’s name had magical qualities. What magical qualities are in your name?

The specifics for this project are:

• Tell us about your name using the previous paragraphs as guidelines but interpreting it as you will. As always, the spirit of this project is to share something about yourself and not simply your name, rank and serial number.

• Once you have completed your entry and posted it, please email me the link at genie [at] inabottle [dot] org. There were some entries I had to hunt for last month and I’d hate to leave anyone out.

• If you do not have a blog to host your story, you can email me the story directly and I will add it here as a guest post giving you credit. The more the merrier!

• The due date for entries is Sunday, August 2nd (the first Sunday of the month) at 5pm Eastern.

• Once I have collected all the entries, I will post a wrap-up to list them all and announce a winner. The winner will receive some sort of prize to be determined but all participants will receive fame and glory and a link on our Living Out Loud blogroll.

You all did a great job last month and I eagerly await what you create for this month’s assignment. Take this opportunity to really introduce yourself to everyone.

©2009 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.

Sarah’s I have found me a home
NOTE: I forgot to include this in my first rendition of this recap. Sorry, Sarah! I blame pregnancy brain. I was friends with a guy in high school whose parents were divorced and it always seem strange to me that he had “his Mom’s” and “his Dad’s” but nothing was necessarily Home. But in a lot of ways it’s like having two homes, kind of like I have now as an adult.

Gina’s Where is Home???
I always forget that Gina is from my relative neck of the woods originally, but more importantly spending even just a few minutes around her it’s obvious how much her personal version of Home means to her. And thankfully, they’re pretty portable.

Jen’s Home is where the spark is …
The fireflies really got to me. In all my travels back and forth to Richmond, nothing beat that feeling of pulling up into the driveway and knowing you were about to be Home.

Jessica’s Living Out Loud – Going Home
Having been to her parents’ home and seeing what it’s like out there, I can see how it would give off strong feelings. I wouldn’t want to be a teenager there, but I’d always love coming back to it as an adult.

Deb’s So, where you from?
I like how she explains where she’s from as not a place but a frame of mind. Also interesting in that Keilyn and I were just chatting recently about the idea of being more “free range” as kids. Lots of food for thought here.

Collette’s Nostalgia is a wonderful place to visit but no place to live
Hooray, a guest post! I love getting these because it means the project compelled someone to write something that they weren’t even sure where they’d put it, but it needed to be said. And I fascinated by most of the foods and drinks she listed, having never had any of them.

Kim’s Living Out Loud Project: Home
First, I love the look on Jack’s face in that photo. And I can totally commiserate with the idea of having two homes, I just solved mine by putting them spitting distance from each other.

Rich’s Home
One day we’ll go back to Germany together. And I’m eternally grateful that he agreed to come to me and leave his family behind.

Karal’s Going home.
This made me realize how spoiled I am to still have the freedom to visit every home I’ve had as a child. In may ways, though, home is just what you make of it and as she says you get to pick and choose what you take with you.

Megan’s I wrote my name on the wall
Oh my god, all the great old photos! Having spent most of the weekend sorting and scanning relics myself, I love looking at others.

Travis’ Home
(He tried to sneak this in and not submit it, but I’m adding it after the fact because it’s awesome.) So fascinating that each of his examples, save maybe the last one is not something you’d immediately think of quilting into a blanket to depict home. But wow, what an awesome blanket this would make.

And my own OV and me

Interestingly, this project taught me that I have so many stories to tell that it’s hard to put them all in one entry. I want to tell you about my Daddy’s farm, about the beach houses where my mother lived where her brother slept in a closet so small his feet stuck out the door, about the decision to build onto our first house and keep it once we still bought a much bigger house, and about the struggles of choosing a home for ourselves and making it ours. So look for all of that soon.

As a note, I hope I got all the entries since a few folks wrote them but didn’t send me an email with the link. If I missed your entry, just let me know and I’ll add it here! I’m super excited that we had three new participants this month who all join the esteemed ranks of LOLers.

It was tough to pick a winner this month with so many quality entries. But I have a soft spot in my heart for guest posts, so I’m declaring Collette our winner! Collette will receive a collection of Sanders sundae toppings, for the nostalgia of it all.

Thank you again, for all of your support and enthusiasm for this ongoing project. I hope you all enjoy reading these trips down memory lane and that they’ve given you food for thought on what is important to you in a happy home.

On a related note, I’m pleased to say I’ve been asked to co-present one of the Room Of Your Own sessions at BlogHer conference this year titled Realllly personal blogging, how much info is TMI? with the talented Miss Britt and Terra. I’m really looking forward to it and am curious what others will have to say in the session as well.

And stay tuned for the theme for our next LOL Project!

©2009 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.

Me: “Oh, she’s from Ocean View.”
Gary: “No, but where is her family from?”
Me: “Well, she was born in Raleigh I think, but they all moved to Ocean View when she was really little.”
Gary: “No, before that. She looks a little Mediterranean.”
Me: “Oh! I have no idea. I’m not good at genealogy. She’s from where we live now.”

My father was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina and lived on the same farm his whole childhood, one with its own family graveyard. Recently, though, he and Mom talked about picking a plot out over on Granby Street, just a few miles from where we are now.

As for me, there is definitely a very small radius of real estate that I call home. I’m irrationally dedicated to this neighborhood. I had been living across the state in Christiansburg, married and with a full-time job, when we drove back to Norfolk for a visit. I had the window down as we came out of the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel and when the salt air hit me I suddenly realized that I was home. I wish I could bottle up that smell to share with you.

On the day I told Jeremy our marriage was over, I handed back my wedding rings and drove home. I stayed in a rental property of my parents, sleeping on a futon mattress on the floor, but I was back in the neighborhood where I rode my bike as a kid. I spent a lot of time walking up and down the beach then (since I was only a block from it) and came to realize how much I needed to be near the water.

Soon after that, I moved to another rental property that I eventually bought from my parents. Rich and I had many discussions while he was living many miles away in Richmond as to who would move for us to share an address, but I think we both knew that the further I was from Ocean View, the harder it would be on me. I come by this irrational behavior naturally. When Rich and I talked about moving to the next neighborhood over (a whopping four miles away), my mother lamented “I don’t know why you have to go so far.” So of course when Rich and I shopped for a larger home than our original house together, I would lament that certain houses we saw while walking the dog were “too far.”

Rich: “You realize we got here on foot from our current house?”
Me: “Yeah, but it’s too far. I can’t walk to the water or my parents’ house from here.”

That said, I consider any space I share with Rich to be Home, wherever it is. He was gone all day yesterday and I spent most of my day either doing laundry or moping about the house waiting for him to come home. Where do I feel safe and content? Wherever Rich is.

But where am I from? I’m from a part of the coast that is cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter than other cities inland. I’m from a shoreline protected by the Chesapeake Bay, so the water is perfect for learning to swim in the summer. I’m from a neighborhood where live oaks twist into shapes like giant bonsai trees and create so much shade that they make “clean swept yards” of sand and tiny acorns. I live just far enough away from the water to not have to buy flood insurance but to still put sheets of plywood over our windows when a hurricane comes.

Our local grocery store is equally frequented by poor families and yuppies, and there are nearly as many rainbow flags as American flags on front porches. This area was the place to be in the 40s and 50s, a place to avoid in the 80s, and is slowly turning back into the place to be again now. But some of us have been here all along.

We’ve learned to swim in these waters, learned to rollerskate on these sidewalks, frequented every single 7-Eleven available to us, practiced driving a stick shift on the dead end roads near the inlets and struggled to peddle our bikes up the hills of the Bay streets. And with a baby on the way, I look forward to creating another “OV lifer.” I still can’t quite bear to get one of those “OV before it was cool” bumper stickers, though.

©2009 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.

As a Michigander born and bred when someone asks me where I’m from I hold up my hand, thumb out and use my five-fingered map. The spot I point to is on the border between Birmingham and Troy—house in Birmingham, front yard in Troy. Back then Birmingham had a reputation of being a bunch of snooty types so my sisters and I told people we lived just outside of Troy. We grew up catching tad poles and crayfish in the pond at the end of the street and reading books as high up in the mulberry tree as we could climb. We had rail road tracks in our back yard and hid under the bridge to hear the echoing roar as the puffer bellies rolled past.

Like any native Michigander I learned to love Awreys Cookies, Saunders hot fudge sauce, Strohs ice cream and Vernor’s Ginger ale—even though the rest of the nation thought of it as carbonated kerosene. Summer meant baseball on WJR, Thanksgiving means watching the Lions lose whoever they were playing. I’ve walked the Mackinaw Bridge, watched the locks at the Sault and dipped my toes into all five of the Great Lakes.

While I’ve happily kept my claim to Michigan (Go Blue!) my professional life has moved me to Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio and Indiana. Living in five states and changing street addresses thirteen times since leaving home I’ve seldom had time to grow deep roots so home is wherever my mother lives and my family gathers for Christmas to make a quilt for a homeless shelter and take a five-mile hike after dinner. With Mom almost 94 I wonder how long before I’m ‘homeless’.

Nostalgia is a wonderful place to visit but no place to live. My future home will be on Maui. My friends and I have gone often enough that we’re often called on to give directions and make suggestions to the malihini (tourists). When they ask “do you live here?” we smile and say “not yet”.

©2009 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.

Men would waggle their eyebrows at my husband, grin and tell him “wait until the second trimester.”

Well, dear readers, we are smack dab in the midst of the second trimester and were I Rich I would call bullshit.

I sailed through the first trimester without hardly any nausea. And thanks to my height, I’m really not very large by most standards. But there isn’t a lot of eyebrow waggling going on around here. Frankly, I’m pissed about it.

The last two weeks or so have been hard in general. My blood sugar has been all over the place. I wrestled them down all last week with ridiculous amounts of insulin only to have them hit rock bottom on Saturday. My own personal lowest moment was lying down for a nap with a blood sugar of 158 and waking up in a full panic a little over an hour later with a blood sugar of 33. So the exact time when we should have been having a quickie upstairs while our house guests were downstairs, Rich found me sitting on the toilet sobbing uncontrollably and blubbering about orange juice. Good times.

It’s not that I feel unattractive or am worried about the baby, despite what BabyCenter.com may hypothesize. My skin is incredibly sensitive so that I go from “that feels kinda nice” to “don’t touch there ever again, are those your hands or blocks of sand paper?”. If I lie on my back for more than a few minutes, I feel nauseated. If I tighten my stomach muscles for too long, I get really nauseated. And then there’s the lightheadedness or the chance that all these symptoms mimic my low blood sugar. Sexy, huh?

No one promises that a relationship will be consistant, emotionally or physically, over time. I suppose it’s part of the adventure we embark on together. And I don’t expect us to have everything stay the same … gosh, that would be boring. But I take solace that even though things are changing a lot these days, one thing and one person remains constant. And I wouldn’t want to figure all this out with anyone else.

©2009 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.

In my fuzzy headedness this morning, I considered staying home today (and under the covers for most of it). I managed to rally, so I present a few things I accomplished by getting out of bed today, if for no other reason than to justify to myself that it was a solid decision.

I snagged another great OV license plate in my morning commute for my growing collection. I think warm weather brings them all out.

I received a bunch of new maternity clothes in the mail (crazy Old Navy sale! $4 tank tops!) and all of them fit. They will greatly help in my quest to have clean clothes each morning that don’t squeeze my bladder or look like a tent.

Rich and I went swimming after work in the incredibly warm and conveniently located pool in our back yard. I love that pool!

I convinced Rich to stand with me for a photo, but as usual, this was the best one from the entire set.

Finally, the most productive thing I did today was create a mix for you. I have been mulling this over in my skull for months and Pet Shop Boys inspired me on the way home. So I present to you a compilation of several unique covers for classic and/or familiar songs. A few have sprinklings of naughty words in them (Gin and Juice and I Will Survive, as far as I recall), so be warned.

Cover Me! (an OpenTape creation)

Let me know if there are any other covers you particularly love. It was fun tracking all these down this evening.

©2009 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.

And tonight, Rich is out at his ridiculously late hockey game, I’ve already read all my RSS feeds and the weather is screwing up DirecTV so I have no choice but to go out on the porch and enjoy the storm.

I read once that some areas of the world don’t have thunderstorms. I don’t want to live there.

©2009 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.

All these settings are stored in my insulin pump but I have to set them up in the first place. I also have to tell them all to my doctors with each visit (which most of the time involves my stammering and looking them up in the pump, particularly now as they change over time).

Since this little guy in my belly has been making my blood sugars crazy for about a week, I had enough data to try to fix them. I’ve changed my basal from 1 unit of insulin per hour to 1.3 units of insulin per hour. I changed my bolus ratio from one unit for every 13 grams to one unit for every 10 grams of carbohydrates. And I changed my correction settings to give one unit for each 40mg/dL I want my sugar to drop down from 50. It’s a lot of changes and I’m a bit tentative I may have overdone it. But those numbers were conservative considering how many corrections I was having to take all day.

So far my sugars have been much better today. It’s barely crested 150 all day and only a smidge low after a huge dinner. It was a little creepy, though, to dial up what seemed like a huge amount of insulin compared to yesterday. Sometimes I have a hard time trusting the technology.

This afternoon, my sensor alarmed in a meeting, telling me I was at 204 and climbing. I checked my blood and it said I was only 130. Hmm. I calibrated the sensor and went about my business. An hour later, I felt a little fuzzy headed and the sensor said my sugar was 120 and dropping. Figuring it was off earlier, I wondered if I was low. I checked my blood at it was 183. Hunh?! I checked immediately again (using blood from the same finger and needle prick) and it said 153. Oh for Pete’s sake!

I just put the meter away and told the sensor to shut up and trusted how I felt. And today, I feel pretty okay.

©2009 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.

One of those things that wasn’t necessarily in the pregnancy brochure is the need for extra fiber to keep ones system from shutting down. However, my dietitian harps on protein and ignores anything I say about fiber. If I eat nothing but steak and cheese for the protein, though, I may not survive. (Side note: I’ve always figured that those people who eat nothing but cheese must have bowel movements that are more like a menstrual cycle where they get all bloated and cranky beforehand but only poop once a month or so.)

So since I had to go to the grocery store anyways, I decided to share some of my favorite high fiber and protein foods of late. As always, I’m open to suggestions.

Quaker High Fiber oatmeal

I eat this every morning for breakfast with a hard-boiled egg. It has 10g of fiber in it! It’s also got 4g of protein, so add that to the 6g for my egg and it’s not too shabby.

Kashi Go Lean bars

I stumbled upon these in the Power Bar aisle and they’re way tastier. They hold up well to living in ones purse or laptop bag for weeks at a time and they have enough protein and fiber to make the pretty versatile (8g of protein and 5g of fiber). They make a good breakfast on the go or snack. The blue box of cinnamon coffee cake is THE BOMB but they’re really hard to find.

Fiber Plus and Active Lifestyle chewy bars

I first found the Fiber Plus bars and they’re pretty tasty. Then I stumbled upon the Active Lifestyle bars in Kroger and they’re a bit more tasty and less heavy. Both brands have a whopping 9g of fiber in them but only 2g of protein.

Frosted Mini Wheats and Fiber One raisin bran clusters

These are my two favorite cereals of late. The mini wheats have 5g of fiber per serving and a respectable 5g of protein, while the Fiber One earns its name with 11g of fiber (!) and 4g of protein. I had low blood sugar last night (31mg/dL) and ate three servings of Fiber One cereal to fix it. It was delicious.

Other random snacks to mix and match

Pretty much every day I have something from this photo. The apple and fiber selects have a decent amount of fiber in them (5g per serving) and the peanut butter, cheese and yogurt all have good levels of protein (7g, 5g and 6g respectively). After some of those high fiber things I’ve listed before, I can manage a bit of cheddar cheese and live to tell the tale. Oh, and fuji apples are the best, hands down. Our child’s middle name may be Fuji.

©2009 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.

I called Liberty today to find out what the hold up is only to find out that they claim to be waiting on doctor’s orders. I’ve been diabetic for 24 years yet I have to have an annual doctor’s notes saying it’s okay for me to have supplies that I’m going to pay for. It’s like needing a hall pass for a disease.

I’m running out of CGM sensors and I’ve been out of test strips for weeks. If I run out of sensors, I’ll be going through test strips even more than I already have. Even with the sensor, I tested my sugar 15 times today (at $1.20 each from our local Rite Aid).

As luck would have it, I’ve reached my 23rd week of pregnancy and as the ultrasound technician was kind enough to explain to me, this is when the placenta starts really growing with speed and it trashes my blood sugars.

Every day it’s like wrestling a bear to get my blood sugars down with only sporadic success. Without sensors or test strips, it’s like paying hundreds of dollars to wrestle a bear blindfolded.

©2009 ... in a Bottle. All Rights Reserved.