Friday the 13th

Today is Friday the 13th, which some people think is an unlucky day.  Frankly, I just think it's a day pretty much like all other days.  Did you know that there is actually a word that means "fear of Friday the 13th"?  It's a really long word, and here it is:  paraskevidekatriaphobia.  This word is made up of a bunch of Greek words that mean things like fear, Friday, and thirteen.  Which just goes to show that you can make lots of very interesting, very long words if you just string enough Greek words together.


I did some research on the Friday the 13th superstition, because I wondered how it got started, but the fact is that nobody really knows for sure.  There are a bunch of theories, but I don't know which one is the real, true theory, so I'm not going to tell you any of them.  But I will tell you that some scientists did a study, and it showed that there may be as many as 21 million people who are paraskevidekatriaphobes, which seems kind of amazing to me.  I'll bet that most of those 21 million people can't even pronounce paraskevidekatriaphobia, let alone spell it, so how can they even talk about their fear?


Some people stay home from work on Friday the 13th, because they are afraid that something bad will happen if they leave the house.  And there are buildings that don't have a 13th floor.  (Well, they DO have a 13th floor, but they call it something else, like the 14th floor.)  Also some people believe that if 13 people have dinner together, one of them will die before the year is over.  

All of this just goes to show that humans have some really weird ideas about stuff, which is something I already knew, of course.  You would never find a dog who was afraid to go out of the house on Friday the 13th, or who would refuse to eat because 12 other dogs were eating at the same time!  Dogs are just more sensible than people are about these things.


Anyway, I'm expecting today, Friday the 13th, to be a good day because Mom is going to stay home all day, which she hardly ever does.  And anyway, Mom already had some bad luck yesterday, on my birthday, so that probably means she's all done with bad luck now.

What happened yesterday was that Mom took her car to the car repair place to get the oil changed.  And also she had to get some stuff inspected, like the brakes.  Anyway, it turned out that the brakes were getting sort of worn out, so they had to be fixed, and it ended up costing Mom $925, which she says is a lot of money that she was not expecting to spend.


So that was one bad luck thing, and another was that my brother Gabe is sick again, and he doesn't want to eat his food.  Also yesterday he was having diarrhea, so he didn't get any breakfast, and he only got rice for supper.  But at least he ate the rice, so that was good.  And this morning he was actually hungry, so he ate his rice with some canned dogfood, and he told me he's feeling lots better.


Part of why Gabe is feeling better is because he is taking pills again to help his tummy.  The pills are called metronidazole, which is another long word that's hard to spell.  I've taken this drug before, too, and I can tell you that it's pretty good for making your gut feel better.


Anyway, I guess that was most of the bad luck that we had yesterday, except that we got supper really late, which was not a nice thing to happen on my birthday.  The reason we got supper late was because Mom had to go pick up her car, which wasn't fixed until 4:30, and then she had to go to Aunt LaDene's house to put Aunt LaDene's trash out for her, and then she also had to take Aunt LaDene to the drugstore and to the grocery store.  And after Mom got home, she still had to cook the rice for Gabe because she didn't do it earlier in the day like she should have.  So that's why supper was late.


Okay, I guess I've written enough for today.  You are really lucky I had so many interesting things to tell you on Friday the 13th!