I agree, janie! Ha! (BTW- they're not home-schooled!) But, a lot of Alaskan kids are given "alternative" names, usually inspired by people, places and things of the north-country. I doubt they're the only kids up there named after animals!

Another Alaskan friend's l'il girl has a name I love 'London' after wilderness author Jack London.

The one serious disagreement Friend Wife have ever had was over baby names.

If we'd been blessed with a girl, I wanted to name her Valeria Victrix.

I'm a big believer in nymic magic (i.e., the name contains the attributes of the thing ). Valeria Victrix was the last Roman Legion in Britain---the one that stood against chaos.

I figure in today's world a girl needs all the help she can get.

Cool name, Brook.

BTW- I'm into historical fiction and non-fiction too- we discussed the Alexander Thom books once. Have you read one of last year's Oprah picks "Pillars of the Earth" by Ken Follet? A fantastic thousand-pager English family saga that encompasses the building of Cathederals. It's got war/torture, love/betrayal, murder/mayhem, evil monks and adultering wenches, and every kind of twist and turn imagineable! Quite the page-turning, believable tale!

Also, my two all-time fav works of historical fiction are Gore Vidal's "Lincoln" and James Michener's "Alaska".

Speaking of authors and Alaska, up north, among the finest interesting privileges I enjoyed was to live for a period in buildings that were once temporary homes of both Jack London (Dutch Harbor) and James Michener (Sitka) where they wrote famous tales. In fact, just for the pure sake of amazing interest (something to tell my niece and nephew one day) I penned the first 2 pages of my cookbook in an out-building at the OSI Bunkhouse that was part of the building that Jack London stayed in all those years ago.

>It's got war/torture, betrayal, murder/mayhem, evil monks and adultering wenches, <

It's a love story, right?

I think Friend Wife read it. I just don't have much time for fiction, lately. Certainly not those thousand-pager tales.

I used to read fiction incessently. Fooled around with "creative" writing for awhile, too. But there's no money in it.

The two biggest influences on my life were my fifth grade teacher and a friend of the family we called Aunt, even though she wasn't.

Mr. Urgo would let you take any book out of the library you wished. But you had to finish it. He forced me to complete Ivanhoe, for instance. With the result that there was never a book that was too dry for me to finish.

Aunt Hortie was ahead of her time. When women were supposed to have babies and take care of their men, she thought they should be using the brains and talents God gave them. In many respects whe was an Auntie Mame type.

Anyway, at Christmas and for birthdays she had a cute trick. She'd give books, of course. But they'd always be volume 1 or a trilogy or quartet. For instance, one birthday she gave me Zane Gray's Spirit of the Border, and I had to find The Last Trail and Betty Zane for myself.

My first book was dedicated to her. The dedication reads: "To HD, in partial payment of the debt."

Cool dedication, Brook! VERY nice, indeed.

Your Zane Gray books remind me of A Louis La'Mour I read last winter and loved, his autobiographical: "Education of a Wandering Man".

I always have two marked books at my bedside table- always a cookbook and something else. Right now they are Edna Lewis's "A Taste of Country Cooking" and Armistead Maupin's comedic serial "Twenty-Eight Barbury Lane", which I'm re-reading for the up-teenth time.