The best thing that any of us can say about 2020 is that it’s almost over. I’ve already started planning for the blog year ahead, and at the top of the list is "What will be my theme for the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge?"

This will be my tenth year of doing the Challenge. Here’s what I did in previous years:

• 2012 – I used the words from the NATO spelling alphabet and wrote on each. That worked out really well, and I’m almost sorry I started with that one.
• 2013 – I chose players from the Chicago White Sox, primarily from the late ’60’s and early ’70’s. I got no visitors.
• 2014 – I went without a theme, just pulling words out of my head and writing on them. That worked out better than I thought it would.
• 2015 – I chose words that started and ended with the same letter. I had to get a little creative, but it went well.
• 2016 – My original theme was portmanteaus, words that are made up of parts of two or more words, and that went really well. Of course, on April 1, I chose as my theme for The Friday Five songs that started with the letter "A," and many people thought music was my theme for the year. So, I decided to do both.
• 2017 – Similar to what I did in 2015, my theme as "words that start with today’s letter and end with tomorrow’s." That went well. No, really.
• 2018 – Picked an easy one: eight-letter words. The entry for K, kielbasa, got maybe the most traffic of any entry on the blog.
• 2019 – To celebrate the Challenge’s tenth anniversary, I chose words that have an X in them, "X" being the symbol for "10" in Roman numerals.
• 2020 – I did words that started with re- followed by the letter of the day.

What should I do this year? Whatever it is will have to have an associated word for each letter, especially letters like X, Z, and J. Then I’ll have to come up with a word list (which will probably change a half dozen times between when I come up with the initial list and actually sit down and write the entries).

Well, I have a few months to decide on that. Meanwhile, I forge on.

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. Now a word about Pall Mall (pronounced "pell mell" like they do in jolly old England, don’t you know) cigarettes. Over, under, around and through, Pall Mall travels pleasure to you!

Seeing that today’s prompt is "opt," I went looking for words that contained that fragment. One of those words was "lepidopterist," a person who collects butterflies…

I’m not much of a poetry fan, but one poet I do like is Ogden Nash. One day, Dad shared a book of Nash’s poetry with me, The Private Dining Room, a collection of the poems he wrote for The New Yorker prior to 1952, which was when the book was published. There were a couple of poems in there that dealt with Old Dr. Valentine, including this one, "Old Dr. Valentine To His Son":

And there was this limerick:

There were many other poems in that collection, some of which I only know the first couple of lines, like the one that starts "I don’t travel on planes, I travel on trains."

Dad died not long after sharing that book with me. I remember I kept it for a long time after.

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. Now a word about Silva Thins regular and menthol cigarettes. Lower in tar and nicotine than all other 100’s!

We don’t have a whole lot of space in our kitchen, and given my mobility issues I stay out of there. So I haven’t put anything in the refrigerator in some time. It’s like this magic room that Mary walks into and comes out with food. She does a lot of cooking in advance, too: today she made chicken soup, so that’s in the refrigerator and the freezer. She’s also made chili that’s also in the refrigerator and freezer.

We have two refrigerators, one in the kitchen and one in the garage. Mary wanted the one in the garage for additional storage, and because that way she doesn’t have to haul all the cold and frozen items upstairs and put them in the refrigerator in the kitchen when she gets home from the store.

The Chicago Bears won the 1986 Super Bowl, and their top rookie was a defensive tackle named William Perry, who was 6’2" and 335 pounds (that’s 188 centimeters and 152 kilograms for you metric folks), earning him the nickname "The Refrigerator." To celebrate, they made a videotape they called "The Super Bowl Shuffle," with the proceeds going to charity. He’s #72; you can’t miss him…

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. Now a word about Parliament 100 cigarettes with the recessed and charcoal filter.

We were playing Trivial Pursuit with a bunch of friends one night, and this question came up when it was my turn:

Does Uranus have an aurora?

Kind of took me by surprise, but I quickly recovered and said "I don’t know. I never looked." We laughed quite a bit at that.

The planets in the solar system are all named for Roman gods except Uranus. If they had been consistent, the seventh planet from the Sun would be Caelus. Why they shifted to the Greek god for the sky, I can’t explain. No, I think I can: William Herschel, who discovered the planet, was a smartass, as I pointed out here.

By the way, Uranus is a gas giant…

Bill Cosby (remember him?) used to have a syndicated five-minute radio show that ran on WCFL every night between Ron Britain and Barney Pip. One of the recurring characters on the show was Captain Oh-wow!, whose catchphrase was "Ring that bell!" after which he’d ring a bell. He had a block of wood he’d hit with something that he called the "dumb bell." The night Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, the news pre-empted Bill Cosby. I remember I was furious about that. I was just 12, what can I say?

Ring-A-Ding-Ding is a 1961 album by Frank Sinatra. Here’s the title track, written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn. Frank liked their music.

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. Now a word about Newport menthol cigarettes. Newport tastes smoother!

I’m just trying to figure out how the guy would explain the good-looking blonde to his wife…

The very first thing I thought of when I saw today’s prompt…

The best thing about the movie Dumb And Dumber is that Jeff Daniels ended up being the funnier of the two. Jim Carrey just ends up coming off as being obnoxious. The movie is really dumb entertainment, but sometimes you need that.

Now that Mary has the Instant Pot (actually, she has two), she makes soup all the time. She makes a huge batch and freezes part of it, so we end up getting a few meals out of it. She does the same thing with chili. She warms things up in it as well, rather than in the microwave. That way, things heat up more evenly.

We all know, of course, that jour is the French word for "day," right? It comes from the Latin diurnum, which also means "day." It leads us to words like "journal," "journey," "journalism," and "sojourn," along with all the derivatives and whatever. I figured everyone was going to write about one of those words, so I decided to talk about soup instead.

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. Now a word about Kent filter cigarettes. More taste, fine tobacco!