In February, we will be celebrating Valentine’s Day Black History Month and Presidents’ Day.

Our pie of the month will be cherry pie and though love is in the air, the weather might be brutal.

Look for articles from Orlando Bartro, Patricia Petrusik, and Jim O’Brien and more wonderful Pampered Chef recipes from Linda Cahill.

Do you think the groundhog will see his shadow?

I haven’t decided what kind of quiz to create or which books to recommend. I’ll be reviewing a couple of books and we’ll have a few surprises for you just to keep things interesting.

Stay warm and keep reading and enjoying This Awful Awesome Life.

All my best until next month,

Fran

Answers to the January 2020 Quiz – Famous Firsts

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

—J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

I was dreaming when I wrote this… - “1999” by Prince

Once I had a love and it as a gas… - “Heart of Glass” by Blondie

You could have a steam train if you’d just lay down your tracks… - “Sledgehammer” by Peter Gabriel

It's 3:00am and I am alone in this apartment… - “All to Myself” by Baby Rose

This was never the way I planned, not my intention. – “I Kissed a Girl” by Katy Perry

In 1947, Chuck Yeager became the 1st person to fly faster than the speed of sound (670 mph in the Bell X-1 rocket).

Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel to outer space – completing an orbit of the earth on April 12, 1961.

In 1789, John Jay became the 1st US Supreme Court chief justice.

In 1967, Thurgood Marshall became the 1st African American Supreme Court justice.

In 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor became the 1st female US Supreme Court justice.

The first internet protocol was established in 1982. In 1985, the first dot-com domain was registered and in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web - the first internet web browser.

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson of the United States developed the first electronic communication message. The email was sent between two computers on the same network.

On September 23, 1992, Manon Rheaume made history as the starting goalie for the National Hockey League’s Tampa Bay Lighting in a preseason exhibition game, making her the first woman to play in any of the major men’s sports leagues in the U.S. Though she deflected seven of nine shots, she was replaced by goalie Wendell Young and never played in an NHL regular-season game.

Café Terrace at Night (1888) was the first painting of Vincent van Gogh in which he used a starry sky.

Katherine Johnson was the first African-American woman to attend graduate school at West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia. She also calculated the trajectory for the May 5, 1961 space flight of Alan Shepard, the first American in space.

In 1968, actors Nichelle Nichols and William Shatner, playing characters Lt. Uhura and Captain Kirk kissed for the first time on Star Trek. Their kiss made history as the first kiss between characters of two different races.

On July 1, 1941, the first television commercial in the United States aired on NBC. It was a ten second commercial for Bulova Watch Company during a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies. It cost the company a total of $9.

The first scripted curse word on network television happened in 1999 when actor Mark Harmon uttered the phrase "s**t happens" on an episode of Chicago Hope.

The first toilet to be shown on an American television program happened on Leave It to Beaver in 1957, when the kids bought a pet alligator and hid it in the toilet tank.

The first kiss between a same sex couple aired on network TV on February 7, 1991 during an episode of L.A. Law. Actors, Michelle Greene and Amanda Donohoe, playing characters, Abby Perkins and C.J. Lamb, kissed. Advertisers threatened to pull their ads over the scene.