Hello. I'm not feeling all that great right now, so there's not much to blog about me. But I like to thank Toodee and Dawnie for their brilliant ideas on Monday. I will be taking a vacation in June. I'll be heading out to Vegas. Depending on the job situation, we might extend our stay in Vegas. Well of course, that also depends on how much we win or lose too. Also I've been totally wanting to go to a spa. But I have no clue what it's like. It sounds like fun, but I really don't know what to expect and how much it'll be. Oh well, but I'll give both those ideas a try soon. I apologize to the fans of Gemele.com that I haven't updated it for a while. There's been a lot of crazy stuff going on and I've been very drained and exhausted from it all. I hope it will all end soon and I can get back to my website updating soon.

Now for some interesting facts I got about 1500 England in the read more section.

Extended Entry Below

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children-last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it-hence the saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water”.

Houses had thatched roofs - thick straw - piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the dogs, cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof -hence the saying “It’s raining cats and dogs”.

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house from the thatched roofs. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could really mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That’s how canopy beds came into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, hence the saying “dirt poor”. The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they kept adding more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway and called a “thresh hold”.

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew had food in it that had been there for quite awhile -hence the rhyme, “peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old”.

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man “could bring home the bacon”. They would cut off a little bacon to share with guests and would all sit around and “chew the fat”.

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with a high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning and death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Most people did not have pewter plates, but had trenchers, a piece of wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl. Often trenchers were made from stale bread, which was so old and hard that they could be used for quite some time. Trenchers were never washed and a lot of times worms and mold, got into the wood and old bread. After eating off wormy, moldy trenchers, one would get “trench mouth”.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or “upper crust”. Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up -hence the custom of holding a “wake”.

England is old and small, and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a “bone-house” and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night ("the graveyard shift”) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be “saved by the bell” or was considered a “dead ringer”.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, women used to help their husband sailors cleaning and washing the decks of their ships when in port, and those pregnant who entered labor, would give birth on the deck between two pieces of artillery. When the babe was born they would shoot the guns to announce the birth, and that babe would be called a “son-of-a-gun”.