Congratulations, you've made it through the week!

Have a Happy Thought: (Before I go too far, do you ever have those times in your life when you just keep seeing the same thing over and over? Like you learn a new word, and then that word appears in a book you're reading, a tv show you're watching, and in a random-facts quiz later that week? Yeah, that's been my life lately. Which is why there is some cross-over between this week's topic and that from just a few weeks ago .) The world around us, especially the living world, is constantly surprising us. We humans continue to learn new things all the time (thanks, science!), and then of course there is the fact that " Life, uh, finds a way " to deal with an ever-changing environment. The latest example of this? Two species of jay birds, whose ancestors have not crossed paths in about 7 million years, have recently been finding themselves in the same place. Green jays are a tropical bird, living in the central Americas.  Image: Green Jay (Cyanocorax yncas) Photo ...

Have a Happy Thought:  Humans have almost always named places that we visit and live. Those names are sometimes just boringly descriptive, sometimes they are nods to history, or something interesting that happened in a place. One of the things that I have enjoyed learning about my latest adopted city (New Plymouth, New Zealand – a lot of “new”s!) is that the local museum has an explanation for many of the street names in the region. Some of these are sensible ( Airport Drive, which does indeed go to the Airport), others are whimsical ( Albatross Place , named after the airplane, not the bird), while others are... memorials to times or people that possibly don’t deserve such positive recognition (looking at you, Gustavus von Tempsky ) Sometimes, people new to an area give a new name to the place, even though it already has a name. Colonisation aside, this can lead to some fun “stacking” of names. You may have heard of Torpenhow Hill in England. The name comes from successive l...