The Slice: Despite the name on the email, she is a serious person

Has this ever happened to you?

It has to one Slice reader.

You share an email account with your 8-year-old daughter. And that little girl has changed the name of the user I.D. so many times that it is now frozen for a month and you cannot change it.

So every time you send an email to someone new, you have to begin your message with an explanation about the arguably silly name.

Let’s move on.

Slice answers: What does our proximity to Canada mean to you?

“We’re close to being polite,” wrote Glenn Johnson, mayor of Pullman.

Sandpoint’s Lee Christensen said it means getting to go to the hot springs now and then.

And Spokane Valley’s Jim Clanton offered this. “It allows me, when I hear someone carping about how cold it is in January or February, to remind them that ‘Spokane is only 90 miles from the Canadian border.’ This reminder is often not appreciated.”

Forty-nine states and counting: Spokane Valley’s Mary Shelly has been to every state except Maine.

Ingrid Carlson has been to every state except Alaska.

Slice answers: A number of readers collect refrigerator magnets or Christmas ornaments when traveling. Not Suzanne Dolle. “I always look for a penny smashing machine,” she wrote. “I really don’t remember why I started this collection but I have books displaying my treasures.”

Warm-up question: If you know nothing about a person’s schedule, what’s the earliest in the morning you will call that individual?

I ask because I find myself reviewing my own policy. For ages, I have tried to wait until after 8 a.m. to phone someone from work.

That’s what I did Monday. It was a few minutes after 8. I called a woman who had left me a message over the weekend about Vermont being the only state she had not visited.

I told her who I was and why I was calling. But she was not happy.

“What?” she said. “I’m not interested. I’m dying of cancer. And you wake me up?”

Then she hung up.

I didn’t get a chance to say I was sorry. So I’m saying it now.

Today’s Slice question: How great is the divide in your family between people who wouldn’t think twice about getting on the bed with their shoes on and those who insist worn-out-in-the-world footwear must come off the moment you step inside the front door?

Write The Slice at P. O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. When my mother-in-law hears certain big band tunes, she says “I danced a million miles to that song.”