Betcha didn't know...

With yesterday's confession of my ABBA obsession, I thought I'd admit 2 more things from my past that most people don't know about me.

My name is actually spelled with an apostrophe on my birth certificate. Melisa' Jones. My parents wanted to give me a unique name since Jones can be common. They thought the apostrophe would help people pronounce it right. It didn't. I got tired of trying to tell people how to pronounce it, so I started going by Lisa in school. Finally, at BYU, I decided that I liked my name the way it was and people would just have to adjust. :) I still get called Melissa a lot, and I don't really mind any more. My family can get away with calling me Lisa, but that's it! I've debated re-adding the apostrophe to my signature. Or changing it to MeLisa (or maybe Me'lisa) to emphasize the Lisa part, but I always just end up writing Melisa again.

While playing a game of "do you know..." with my college roommate (who coincidentally IS a Melissa - which made for some interesting mix ups - like when she almost got my church calling), I realized that I rarely tell people where I am actually from. When people ask, I usually say, "Los Alamos, NM." But that isn't really the truth. I grew up in a suburb of Los Alamos called White Rock. I find people who know Los Alamos, owing to the whole nuclear bomb thing, but people never know White Rock unless they grew up in the Santa Fe area. It is a really small town that only had 1 stop light the entire time I lived there. They got another one after I left. Whoo hoo, look who's moving up! The town will probably never get any bigger because it is surrounded by land owned by local Indian tribes and the United States Government, and a lot of canyons. There is no where to expand to!

So, that is my real name and where I am really from. Now, how many of you knew that?