Since I've gotten some odd looks in regards to it before, random explanation time! In my family, when talking about our extended family, we often append names that describe what their general relationship is - 'Aunt Nuha,' for example, which I'm sure is pretty regular, but then also 'cousin Christina.' In some cases it's kind of logical, with an Aunt Abi and a cousin Abby, so I think that's where part of it stems from, but I think also is the crossing of generation-lines in our abundance of relatives. For example, Uncle Freddie's son is cousin Freddie, but cousin Freddie's daughter is cousin Tia - but at the same time, my mom talks about cousin Joann in Texas, who is her cousin, but not a cousin in the sense we call the other cousins cousin, but my granddad's brother is Uncle Nelson....hm. Now that I actually think about it, there really isn't any steady logic to it. So for some odd reason we add an extra sort of prefix to our relatives' names beyond what I've usually heard when people talk about their family. Yay! Probably mostly useless post!

Other random family observation, to no real purpose: I heard some statistics being bandied around the other day of how many people in the U.S. supposedly believe in some sort of god, how many attend church, and other related things. But, fifty percent of statistics are made up on the spot and all that. Anyway. It just made me reflect a little how my family, whom I do know better than statistics and feel I can make a somewhat more proper obvservation of, is generally 'spiritual,' I think, but in a quietly individualistic way. Not like, the entirely family attends church at once, per se, but there is various common experience with meditation or exploration into that kind of yoga or zen-ish spirituality and at the same time a common base of more mainstream-ish moralistic spirituality among us, even as we're all perhaps a bit more outwardly different from each other in whatever beliefs we have. Not that me making that observation really means anything in particular or is something to be analyzed in any way at all, but there it is.