Sandra Nickel: Hi. My name is Sandra Nickel.

When I was growing up, you can imagine the fun other kids had with the rhyme my last name could make: "Nickel Pickle" was a big favorite. When I learned to drive, my friends even gave me a stuffed pickle to hang from the rear view mirror.

But I was also sometimes called "Snickel" because of my first initial and my last name. I love the way that concoction slides off the tongue, and when I need to use a fun name for games, I always use Snickel.

My last name, Nickel, refers to the metal. It's number 28 on the periodic table. We, of course, know it from our five-cent piece, which was originally one part nickel and three parts copper.

But if you go way, way back, you can discover that nickel first meant "goblin," or "rascal," even "demon," because when miners were searching for copper they ran across veins of metal they thought were copper but turned out to be something else. They gave it this rascally name of "nickel" because it kept getting in the way of finding what they really wanted to find. In case you were wondering, I, too, can be rascally sometimes.