Yeah, so I just wrote a huge boring post about my semi-bizarre genealogy obsession, and then I meant to open a window to create a link but I typed the search terms into the Typepad locator bar and lost my post. The drawbacks of Chrome at work. But consider it my gift to you, because now you won't be bored silly.
That's what I've been doing in May -- updating my genealogy files after a mostly-complete hiatus of three or four years. Apparently it's been a crazy three or four years: the search-engine algorithms have gotten so much better, every newspaper puts its obituaries online now, a lot more people have discovered the public member trees at Ancestry.com [no links this time], and the Norwegian Digital Archives have scanned an insane number of their parish registers. I'm trying to finish a book for my grandfather before we leave for Minnesota (he celebrated his 87th birthday this month and he's been asking for an update on my research for years) and I'm worried that I won't finish because I have too much information to slurp into my program. Crazy.
In other news, we had thirteen gerbils and now we're down to three: the original mother, a daughter from the first litter, and the only son from the second litter. The boy gerbil ran off our balcony one night, witnessing which caused Wilder and I lasting trauma. Running down the stairs, expecting to see a bleeding, broken rodent on my hardwood floors took years off my life. That I'm not still wimpering can be attributed to the the gerbil's wildly improbable survival thanks to the strategic location of a basket of unfolded laundry.
Take-away lesson: unfolded laundry can save lives.
But every time I see that gerbil cheerfully running on its wheel, I'm tempted to smack it. He takes a ten-foot leap into space and I'm the one still shaking? Not Fair.
I'm halfway done with my library program. The kids "graduated" from elementary school. Calder was promoted to full professor. That's about the sum of it for now.
