My New Toy

I mentioned awhile ago that I love indexing and all things history related in general. When it comes to doing my own family history, I haven't done much. Most of my dad's line is done, and my mom and grandma are working on my mom's line. So, I decided a couple of years ago to start working on James' family tree...armed only with a few names, dates and places written in his baby book, I set off to see what I could find. I found his great grandmother on a census from 1911, but I didn't get any further than that. Well, on Monday night I decided to try again - ancestry.ca has a 2 week free trial so I signed up and started searching names.

That great grandmother I couldn't find anymore information about...I found her marriage certificate! Her name was slightly different, which is probably why I couldn't find her before. Anyways, I noticed that someone had a family tree connected to James' great grandfather - lo and behold, someone has done a TON of family history work on one of James' lines! Not only did I find lots of full names, dates, and places, I found pictures too! I have pictures going 5 generations back, but this one was my favorite - this guy's name was also James Johnson, and I think he was James' great great uncle:

The first time I saw this picture I thought "Hey look, someone put my husband in old timey clothes!" The face shape, nose, stature...clearly James is a Johnson through and through!

So, I've officially got the bug now...all of my precious TV time has been cut out in favour of going through this public family tree and recording every bit of information I can. I've found a lot of info but there is so much more to do!

Stuff I Waste Time On!

Here's a bunch of my favorite blogs:

http://www.lovelylisting.com/

Lovely Listing has all sorts of interesting/creepy/weird/eye bleed inducingly ugly photos from real estate listings. People have some weeeeeeeeird houses. Like this one:





Yep, that's an aquarium floor. I'm pretty sure this is James' dream home. Well, we ARE saving up our downpayment right now...quick, what's 5% of 29 million?













And then there's Cake Wrecks:

http://www.cakewrecks.com/

Like cakes with obvious spelling errors? Cakes with instructions like "I want sprinkles" written out? Cakes with random, unexplained piles of dog poo icing? Cake Wrecks is the place to go. One of my personal favorites:








Now really, how could you NOT have a happle birthday with a cake like this? Man, I can't wait until I'm fithy years. plus Nine...that's gonna be awesome.





This next one comes with an assignment:

http://www.awkwardfamilyphotos.com/

No picture, but see if you can find the one of the nude couple posing with their very annoyed looking cats. Don't worry, the cats are covering all of the essentials...I want the back story on that one, bad.

And a couple for the members reading:

http://www.whatmormonslike.blogspot.com/

This guy hasn't updated for awhile, but this blog is well worth a read through...hee-larious!

http://www.overheardintheward.com/

Lots of funny stuff heard at church - not surprisingly a good chunk of it comes from sunbeam classes. This one's my favorite:

Mom: How was Primary today?
Son: Good.
Mom: What did you do?
Son: Well, they told us Jesus was coming but he never showed up… so we just colored.

And finally...

http://www.sexypeople-blog.com/

I'm not brave enough to scan my grade 7 picture, but believe me, they'd post it.

My Office has "Es-ploded"

It's been teething hell-week for poor Mr. Seth...he's cut 3 top teeth in the last 7 days, and #4 isn't far behind. Little man and I were up at 4am this morning, so I thought I would get some much needed paperwork done while he was distracted with his "baby genius" DVD and we waited for the baby Tylenol to kick in.

About an hour later, piles of various papers all around me, I gave up. Half the stuff I needed was buried who knows where. I'm normally an organized person - I seem to do well everywhere else in the house but papers just pile up like crazy. For the past year or so whenever I'd have to hunt for something I would swear up and down that I was going to straighten this mess out Once. And. For. All. Then I'd find what I needed, and that plan promptly went out the window.

No more...I'm gonna get me wunna them there offices in a box today, and then the Great Office Organziation of '09 is ON. Seems like the only solution now that my desk file drawer only opens half way and my hanging file folders have literally fallen apart. It's like an ancient ruin of what was once a great filing system, pre-children. Now Emmett plays mailman with said broken drawer (if James or I ask the other if we've seen some small item, the first reply is usually "check the mailbox"...and at least half the time, we're right) and one of the Seth's favorite pasttimes is tipping over my office garbage can and diving head first into the balled up paper and candy wrappers.

The real heart of the problem is we have just plain run out of space. We live in a basement apartment, which by anyone's basement apartment standards is pretty nice and very liveable, but even as a rather minimalist family of 4 we are really crammed in here. Our christmas decorations live in the boys' closet, along with kid clothes of every season and size (properly boxed and labelled...go me!). James' tools are hanging out in the pantry. My griddle is hanging off a coat hanger on a pipe in the laundry room. My mother in law gave us their wok yesterday and I honestly haven't the faintest idea of where it's going to live.

A basement, a basement, my kindgom for a basement! (That we, uh, don't have to live in too.) Hopefully we'll be buying our first place next spring/summer...then my office in a box can get to know its friends Christmas Tree and 0-3 month Boy's Sleepers better in a cozy dark little corner far away from my line of sight. ;)

I want chicken, I want liver...or maybe just some tofurkey.

I caught a bit of The View today as I was folding Mt. Washmore (aka a long weekend's worth of laundry for a family of 4) - Alicia Silverstone was on promoting some new vegan diet book she's putting out. She spoke about how "nasty" foods like meat and dairy are "unkind" and make you feel bad. Ok, I can be on board with that...downing tons of meat and dairy probably isn't the best for you. There is definitely something to be said for a (mostly) plant based diet, and if someone feels the need to be vegetarian or vegan, I can totally respect that. I could go veggie, but avoiding anywhere that bacon was being fried up would be tantamount to my success. I don't think I could handle vegan (if my life had a subtitle it would be "A Life Without Cheese isn't a Life Worth Living"), but to each their own, right?

But you know what part really stuck with me? Alicia Silverstone's DOG is vegan too. The thought of a vegan dog manages to both amuse and annoy me simulateously. Some argue that humans aren't meant to consume animal products, and while I don't agree, I can accept that argument. But dogs? What exactly does Ms. Silverstone think her dog would be eating if left to its own devices? Perhaps she imagines it would hit Trader Joe's and Whole Foods begging for kelp "meat"balls (kelpballs?) like that scene in Lady and the Tramp. Come on...has Hollywood really reached the point that even naturally carnivorus animals can't enjoy a little Iams the way nature intended?

As The View's co-hosts ooh and aahed over the guacamole (vegan cheese and sour cream, natch) and aformentioned kelpballs, one mentioned her sister and five kids...where were they to find the super special calcium rich seaweed used in the kelpball dish? "Oh", Alicia replied "you could order it online, or just pick it up at (insert overpriced specialty hippie store of your choosing here)." Yep, I can just see it now...Joe Six Pack driving right on past Wal-Mart to the local hipster hangout to pick up the kids' favorite vegan cheese-whiz. It's just not dinner without it, you know?

It's a personal pet peeve of mine to see celebs hawking the latest "miracle diet" calling for weird, inexpensive, hard to find ingredients and insisting that evvvvvvvvvvvvvvverybody would just feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeel so much better it they only tried it! Tell that to the majority of people out there whose monthly grocery budget would be busted after one trip to the store.

/End Rant

On a completely unrelated subject, Em had his first trip to the dentist today...we've been reading Just Going to the Dentist (Oh how I love Mercer Mayer!!) all week and talking about how the dentist was going to look at his teeth with a mirror on a stick, which he seemed to think was moderately cool. Still, Emmett is Emmett, and things went about as well as could be expected. The dentist said Emmett was the first kid he's ever seen that could cry and scream with his mouth closed...LOL, classic Em! The new dental hygenist there also spoke and acted exactly like Kelly from The Office, which was highly amusing. She was great though, super gentle. Hopefully Em's a little more cooperative next year, otherwise we may have to talk alternative measures - maybe The Big Book of British Smiles and then "hold still while I gas you!!" ;)

Nerdy Confession

I love indexing! There, I said it. Whew! ;)

For those thoroughly confused right now, indexing is when you take images of old records (censuses, birth/marriage/death certificates, ship passenger lists, etc) and type out the info so that it can be searched by those doing their family history. Before indexing you would have to get rolls of microfiche and scroll through them until your eyes felt like they were going to fall out of your head, and hope you found the information you were looking for. (Yeah, I did that exactly once.) After something is indexed you should be able to type in a name, for example, have it pop right up for you.

I started indexing last year after reading an article about it in our church magazine (Mormons are well known for being genealogy-happy) and checking out the website. As of today, I've indexed 10,659 names! It's probably more than that, because I've done quite a few records that had more than one name on it (like a marriage record that's got the bride and groom as well as their parents' info). A couple of weeks ago I got an email from the site inviting me to be an arbitrator...each record is indexed by 2 different people, and the arbitrator goes through any discrepancies and picks the correct information. I have to admit, my inner nerd was pretty stoked to be given arbitrator status. So far I've arbitrated 150 records...sometimes it's really hard to figure out which interpretation of the info is correct, but I'm doing my best with it.

It's pretty interesting to read the old records and learn a bit about the past. The death records make me glad I live in the 21st century...even 70 or 80 years ago people died of seemingly benign things ALL the time. The romantic in me wonders if the people who filled out those 100 year old marriage certificates stayed together all of their lives. It surprised me as well to see the number of women in their late 30's and up getting married for the first time...I always thought back in the day you were a confirmed spinster by the age of 23! I've seen plenty of interesting names - one 19th century black family in the deep south gave all of their sons occupation names: Doctor, Judge, etc. Sometimes I even Wiki the places on the records...I did a bunch of death records for what turned out to be a TB hospital somewhere in the southern states. I looked it up and found a picture of the place - it was pretty much the creepiest looking building ever.

So yeah, I may not be doing *my* family history (kind of at an impasse on that one right now) but at least I'm helping others do theirs...and satisfying my inner nerdiness at the same time. Win win!

Another quick preschool update...I hosted for our co-op preschool for the first time today! We learned about Thanksgiving - we ran around pretending to be turkeys and made a turkey centerpiece out of a lunch bag and some construction paper. Emmett still wasn't sure about things, even though we were hosting this week - I think the word "preschool" still has negative connotations for him. He freaked out while we were pretending to be turkeys, which didn't surprise me (he is really weird about pretending to be animals), but I'm trying to teach him that we do a variety of stuff at preschool so there is something for everyone and it's not just things HE wants to do all the time. He actually did most of his turkey craft, which pleasantly surprised me, and he did a fantastic job sharing his toys with the other kids. Oh, and he went nutso for the animal crackers we had for snack, surprise surprise. ;) All in all a successful morning!