This Happened

[Elle]

SOMETHING HAPPENED TODAY!!!!!!!!!!!!
I RECEIVED SOMETHING IN THE MAIL AND IT WAS BOTH SURPRISING AND AWESOME

[Elle]

Okay, the thing is still just as surprising and awesome, but I am beginning to question a lot of things. For instance, whether I really did miss my calling as a brain surgeon, given the difficulty level of the application process. Second, how it is that so many office worker ladies are capable of typing or dialing phones or adjusting their clothing during bathroom breaks or DOING ANYTHING AT ALL with fingernails. I always have that one coke nail, you know, which functions as a screwdriver and tick removal device, but otherwise it's all cello nails all the time over here. Meaning no nails. Sometimes they get painted rainbow colors by maniacs who seize control of my bathroom. But otherwise? This is very new. I type about fifty bazillion WPM and it is down to approx 50 now. It's like a preview of old age.

BUT MY NAILS LOOK AWESOME!!!

[Ronster]

My youngest daughter just won a scholarship last week to the National Flight Academy in Pensacola, FL at the Naval Air Station. They will be staying in a 6 story building that simulates an aircraft carrier and the daily life of the people aboard it including flight simulators, problem solving, etc! The scolarship was sponsored by my place of work, but if you look at the Nation Flight Academy's site you perhaps can win a spot from other sponsors too.

If they do this next year at work and it is available to people outside the company I will be sure to post the links.

"Kat" is so excited. She's going to get her own "handle", etc...


I posted some links on Facebook. feel free to friend me if you like, or unfriend me if you don't

[Elle]

That is so cool, wow!! Congrats to your daughter!

[Elle]

This might not mean much to anyone else, but today is a good day for me. Four years ago something small but weird and random and coincidental happened. This one weird, random event didn't mean anything at the time. But a few days later, thanks to having a dumb OCD brain that notices and is bothered by dumb things, the weird, random, coincidental event suddenly jumped up to be noticed. Noticing led to wondering, and wondering led to speculation, and speculation led to anxiety and fears and theories and meanings where no meaning should have been assigned, and thus a long tangly canned silly-string of OCD problems burst out that previously had been carefully ERP'ed up into a smooth ball.

A few weeks later we went on summer vacation. Along with the usual things like sitting in alien unclean hot tubs and hiking with small children along steep rocky paths, my husband took us all four-wheeling along the continental divide. It was so crazy that we had to pause along the roadside multiple times for kids to vomit out their carsickness, and then my son, who was still a baby at the time, developed a high fever and weird illness, and then I got the same illness, and we had to take the baby to the ER in some strange small town due to his astronomical fever, and there was no sleep. The mind wasn't at its strongest, and then the little tangly OCD string became a giant fish-trap for one hapless sea creature, and it took a very long time to fight back out. But now the creature is free, and that is a very good day indeed.

[Cazmonster]

[Elle]

Tomorrow I shall try something since I have honey ham slices. I do not usually eat the pig; it was an unusual circumstance. I shall chop the slices and make.... a meat pancake!!!! Did this with bacon once: embed bacon slice in pancake. Awesome, but... chewy. Not so with tiny thin ham chunks. The hypothesis.

[Elle]

The dog people have not called back for two days. It's like being at the end of pregnancy.

[Mike]

I just got a scam/spam phone call on my work cell. I've won a cruise to the Bahamas! All I have to do is answer their survey. It's just a machine talking to me, so I feel free to respond to everything she says, yelling at her as I go: "No way!" and "Fuck you!" etc. Then she says, "Let's get started then..." and I shout, "Nooooo!"...

And she says, "Okay. Sorry to have bothered you. I'll take you off our calling list. Goodbye."

The scam robot actually listened to me and reacted accordingly. How very nice of her. I'm going to be way nicer to these bots in the future.

[Tahlvin]

So I'm a bit of a genealogy nerd. A while back, i did one of those DNA tests from Ancestry.com to find out my ethnic heritage. As part of that, it compares your DNA to other people who have taken the test and gives you notices when you're related to someone. I recently received a message from someone saying we have a DNA match (distant, 6th cousin or greater kind of thing). We traced it back to a 6th great grandfather on my mother's side of the family, a Timothy Spencer born in the 1730's in Connecticut, who's daughter married my mother's great-great-great-grandfather. Turns out, this person had traced their family tree back to a Henry G. Spencer that lived from 1365-1416, who happens to be an ancestor of Princess Diana.

So there you go, apparently there's a possibility that I'm related to royalty.

[Elle]

And not just any royalty, but the best ones! They do have really cute babies now - we can only assume this is your responsibility!

[akiva]

I'm very distantly related to one of the last people convicted of witchcraft in Salem. And since she's an ancestor of Ray Bradbury, I'm also distantly related to him.

[Elle]

Well, that does it, everyone else can give up now. Unless they can find a connection to Prince. I like to think I was descended from someone who wore the peasant shoes that were painted by whoever painted the painting Heidegger embarrassed himself over in that essay on Art I was forced to read in college, and then the piece of my ancestors that lives on in me accomplished such a violent eyeroll upon reading it that my retina was harmed, but I doubt it.

[Elle]

Chloe: "I was bored so I decided to clean the basement. Sorry."

Me, silently in my mind: WHY ARE YOU APOLOGIZING? NEVER!!!
- BREAKS DOWN WEEPING WITH JOY -

[Elle]

There is a reason is illustrated with some cattle dog type.

[Elle]

The first time I had a dog, I picked her based on her beauty and good behavior, because I had no further idea what she'd be like and only a few minutes to figure it out. It was... challenging. She was at the same time the best dog ever, and also had Challenging Behaviors of a complex psychological sort that required long-term, exhausting training. And after that she was absolutely perfect, like a celestial being, the best dog one could ever hope to have. This must have been in my mind when I said yes, let's do the same thing again. You need to find a dog that, due to its obvious potential to be the smartest, best dog on earth, also will be completely exhausting. You need less sleep, lazybones, I said to myself.

[Mike]

I think dogs are emotionally complex beings that are exhausting to raise, in general. Like children, but children are even more so.

[Elle]

It's true. This dog is a really good dog but he has been through a lot, so he will take a lot of patience. I was used to the freedom that comes from keeping your own hours and generally not having to worry about anyone else's potty functions. It is a really big deal not to have kids who need tending in the potty department. Eventually I guess we grow old and maybe require such tending ourselves! The little things in life, you know.

In related news, I have walked this dog so much in an effort to work out the puppy ya-yas that I think my toe is sprained, so now pain. Especially while walking! It's all worth it if we end up with a happy dog baby.

[Ronster]

[Tahlvin]

It depends in large part on how much interbreeding has occurred in the past generations. For my and my wife's families, while there was a little bit of outside bloodlines brought in here and there, for the most part they tended to marry other people of Germanic/English descent. That was in large part due to historical development of communities, where people of the same ethnicity tended to clump together in cities and towns, go to separate churches, etc. It has really only been in the past couple generations that you really begin to get a whole lot of mixing of different ethnicities.

Heck, my maternal grandmother was at least 3 generations removed from the people that emigrated to America, but she still grew up in a house speaking German part of the time. So much so that on her death bed, she relapsed into speaking German for a time.