YES WE CARVE!

A "Yes We Carve" party was held at my house last night.  Bubsy put on his Halloween sweater for the occasion!

Names

Several years back, I became completely obsessed with online genealogy.  If you haven't tried it, visit Ancestry.com and use their free service.  Type in the name of a forebear a couple of generations back, preferably an unusual name and not "John Smith."  If you get a "hit" and find that someone else has already entered your family's info on the world family tree, it's very easy to get hooked!  It's like treasure hunt, and you become consumed with seeing how far back you can get!  I met all kinds of distant cousins, got packets in the mail containing photographs of people, headstones, houses, homesteads, and all around had a wonderful time.  Ultimately, I kind of got stuck, but this was after finding literally HUNDREDS of family names and tracing a number of my lines to people who were born before 1700, and several before 1600.  Through my grandmother's Goodloe line, one enterprising soul had traced the Goodloes back to somewhere around 1400, with a surprising amount of detailed birth and death dates and burial places.

Anyway, one of the most entertaining parts of this was learning some of the delightful names of some of my ancestors.  I thought I would share with you some of my favorite ancestresses:

Sophronia America Chappell  (Sophronia was my great-great-grandmother, and is my favorite of all the names!)

Betsy Breedlove

Sally Featherston

Paulina Thomason (they pronounced the "i" in Paulina as a long "i."  The original Paulina must've been much loved, because the name went on for four generations.)

(The three above were grandmother, daughter and granddaughter.  All had lovely names, to my ear.)

Other favorites I came across were Cecily Osbaldston, Alydia Anderson, and Lydia Ederington.  I could go on all day--I found hundreds of ladies with beautiful names.

One of the oddest names I found was a woman named Barnaby Roberts.  Barnaby??  Another odd name was one Easter Burch, born 1671.  You can't help but wonder if somehow "Esther" was misspelled on a document.

Though not an ancestress, the oddest of all was one poor man with the name Payne Payne.  The most horrifying?  My ancestor Richard Cheney, born 1620.  I decided not to investigate THAT line too closely.

My "prize find" was my many times great grandfather Robert Thompson of South Carolina, a Revolutionary War hero known as "the first martyr of the American Revolution."  He was one of the "Regulator Boys" (an organized group of rebels protesting lack of representation, extortion and oppression by the British colonial government) of South Carolina, and was shot to death by the British Governor Tryon, while returning from a meeting in which he tried to negotiate a peaceful resolution between the British troops and the 2000 or so Regulators.  Pretty interesting!

Colin Powell says it better than I ever could

"I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said.  Such things as, 'Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.'  Well, the correct answer is 'He is not a Muslim, he's a Christian, he's always been a Christian.'  But the really right answer is 'What if he is?  Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?'  The answer is 'No, that's not America.'  Is there something wrong with some 7-year old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she can be president?  Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion he's a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists.  This is not the way we should be doing it in America."

Santa Ana skin care

I have just declared a full-scale Santa Ana skin crisis.  This morning when I woke up, I saw that I had scratched my dry, itchy arms and legs hard enough to bring blood, all while I slept.  That was my cue to go into full-blown crisis management.

This generally involves dumping about a half a bottle of Neutrogena body oil into my bathtub morning and night, and then applying a thick layer of Palmer's cocoa butter to everything but my face while I'm still damp, before the winds can completely deplete my cells of all moisture. The face gets a coating of vaseline around the eyes, nose and lips, followed by a thick layer or two of Chapstick on the lips.

Before sleep, I put a bottle of water and a tube of chapstick on my nightstand, because when the crazy winds blow, I tend to wake up during the night with a mouth and throat dry as parchment, and cracked lips to boot.

As a final sleep aid, I bring the old, noisy box fan in from the garage and turn it to "high," (pointed away from the bed, of course.)  The idea is to drown out all the scary banging and clanging and creaking coming from outside, as lawn furniture, umbrellas, trash cans, small pets, etc,  blow through my humble homestead on their way to the ocean.  It's not unlike the scene from The Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy watches from her bedroom window as the residents and contents of her farm blow past.

Strange days.

And now, in honor of Spidey and Orbie, another 70's wedding pic!

If you squint, you can sorta see those green tuxes in the background!