Prerequisites: Must have completed coursework in both planned and unplanned transitions. Individual study of personal reactions to the topic is recommended. Successful students will have also analyzed familial repercussions to large life changes. No grades awarded. Pass or fail.
I'm very behind on my postings, busy month was April. (ugh, Yoda had invaded my psyche without my even seeing the movie!)
There was the knitting/spinning trip - 3 days of wonderful workshops, then Passover, and lots of volleyball and normal running in between. I have pictures to prove it. Updates to come soon:) Digital camera is holding images hostage in a Mac - demands more memory and that we stop dropping the dang thing.
Speaking of breaking down, we broke down and started the AC today. Temperatures in the low 90s... bracing myself for the sweltering humidity of summer after a crisp and very cool spring. Not sure what to do with bulbs once they've ... expired.
The heat of the Midwest is definitely something I figured on, but not the sauna that I think of as exclusive to the South. It's all these big dang rivers around here. Mark Twain country.
A reasonable person might ask why would we even think about a hot tub this time of year?? So we can add ice cubes and enjoy it like a "big baby" pool!! No comments about who are the big babies around here. (hint: It's always the husband.)
Actually, I think it's just so we can have something the neighbors don't have:) And we'll love it in the winter. There's no problem that can't be fixed with a hot tub and a glass of wine. Or a massage and a nap. Or a just hot bath, if that's all you can manage.
News flash: Left my job this week. Nice to change pace. Doing the Stay at Home Mom gig for a few weeks, which I love. Not too sure about the next gig - working on that. But refuse to freak out over what is. (I will not panic. I will not panic.) Ready for something else, that's for sure! And if you notice me talking about going back into legal, please stop me!
I'm expecting more ups and downs over the, er, course of the transition...
Tom is still looking for something to earn income so he can do art too. He's gotten an order in last week for 2 panels from one of his galleries, but it's slow getting started again on his own after 3 years mostly working for someone else...takes a lot of determination and will power to run a business. Been there, done that.
I did some geneaology research this week and found that the 1880 census has a wealth of info about my great great grandfather, Dr. George Ivancovich, and his family in Grass Valley, CA. Apparently it is so close to the state line (and very close to where my youngest sister Lura lives now) that there was some dispute about what state it was in. It's considered CA now, just west of Tahoe. And I'm planning a trip out there this summer to do more research, on the ground, as it were.
There were 3 children, including my great grandma Ruth Madeleine, and her Mama, Mrs. Nellie (Jones) Ivancovich and her brother, JC Jones, who was a clerk, 20 years old. There was also a servant living with them. We don't know what happened to Nellie, but she may have died in childbirth later. There was another child, "a daughter" born to the doctor 10 years later, but no idea what was her name, or who the Mama was. We do know he was on his second marriage when he died.
Funny thing about genealogy, you really get a sense of how tenuous life was then. For instance the birth of children wasn't recorded until the 1900s, in most places, because so many children died. You pretty much had to have some legal standing, like owning land, etc. before you made it into the record books.
Same for women and slaves, rarely mentioned in the records, so it's hard to know who lived where and how.
Think of all the millions of silent voices stretching back into history, ghosts with no record of having ever existed...
I heard something a few months ago on the radio about the vast difference in the Western view of the value of individual life in contrast to other cultures. This particular program was about the way murderers are treated in Mexico, and how the death penalty was rarely assigned to perpetrators. They held that, culturally, to lose an individual life there isn't viewed as seriously as it is in the U.S. Perhaps this just reflects an older culture, or the predominant view in the world and in history, that life is brief and fragile, death just another transition.
Interesting that other cultures have come around to embracing the value of an individual life and have extended that to banning the death penalty for murderers.
On that note, I'm going to take a hot bath and ponder lines - family lines, moral lines, lines in the sand, where they are drawn and if it matters... lines in movies... infinite lines, getting in line, dropping a line, and going over the line:)
v