Vacation post #3

[annathepiper]

Christmas Eve turns out to be the Big Holiday around Marc's place, since he and Didi usually go and visit our relations in Gravel Switch on Christmas Day, and/or other relations in Lousiville. This year, though, the weather in Louisville has made getting up there not really an option. The interstates are clear, but once you get into Louisville proper a lot of the back streets are still clogged up. They got something on the order of five inches of snow, then some ice, then more snow. My brother Donnie tried to go visit our grandmother, only to get stuck and require the assistance of several large guys to get his vehicle freed.

In Lexington, there's been pretty much no snow. But it's been plenty cold, and Marc's driveway is still slicked up with a lot of ice. Neither he nor Didi were willing to try to get their van up the driveway, which has pretty much meant that going anywhere with the children has been out.

However, Didi's sister Donna and her husband Dave came by yesterday, bringing more presents for the children, and so we did wind up having a bit of a family gathering. Amazingly, the children were kept off of the presents until mid-afternoon. One thing after another served as useful distraction, culminating with two-year-old Lydia zonking out on her bedroom floor and her parents asserting that it was better to let Lydia get her nap out of the way rather than having her be wound up and hyper all night.

I killed time, therefore, with working on Marc's two spyware-and-adware-infected computers. solarbird and I had taken an initial crack at them and discovered that yeah, they were riddled with all kinds of crap. Both of the computers had been given to Marc's family; the Win98 box was a hand-me-down from his workplace, and its prior two owners were completely clueless when it comes to Internet security. The Win95 box came to them via Didi's family, and her parents, too, are fairly clueless in that realm.

Marc had taken the precaution of putting Ad-Aware on the Win98 machine, but for whatever reason, the definitions file with that installation was screwed up (it claimed its creation date was later than its last modified date!). I'd initially copied in my more recent definitions file on top of it, and that made Ad-Aware much happier, but not as happy as we'd like. So while we were at gazerwolf and starsongky's place, I downloaded a more current definitions file and the executable for installing Spybot and the installable for Firefox as well (even though Marc does not plan to put either of these machines back on the Net any time in the foreseeable future). Armed with those, Dara and I worked on the machines some more and got them fairly well cleaned up--though we found out Ad-Aware would not install on the Win95 box, and Spybot kept throwing strange errors that suggested there were a couple of Trojans on the machines. This was alarming, as neither of them had functioning anti-virus software. And though Marc was willing to reformat both machines' hard drives if he had to, he wanted to keep that as a last resort since the children have a bunch of games that won't run on later operating systems.

Our hiding back there in the children's room with the computers got us a reprieve from new toys that went over really well with the kids: toy guitars. Four of them. Complete with headset microphones that let the kids blow into them. Loudly. Marc picked up Meighan from her mother's, and Donna and Dave's daughter Hillary teamed up with Meighan to go to town with the guitars to write what they informed us was a song. Didi and Donna kept claiming that they sounded like a Chinese rock band. Me, I was able to discern at least some notes in the progression they were playing, which was a step above the cacophony that Charlie and Lydia produced with the things. Marc and Didi told us that the guitars had been sent home from the children's daycare, and Dara boggled in general dark amusement about the evil of that particular daycare center.

Seeing Meighan and Hillary was kind of stunning, though. I remembered this two kids as circa age 5, back when Marc and Didi got married; I remembered both of them taking turns sitting in my lap. Seeing them this time around as very young teenagers was quite the jolt. Especially Meighan, as she's starting to be built like a teenager as well, and I remember that kid being the size of baby Misha.

Once the kids started tearing into the presents, though, it was all about the Storm of Wrapping Paper. This went over equally well with the cat and the infant Michelle (a.k.a. Misha, which amuses me, given the Russian-ness of the nickname), both of whom thought that the paper was the coolest thing on the planet. And Lydia roused up from her nap to join in on the fun, though her two-year-old hands weren't quite as speedy at the unwrapping of gifts as those of her older siblings. It was all pretty much what one would expect of a Christmas in Kentucky: 'girlish' gifts for the girls, 'boyish' gifts for Charlie. (I personally would like to see a bit more variety in that regard, but hey, not my kids. Me, I gave 'em all a box of chocolate to split up between them.) But Meighan and Amanda seemed happy with their new outfits; Charlie seemed happy with his new Lite-Brite; Lydia and Michelle both seemed happy with their tiny squeezy-soft dolls that made noises when you poke their stomachs.

The drawing game was also a big hit with Lydia--one of those large colorful things with a drawing area you can erase magnetically, kind of like an Etch-A-Sketch. It has a pen attached, but Lydia only barely grasps the idea that she can draw with the thing. She's way more interested in grabbing any of the three colorful magnets that come with it, and smearing those all over the drawing area until she has one huge area of Dark.

Several noisy, rattly, jingly blocks were among the gifts for little Michelle, though the plastic boot that comes with five jingly blocks was way more interesting to Lydia. She happily kept dropping blocks in the top of the thing and watched them tumble out the hatch at the bottom. I know this because she did it in my lap. About fifty times. Over and over. In between trying to get me to help her with the 'Draw', though the assistance she wanted with that seemed to be primarily to provide the lap for her to sit on as she went about her works of toddler art.

Charlie made more demands on my attention as well, trying to get me to help him with the Lite-Brite. I explained to him where all the various colored pegs went in the provided 'pictures' that come with the thing--R for Red, B for Blue, etc. I could not, however, convince him that the white pegs were not silver.

Marc and Didi, though, were quite pleased with the teapot and tea assortment that Dara and I gave them. For extra special unexpected bonus points, it turns out Meighan is also quite the tea drinker; she perked up considerably when Dara talked about the loose-leaf tea and mentioned the place from which she orders her tea.

Once Donna, Dave, and Hillary took off and we got the kids off to bed, we had some of what my family has historically called "cussing and discussing" regarding where if anywhere we were going to go on Christmas proper or the day after. We finally settled on not bothering to try to go to either Gravel Switch or Louisville, partly due to the difficulty of transporting all five children, partly due to the weather, and partly due to the ice on Marc's driveway. Once that was settled, the rest of the night turned into further discussion of Ancient Family Lore.

And that was fun. Marc got out the old family picture albums that an old relation of ours gave him--a gentleman he's unearthed in the course of his family research, a guy by the name of Homer Eugene (Gene for short) who is our grandfather Burgoyne's nephew--the son of his oldest brother. (Anybody know what relation that would make him to us? I never did know how cousins and once-removal and twice-removal and all that sort of thing works.) This old dude apparently served in the Navy during WWII, and he's queer. When this came out, it apparently raised a huge stink in the family and caused Gene to basically turn his back on the entire family. However, Marc must have made enough of an impression on him that he was willing to hand over the old pictures. Didi thinks Marc needs to get back on his good side and get all the data he can out of him about who all the folks are; it'll be interesting to see what else Marc can discover.

Dara especially got into the pictures, once Marc got her a magnifying lass that let her do things like make out details like license plates on cars and little bits of architecture, in an attempt to narrow down the dates of the various pictures. And she and I both urged Marc to get the pictures into better photo albums and scanned in as well, to try to preserve the data. There's a whole lot of historical goodness in these shots, but they are deteriorating rapidly.

One of the shots particularly caught my eye: that of Julia Gillispie, who was my great-great-grandmother. Like most of the rest of the pictures, hers seemed to be circa some time in the '20's, and she's an old woman in the picture. According to the data Marc has on her, she was born in 1848--which makes me think, 'Whoa, she was actually around for the Civil War'. And to see a photo of an ancestor of mine from that era is, I can tell you, pretty trippy.

I edited some more of the book while Marc and Dara pored over the pictures, and while we all chatted back and forth about interesting tidbits of family lore: things like how apparently a whole slew of Highland men from that era committed suicide. And another one of Grandpa Burgoyne's brothers, Virgil, was killed in a "munitions accident" when he was very young and serving in the army; apparently he was transporting munitions in (get this) a covered wagon. Something deeply unfortunate happened, and he was practically cut in half. The military records Marc has unearthed do not indicate whether the munitions he was transporting went SPLODY, but one wonders!

We have another ancestor who was murdered on the courthouse steps of (I believe) Richmond, where our family has apparently been for several generations now. This guy was shot in a dispute over his allegedly inciting a neighbor's slaves to steal horse. And his children had to be adopted and raised by his father.

Linguistically interesting to me, as well, is how our surname of Highland has changed spelling several times down through the generations and was apparently not consistently written even by the same person. Some variations include Hilen, Hyland, and Hiland.

This kept us well and thoroughly occupied until 2am or so, till we finally decided to trundle off to bed.



This morning, Lydia and Charlie went more rounds of demanding my attention with both the 'Draw' game (on Lydia's part) and the Lite-Brite, Bubble Bobble, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (on Charlie's). But we got ourselves a respite as Dara finally touched bases with starfallz and arranged for us to come hang out at her place, borrow a cup of Internet, then head out for some food and general wandering around Lexington to see if anything interesting around the city has changed since we were last here.

The search for food took a while. Unsurprisingly, given that this is Christmas Day in Kentucky we're talking about, very little was open. We wound up eating at a Chinese place called Hunan's; of particular interest to spazzkat, we all made the expected Christmas Story jokes at one another about whether we should order Peking Duck. We did not in fact do so, but it was gigglesome to think of it. Over Chinese food (Orange Beef, Kung Pao Chicken, and Beef and Broccoli), we yakked a lot about movies and media--the sorts of things you'd expect four geeks to yak about when they go out to eat.

After that, we drove around more to look at things. For the most part, Lexington hasn't really changed--with some exceptions in the area of the UK Campus, which is apparently doing the same expansionist claiming of surrounding territory that the University of Washington is trying to pull. The house Dara and I used to share with amethyst_dancer and her husband John is still there, though the street it's on has significantly fewer trees; Janis says that a lot of the trees around Lexington were hit heavily by the ice storm from a couple of years ago. Tates Creek, the most significant arterial near Janis' apartment, has noticeably widened as the development of the city has spread outward from the core; this, however, is not necessarily a good thing. As Dara has frequently lamented, Lexington follows what she calls the California Development Model, and this has left downtown Lexington in a heavy state of decay.

Now, as I write this, we're still hanging out at Janis' place. Dara's played some with setting up Janis' wireless network, and they're watching TV while I take the time to get my journal updated--Interstella 5555, the movie that goes with the entire Discovery album by Daft Punk. We've checked in with my brother to let him know we probably won't be back at his place in time for dinner, but we don't expect to be out too late.

More next post!

Comments

Expansion modes..

[(Anonymous)]

As you've no doubt noticed,Lexington expands outward,leaving the center to rust out. My house in is the "rust out zone",and I hope to sell it this Spring. It's old,has a lot of potentially expensive problems,and I want out of Lexington,anyway. One rental company has bought up most of the houses on my street, leaving less than a half-dozen private owners. They leave d'ya-wanna-sell notices in my mailbox every so often..I may take them up on it.
The original plan was to give my house to my Mom, but she really doesn't want to stay there,so I will most likely sell it.
It's actually cheaper to live out of Lexington and drive in..one of my supervisors lives 80 miles away..even with his house and car payment,gas used and everything,it's still cheaper. According to him, gas will have to get around five dollars a gallon before it becomes cheaper to move back.
I looked at some places in Corinth(about 40 miles north on U.S. 25)..and found out there are two towns named Corinth in Ky..one north of Georgetown, the other almost in Tennessee.
As long as you aren't looking in a county that borders Fayette,house are quite reasonable..if you don't mind the drive. Driving doesn't bother me, so that's no big thing.
Hope you enjoy your stay here,and I hope I get to meet up with everyone at Joe Bolognas...Scott

Re: Expansion modes..

[annathepiper]

Well, if that supervisor of yours holds out for a while, gas will probably get up to that price. :P

Because of the driving, though (among many other reasons), Dara and I are really glad to not live here any more. Having to drive EVERYWHERE would start driving us nuts very quickly.

The trip's been good up to this point, though. :) See you on Tuesday!

[poodlgrl.livejournal.com]

Two Words:

Gravel SWITCH?

[annathepiper]

Yep! Not the strangest town name in Kentucky, but definitely one of the strangest. And it is quite literally small enough that you can blink and miss it. The first time Dara and I visited the place, after moving out to Seattle, we DID.

[wildshadowstar.livejournal.com]

I don't remember if I ever mentioned to you how Gravel Switch got its name, but here is the story that was given to me from either Aunt Eileen or Uncle Jack. There used to be railroad tracks that passed straight through Gravel Switch and many of the trains that passed through carried gravel. There was a switch close by (I'm assuming that the trains switched tracks or something of that nature). I was also told that for some unknown reason, the name of the town used to be Prairie City.

The house we used to live in (if you remember it, the blue two-story one with the pool in back) was right there beside the track, the only thing separating our house from the track was our yard and the road that went past our house. Aunt Eileen hated for us to be playing in the yard if a train happened to go by. I even remember pictures on the wall and other stuff rattling whenever a train passed. The tracks were taken up about 1986, so I don't have many memories of the trains.

[annathepiper]

I remember that house, indeed. I visited it often enough for it to get a foothold in my memory.

And yeah, I think I might have known at some point that the name was railroad-related; I have this little feeling of "yeah, that sounds right" in my brain.