Vacation post #4

[annathepiper]

solarbird and I got home between 9pm and 10pm last night, and found Marc's family in the middle of watching I, Robot, which Didi had received as a Christmas present. From what little bit we saw of it, it looked not too bad to me, though Dara didn't care for it at all. It might be fun to see the whole movie at some point, though I don't think I'd want to own it.

Anyway, I got in a little bit of editing last night, but mostly last night was about a bit more playing with the children and a bit more yakking about family lore with Marc. Lydia got into asking me to draw with her again, but this time her trick was to try to get me to draw FOR her. When I asked her what she wanted me to draw, she piped, "Liddie!" Which led to me then having to draw everyone in the family, including the cat. However, I must add that a thick toddler-sized pen that goes with a magnetic drawing surface is NOT an artistic medium conducive to great detail. ;) So my drawing of the family came out more like you'd expect drawn by one of the children, but well hey, it amused Lydia.

Later, Marc and I got into talking about the Amerine branch of the family--the branch of our maternal grandmother, Ruth. It turns out to be that branch where we have the ancestor who was murdered on the courthouse steps. And this guy himself shot the slave of one of his neighbors who in turn shot him. As with the Highlands, the Amerines have had their name change spellings down through the generations, which has made it interesting for Marc to try to track them: he's found variations like Emmerine and Ammerine and such. But the really impressive thing Marc shared with me last night was the database he has on his work computer, in which he has amassed about SIX THOUSAND NAMES off the various branches of our family.

And he's been telling me about how people are starting to come to HIM as an information source, just for the degree of the work he's been doing. He'd like to make more trips to continue the research, but it's not really feasible for him to travel out of state. So he's stymied on more than a few tracks of his research.

Me, I think it's all really great that he's doing this, just because it gives me this sense of family and connection that I've rarely felt throughout the course of my life. It's sort of the same vibe I get off of Great Big Sea music--the sense of tradition and connection and such. And I got a warm fuzzy off of Marc telling me how gratified he was that I was actively interested in what he's doing. Apparently most of our family show initial interest and then get cross-eyed and dazed with the sheer volume of information he's collected. For me, it just starts filling in the details of the stories of these people's lives, and Marc and I had some great conversation about how historical trends might influence familial ones, and how both of us kind of lack the proper education to really see where these trends intersect--on things just like, say, the third wife of one of our ancestors being named Elender. (chamois_shimi, I shared your findings with Marc, which is what prompted this. ^_^)

So that was all good.



Sunday morning fired off with the expected Lydia/Charles conflict over who got my attention first. Lydia wanted to draw with me some more, though this time it was with her new sketch pad and crayons, which she had previously neglected due to having missed her Christmas stocking entirely. The crayons were the big thick child kind, and yet she managed to break two of them just by grabbing them so hard in her little fist. And yet again, she wanted me to draw her various family members--though this time the game involved active Lydia participation, as she scribbled all over whatever scribble I made even before I got very far.

Charlie, though, kept up with the "Will you play Ninja Turtles with me? Will you play Bubble game with me?" barrage. When I didn't come downstairs immediately with him, though, he switched tactics and asked if he could play the "Head game" on my computer. That, I was willing to do. So I fetched my laptop, brought it upstairs, and monitored Charlie playing SameGame while I helped Lydia color. This eventually attracted the attention of Amanda as well, who then jumped in to take turns with Charlie to play. Me, I realized that this game was supposed to have sound--and yet, the sound has not been working on my computer at all. It was behaving erratically on my last laptop, but on this one it hasn't worked once. I must wonder whether this is an artifact of my having fiddled with the sound DLLs when I'd installed SP2, but I'm not sure. The game is old enough that its Readme file talks about "Windows 3.0 or later"--and my trying to set it into "Windows 95 compatibility mode" did not seem to help. I may have to go look for a later version, to see if I can find out if the original creator of this game has worked on it since.

Marc eventually showed up with Meighan, having fetched her, and once Meighan was on hand a huge blur of family domesticity ensued. Dara made tea, which got Meighan's attention; then Meighan, Amanda, Charlie, and even Lydia occasionally got into a slew of group coloring. Meighan got a nice set of tiny colored pencils for Christmas, and she got into doing some sketches that looked pretty nice to me from a color standpoint; she showed me the picture she did of the outfit she'd gotten as well.

Lydia apparently has decided I'm one of her new best friends, though. Her mother tried to put her down for a nap, but that didn't work very well, and so she came back out into the living room to flop onto one of the chairs while Mom put on Stuart Little for her. This worked only long enough for Lydia to decide that she wanted to sit on my lap and have me either draw with her or read to her. Hee.

Soon, though, my uncle Randy showed up with his latest significant other. (Randy is only the same age as my older brother Donnie, though, so I have a hard time sometimes thinking of him as my uncle.) I only got to see a bit of them, though, as I'd distracted myself doing further work on the Windows 95 box in the kids' room, getting the Spybot update onto it that I'd downloaded yesterday (which eventually claimed to me that the box was clean, yay). And then Dara and I needed to set out to go see our friend Scott.

Scott has moved away from his former residence near the University of Kentucky for much the same reasons that we've moved out of the vicinity of the University of Washington: i.e., the students turning into assholes. That truly sucks--and he and Dara spent much of our conversational time comparing trends between our area and this one, and it's mind-blowing how sharply these trends have come into being at almost the same time in both places. It is Dara's theory that all this crap that has commenced at the U-dub is a result of the children of baby-boomers hitting college age and having pretty much unlimited money at their disposal--and therefore having hugely over-inflated senses of entitlement. I.e., "everything should be given to us." In fact, Dara has heard kids in this generation outright saying that they thought all the houses on our block in the U-district should be given to them. These kids have pitched fits over neighbors mowing their lawns before 2pm on a Saturday afternoon because it interferes with their hangovers.

Now, yeah, I will outright say that I know not all college kids are like this, even now. But the sharp upswing in acts of destruction, vandalism, violence, rape, and murder--both here in Kentucky and at home in Seattle--is undeniable, and it's sobering and shocking to think about the almost synchronized shift that's happened in both places. And it's very sobering to think about what will happen when this generation of kids gets old enough that they have to enter the working world.

In his old neighborhood, Scott had to chase drunken students off of his property and out of his house more than once. He almost shot one student who wandered into his house, and all that kept him from shooting the kid was his subconscious realizing on some level that the noises being made by the intruder in his house were not those of a burglar, but rather, someone who was clearly intoxicated. So that, in a word, sucks.

The silver lining of that particular cloud, though, has been that he got himself a very nice new house in the Bryan Station area of the city, close to where I went to high school for my last year and a half. Dara really likes his place and could wax eloquent about its architectural features much better than I could, but what stands out for me with the place is that it was designed and built around a huge sycamore tree that's easily a hundred feet high. If you look out the windows of the living room, the tree is RIGHT THERE, with an enormous trunk that forks and provides a solid enough place for a full-grown person to sit. Way, way cool.

Anyway, Dara and I spent several pleasant hours at Scott's place, chatting with him and his partner Joyce about a whole range of topics. As we'd done at on the two previous visits with friends, we borrowed Internet access--and I got a lot of LJ comments answered, though no further posts made. I chatted some with Joyce about books I've been reading lately (The Three Musketeers), musical endeavors, and other things going on in my life. She was quite interested in Great Big Sea once I launched into my inevitable spiel about them--but she surprised me when she told me she'd actually heard of La Bottine Souriante. So that was all about the cool.

And we met Joyce's daughter as well, and their pets: a gray and mostly anti-social cat, and an old doggie named Brandy who spent most of our visiting time wandering around between us sniffing us and asking for skitches. And Scott and Joyce fed us some tasty ham and smoked turkey sandwiches, with some mango chutney which was a new thing to both Dara and me. And we had tea, and thick brownies chock full of nuts and topped off with coffe-flavored chocolate.

We had originally planned on hanging out with Scott for only a couple of hours, but we wound up staying there all afternoon and into the early evening just because of having that much to talk about. And we went straight from there over to meet our other friend Brent for dinner at T.G.I. Friday's over in the South Park shopping center, near Fayette Mall. He showed up with his significant other along with him (the same young lady who'd accompanied him on his trip out to Seattle some months ago), and we had a nice dinner and a nice conversation with them as well. Mostly it focused on the differences between Everquest and MUSHes, the state of the monorail in Seattle, and political science. And our waitress was very amiable, asking where we were from and perking up a bit when I told her I was actually from Kentucky but lived in Seattle, and had come back to visit family for Christmas.

But because of being out visiting friends all day, we missed any opportunity to visit with Randy. Oh well. But he did leave us a gift bag, with a box of oatmeal-raisin cookie mix and a big candle. So that's nice. And Marc tells me that it's confirmed that our brother Donnie will in fact be making it down from Louisville tomorrow night to visit.

When we got in tonight I, Robot was being watched again--this time by Meighan, who hadn't been here last night to see it. Dara and I were amused that we walked in at pretty much the same point in the flick that we had last night. And while that was being watched, I worked on getting another email answered out of my email backlog (it's kind of amazing how well I can get caught up on my email when I do not in fact have any Internet access).

Marc's chatted some more with Dara and me tonight, and it seems that my little brother shares my addiction to caffeine and the resultant symptoms: twitchy eyelids and excessive fidgeting. I have urged him to try cutting back on his caffeine intake and to consider drinking more tea. I have had to kind of abandon my caffeine reduction for the duration of the vacation, just because both Marc's family and starsongky and gazerwolf bought us so much soda to drink, but when I get home again I will be resuming the effort just because I actively appreciate the impact it has on my sense of taste. And I've told him so.

For the rest of tonight: a bit more book editing. Then, bedtime. Tomorrow: Dara and I will be heading to Harlan on a personal day trip, for reasons I won't get into in this entry. Suffice to say that it's going to be all about trying to lay some old ghosts to rest. Hopefully we will be able to make some headway on that.

Comments

[gazerwolf.livejournal.com]

They DO make a caffeine free diet dew. The lack of caffeine doesn't change the taste that I noticed.

(of course I don't do diet so I only tried it once.)

The regular caffeine free dew tastes just fine.

[annathepiper]

Marc actually had a lot of the caffeine free diet Dew at his place, and Dara and I drank some of it. It did taste about the same, yeah. Mostly it's just me rebelling against the notion of diet Dew being caffeine free at all, since historically, for me, the caffeine has been half the point. ;)