Eep. This is a little stronger language than you usually see out of the National Weather Service:

-- People sheltering at ground level at Galveston Bay when Hurricane Ike hits face "certain death," the weather service warns.

But I have a cut on my lip that is still swollen and I'd like to think it's going to go away soon.

My unstitched but deepish cuts stayed swollen a couple weeks. Looks like this one which went right through the lip might be at least symmetrical in 10 days, if still big. It's so hard to say. I'm in that phase where I really hate TV injury makeup and injuries in narrative because they're so damned trivial and never swell.

Unfair.

I don't think I ever want to see the National Weather Service say "certain death." Even if they're not lying.

I'm still having the world's worst headache, in case you're keeping track. But it's only been since morning, so no ER for me.

Well, that isn't mincing...

Insiders who are also by some way outsiders have always fascinated me, probably because it is a feeling I'm familiar with. Whether by birth or psychological quirk (both,) I've felt it keenly. I was not part of the dominant culture I grew up in, but that culture was one that helped define me, even as I am not it. And I was a nerd in an even smaller circle that wasn't defined by that culture (well, not totally.) Yet another set of circles. And now? Well, the workplace finds me with similar weirdos as I sink into yet another living culture where I'm not like and never will be, but welcome me still. I'm their weirdo, I guess. I don't know that I'll ever be common in wherever I call home, for one reason or the other. Yet, on the surface, I'm ridiculously common. I've just never felt so. But you know what? It doesn't matter. I like 'em all, and I'm glad to be where I am. Everywhere. It's still a curiosity.

There was an interesting program around 1910 to try to move Jews out of the east coast cities. Some of it was incentives for Jews to move from the east coast to small towns in the midwest. Another big part of it was incentives for ship companies to change their routes so that they'd be bringing Eastern European (mostly Jewish) immigrants to Galveston rather than Ellis Island. [link] My great-grandfather was on one of those ships, and after landing in Galveston, he stayed there just long enough to earn enough money to get on a train to New York.

(There seems to be a history of "we don't like the Jews over here -- let's put them over there!" programs. One of my grandfather's cousin's was trying to get to the US from Vienna during WWII, and he stopped in England for a time, and was then classified as an "enemy" and deported to Australia. [link]

Wow, Hil -- I'd heard of that story, but didn't know you had a connection to it. Did he stay in Oz after they finally got residency?

I *hate* tv injuries. They are just vaguely sexy usually and in no way gory, swollen, oozing or ... real. This is not how my body deals with injury. I want tv injuries if I have to have ouchies.

My unstitched but deepish cuts stayed swollen a couple weeks.

Yeah, I am just over two now. It's got some more time before it's done with swelling. I will deal if it ::crosses fingers:: means less scarring. I mean, I will deal with it either way, since I have no choice. But I hope for minimal scarring.

the weather service warns.

No vagueness in that disclaimer.

Wow, Hil -- I'd heard of that story, but didn't know you had a connection to it. Did he stay in Oz after they finally got residency?

Nope. He served in the Australian army during the war, but then came to the US after the war was over, since his parents and little sister were here.

I'm not actually entirely sure how he's related. I think that his mother and my grandfather's mother were first cousins, but I'm not sure of that -- I can't find records that say for sure, and no one I've asked can remember anything beyond that he and my grandfather were cousins. He and my grandfather were about the same age and both grew up in Vienna, and they wrote a lot of letters and sent photos and stuff to each other when he was in Australia and my grandfather was in NYC, but then they seem to have lost touch after they were both living in the same city again.

I actually have another relative who went from Germany to Scotland in the late thirties, and got married and had a few kids and seemed to be settling there, but then in the early fifties, he started getting worried about nuclear proliferation, and so he and his family moved to New Zealand, since he thought that was far enough away from potential targets.

The Australian archives are pretty cool -- they've got a lot of their stuff scanned and available online, so I was able to search for my grandfather's cousin's name and it pulled up four documents -- two about his detention, and two about his army service -- and two of them were available for viewing right online, for free. I haven't seen that for any other place I've done genealogical research. Chicago has birth, marriage, and death records available for viewing online, but you've got to pay something like $16 for each one. For NYC, you can order the records online, but they send you a paper copy about a month later.

The Australian archives are pretty cool

Huh. I just found a fair chunk of my family -- oddly, some of them are listed as Austrian and some are listed as German.

Also, Cousin Cora was apparently Cousin Kora. I'm not sure that's a name I can handle right now.

There's a great book about the "Driving Miss Daisy" era, The Temple Bombing >[link] by Melissa Faye Greene, and much of the book is about Jews as outsiders in the South.