Neverming! That sink is GORGEOUS! I would give anything to have your bathroom.

Great job on the medicine cabinet, sarameg!

I woke up at 6:00 am and decided to finally get my kitchen and bathroom floors scrubbed. I'll admit that it's been a looooooong time since that happened in either room. So, after taking off my nightgown and just in my skivvies, I filled up a bucket with water and Spic 'n Span and started scrubbing. The kitchen wasn't too bad, but ye gods, that bathroom floor was utterly disgusting, especially around the toilet base. It required refilling the bucket with another batch of clean water before it was anywhere near somewhat clean. Ugh! Oh, well, at least those rooms are clean. I then managed to pick up and vacumn the rest of the apartment, but I didn't do any dusting (the Pledge can and dustcloth are still sitting on the coffee table, in fact).

Dad spent the afternoon and took me out to lunch. I'd been craving the lamb kabobs and carrot salad at the local Uzbek place, so we headed over there, where we were the only ones in the place until we finished, when we passed by a Russian family coming in with a bottle of vodka in hand (they have some house wine and Russian beer and vodka available, but are also BYOB). I have enough of both the salad and lamb left over for dinner, and some bread, too.

After we came back to my place, I was talking about the summer projects I meant to do but ran out of time, including the photos I really should organize and put into albums and frames. We started talking about old family pics and I ended up pulling out my box which is mostly photos that Dad had given me years ago.

In going over the pics, we talked about his parents' families and their histories, most of which I had no idea about! I knew my dad's maternal grandfather, Jesse, was a barber on the South Side of Chicago, but nothing else. Turns out he had gone from school as a late teen to working as a barber in logging camps in Michigan and Wisconsin in the 1890s, which he did for several years before he'd had enough and moved to Chicago. He was job hunting, popped into a hair place called "Carson's Beauty Shop" which cut both men's and women's hair, and was hired. He then met the owner's daughter Alida and fell in love. Also, my great-great-grandma Carson was a single mom. We don't know what happened to great-great-grandpa Carson; if he died or if she divorced him, Alida never told anyone in her family.

One of the photos that I already have is a family pic of Alida and all of her siblings. I got that one because I see myself in every one of them. Apparently, when I was still pretty young, my dad's sister Barb was visiting one day, took a look at me, and looked at him and said, "Karl, your daughter looks exactly like Mom!" Sure enough, as I lose more weight, I'm looking even more like her now. All those Carson genes are resplendently viewable on my face.

Oh, that's wonderful, Kathy! How neat, on all counts.

Hey, it's raining! I was all, man, it's dark. I must have been slounging around reading non-electric catalogs way longer than I thought. I got up to look at the clock, and nope, not nighttime, just raining, yay!

Smells nice too, so I opened all the windows. Sounds like we might be up a lot overnight though, because it's thundering. AND once again I should have taken my bath when I was thinking about it because now I can't.

I tried to do a 15 minute clean, only something goofed up with my timer and I never heard it so now I have no idea how long I was tidying up and when I noticed I got all disgruntled.

But you are inspiring, Kathy, so maybe I can manage a few more things today. Tomorrow I want to be all about office work, so the better shape I get the household in today, the happier I'll be.

Smells nice too, so I opened all the windows.

I so miss that smell! Any prolonged rain here smells like wet dog.

I don't know hard numbers, but my gut feeling is that this country could not survive without illegal immigrant labor. Not without a dramatic shift in how we pay people and what we are willing to pay for things, and a million other aspects of our society.

Abso-freaking-lutely.

Clean....floors? Huh. I mean, I guess I could try that....

I did go to the supermarket just now, which was surprisingly crowded. The boy in front of me in line (who had a tatto down his leg that read "dying to be thin") said the corn I was buying made him homesick, because he's from Indiana where all they have is corn. Poor boy.

Also, on the subway home some (I think) German tourist kid fell down the stairs (within the car) directly on to me, knocking off my glasses, which luckily no one stepped on! And then still didn't hang on to anything! Fucking backpacks.

I think I'm going to take some time tomorrow to get everything dusted, in particular taking everyting off of the bookshelves and dusting instead of just dusting around the books.

Another thing I found out about was that my dad's paternal great-uncle Gus, who had come to America from Sweden at the same time as my grandpa Bror (he was only a few years older than Bror and had lived with my grandpa's family since he was in his early teens, so they were practically brothers and not uncle/nephew), had lived in Fairbanks, Alaska, for a good portion of the late '40s and early-to-mid '50s (he worked on military bases building barracks and doing other carpentry) before coming back to Chicago, and then relocating to Minneapolis. I always thought he'd been in Minnesota and had no idea about the decade in Fairbanks (he met his second wife, Agnes, there; his first wife had died of cancer in the mid-40s).

Gus was a neat guy--I remember the trip we took to Minnesota when I was around 7. We stayed with Gus and Agnes for a few days, and Gus cracked me up! He was this small-statured old man who had more energy than us kids did, stayed up to all hours of the night playing pinochle, and loved to watch pro wrestling on Sunday mornings.

Speaking of stature, one of the photos I found in my box was one of my favorites, a great photo of my grandpa, his brother, and my aunt Dorothy (who was also my grandma's sister--two sisters married two brothers, which is pretty neat!) on a beach on the South Side of Chicago in 1932. Grandpa and my uncle are in the tank one-piece men's swimsuits of the time, and my aunt is in a gorgeously flowy chiffon dress, cradled sitting on their clasped hands. Grandma is apparently the one taking the pic, which is too bad because I would have loved to see her in a similar dress, which I just know she was.

Well, every time I see that pic, I'm constantly amazed at how much of a hunk my grandpa was as a young man! I mentioned that to Dad today, and he said that he remembered how Grandpa, who had a barrel chest, also had a real six-pack for abs, and had those until he was in his 50s. Also, he had dark hair until he was 43, when all of the sudden, it went white practically overnight for no particular reason.

Ok hivemind, anyone know anything about the nutrition thinking of high fat, low grain, low dairy, high meat protein?

I knew my dad's maternal grandfather, Jesse,

So, Jesse is your great grandfather?!?

Seriously, that is a very interesting story, I love family history.

I'm a lot of people's great-grandfathers.