My cousin Jen named her daughter Josephine in honor of Jo March...and Josephine Baker. Gotta like that combo.

Oh I love that, Scrappy!!!!

I like hearing about people's family histories too.

I think I'm going to ask around at my knitting/crochet group tonight for recommendations about where to get snow tires.

My maternal grandmother's mother traveled by: covered wagon, carriage, car, train, and airplane in her life time. Her family moved from Kentucky to Oklahoma in covered wagon. And then later she made trips by train and plane. In fact when she died she had tickets and plans to go fly and see one of her sons in Las Vegas.

My paternal great aunt (Grandma E's sister) moved to Alaska from Georgia after World War II. She and some of her friends all decided to go to Alaska for an adventure, but the friends changed their mind. Great Aunt C told me that she'd already told her family and all her friends she was going and she wasn't going to back out after that. So she went by herself - she took a bus to Seattle and then a ship from Seattle to Alaska. She found a job and then she met her husband and got married.

Their first year or so of marriage they lived in a hotel and ate room service every night.

My great-great-uncle Gus, the one who came over from Sweden with my grandpa and his brother, had married and was working as a carpenter in Chicago. His wife Vicky died in 1948, and after living with Grandpa and the family for a year or so, he moved to Fairbanks and worked on the military bases up there building barracks and doing other carpentry. He came home briefly in the mid-50s, and then moved back up there until the 1960s. He met his second wife Agnes in Fairbanks.

We visited Gus and Agnes in Minneapolis when I was around 7 years old. I remember being really charmed by this little old guy, who had more energy than all of us kids combined, and he would stay up until 4:00 am playing pinochle and then get up on Sunday morning and watch professional wrestling on TV. Agnes was more taciturn, but Gus was a trip.

My grandfather went to law school in Austria before the war. Their version of the bar exam was a series of six tests. He'd passed five of them before the Nazis barred Jews from becoming lawyers, so he never had a chance to take the last test. His immigration papers when he came to the US said he had the equivalent of a bachelors degree, but most of the jobs he had in the US were sewing handbags in a factory. He was very involved in organizing union stuff, though.

Oh, and sometime in the early seventies, he contacted the Austrian embassy to see if he could get the certificate saying he was an Austrian lawyer. The lack of that piece of paper had bothered him his whole adult life. He didn't actually want to practice law, he just wanted the paper. The embassy said that he'd have to pass that last exam to get it.

My BIL's dad was a rather prominent lawyer in Havana, but he got his family out in the last plane out of Cuba before Castro shut it down in 1962. He never practiced law in the States, but I'm not too sure what he did instead.

BIL's sister is older (from his dad's first marriage), so she was already married with kids in 1962. She lived on the same block as Castro's mistress, so whenever he'd come over to visit/get a little nooky, his security forces would shut down the entire block. She hated it, so she and her family were on the same plane out with her dad, his second wife, and BIL, who was 3 at the time.

My mom taught me to sew a little bit, and I have her amazing all-metal workhorse of a machine. But putting in or replacing a lining? Nope, not my skill-level. Most of my (dubious) sewing skills have been learned through trial and error over the years.

Hi, guys.

Brane ded. I'm ded.

I got home last night, and I slept 12 hours last night in my own bed MY OWN BED. Bliss. I still need a long hot shower and about 12 more hours of sleep and a bottle of Tylenol.

We were supposed to get back Monday night, but Kelly had more work come in than expected, so we spent a little more time getting to Detroit and back than we thought.

It was lots of fun, and I will detail it more, and I have tons of pix, but ye gods, am I TIRED! Doing something like this at 40 is different than 25 or 30!

Thanks to everyone who helped with my costume - the costumes there were, for the most part, amazing. I went up and down 7 floors of Masonic temples probably 3 times that night. My ass STILL hurts from all the stairs -- I am SO GLAD wore boots. People kept moving out of my way and calling me ma'am or milady. I think a lot of people thought I was a dom. That's ok, though; they got out of my way.

And gay guys took a lot of perverse pleasure in balancing things on my boobs, but I didn't mind.

Need more coffee. Missed the internet, missed you guys.

Okay, please check me on this:

I've had a sore throat for, I don't know at this point, 4-5 weeks. Last week's strep test was negative. I don't *think* it's a cold, though it could be.

It truly didn't occur to me until this morning that it could just be allergies, and maybe I just need to switch my damned antihistamine. I mean, I usually have to switch in the spring when claritin stops working, so maybe Allegra isn't holding up to fucking ragweed.

I say that I don't think it's a cold because the only nasal/sinus symptoms I've had are occasional mad sneezing fits and an itchy nose. No stuffy head, no nasty snot, nothing. Also really itchy, watery eyes.

And my throat really is a combination of sore and itchy. So...allergies? Fuck Allegra and switch to something else to see?

I can't believe I didn't think of it until now. Sheesh.