The Family Tree

A few weeks ago my sister Kate and her husband Tom got their dna results back from Ancestry.com.  They decided to purchase a membership and start work on a family tree.  I have all the family information, so she gave me her password. We may as well work together, as it's the same tree going upward.

So for the past couple of weeks I have been delving into different aspects of the tree.  It irritates me to no end that I'm stuck on my Great Grandparents Meys.  The immigrated from Belgium in 1907 (he came a few years earlier) and the trail ends.  It was that way when I started looking ten years ago, and it hasn't changed.  They have a pretty amMEYSing story, and I would like to find some of the family they left behind.  I shall not give up.

Anyhoo...... I get sucked into the trees and hours go by.  It can be kind of emotional.  I mean this is where you come from.  I focus on one part of the family, and then as I'm finishing up I go to add something on another part and find the trail that leads me to my Great Grandfather TEN generations back.  I found family that my Mom talked about, but I never met, and saw pictures of their gravestones.  My Great Grandfathers family having three different spellings of the last name in one family group. WHY?!  We are Lenihan.  Some are Linehan.  Some are Lennihan.  They all have the same Linehan father.  I think my Mom told me that her Grandpa changed the spelling because it was confusing for mail, etc with so many siblings in the same area.  Not as confusing as trying to put these folks together I bet!

Now back to 10 generations ago:

Pierre Desautels Sr. was born in Sarthe, France in 1631. (When I was a little girl that side of the family always said they were from France.....well, um........sure, but until about 1650 that was Canadian.  Ok, unless it's closer from my Great Grandfather's side. I haven't been there yet. This is my Great Grandmother's side)

Joseph was born in 1668
Michel was born in 1701
Gaspard was born in 1743
Michel was born in 1775
Joseph was born in 1805  *this dude had at least three wives (at least two at once) and 18 children
Antoine was born in 1840

All of the above are born in Canada

Florida Desautels was born in 1889 (both parents from Canada)
Eva Ann Marquerite Laverdiere in 1907
Edward Joseph Meys in 1933
ME  in 1969

So I'm like really solid Canadian.  That bodes well if I decide to jump ship and head north.

I found all of this information in one afternoon.  It's astounding what you can do with the internet today, vs what I could find ten years ago.  I'm mentally exhausted.  I think it's time for a hot bath and a book to turn my brain off for awhile.

New Addition

After a long nine months of deliberating, arguing, planning, searching,arguing..................

It's a KITTEN!

Most of you already know this, but two months ago THE Magnificent Mo joined our family.

7 weeks

First meeting

Jacob was loving him right from the very first night.  Milkie was not.


Jacob is also teaching him to be a good dog. He shares his water dish, and he would share his food if we would let him.  He did actually growl when Mo tried to get in on the pigs ear treat, and I was glad to see that, because Jacob is such a pushover. They play, and play, and play, and play!  It was definitely a good idea for Jake to have a friend.

Milkie began this adventure by just hissing at Mo in passing.  I was uneasy about how she would treat him, so if she was out he was safe in the big kennel where she could investigate, but not touch.  As the weeks have gone by they play more and more, but Mo is just the devil.  I was worried about the wrong cat.  Milkie thumps on him, but she is declawed.  I have yet to see her use the big teeth, and he never cries out while they "play".  Milk, on the other hand, is quite vocal about it.  When she has had enough of him she asks to go into the one room he isn't allowed in, which is where we keep her food and water.  We immediately put her away, because I want to keep it on her terms as much as possible.  She has earned her place here.  Mo is working on it.

Mo is growing SO fast.  I can't wait to see how much he weighs now, and I'm looking forward to the "snip-snip" in a week or so, and having him settle down a bit. He has the run of the house while we are home, unless I am trying to do something and he wont let me be.  Then he goes to "kitty jail."  My preschoolers think that is hilarious!  He also can be very evil in the night, and then he gets booted out too.  We have a very large, carpeted master bath that holds all of his necessities, scratching post, and some toys.  If he gets too bad, in he goes.  He spent several nights there for weeks on end, but he is settling in now, and sleeps with us.  During the day he has our large bedroom and the master bath to butt around in until we get home.  He can also see Jake out the window. I still can't envision the day when he has reign of the house with Milkie while we are gone.

He can be exhausting one minute, and a lover the next.  The Brown Eyed Man calls him "MY little lion", but he is definitely his Mama's boy.  Everywhere I go, there he is.  You can practically hear him yell "NOT THE MAMA" if he doesn't want Papa to hold him.  That being said, they do take a lot of naps together. ♥ 

Girls and Dolls

Back in my younger years, of course I had a dolly or two, or twenty.  I don't remember being very enthused about playing with them, but I had all the newest dolls.  Hi Dotty came with a phone, and I can't remember her, but remember a Christmas picture with her in it.  I must have been two or three.

The pic says 1972, so I was two.

 Baby Alive was more interesting because you could feed her, and then she pooped.  Then her batteries corroded, and there was an awesome mess in her diaper.  Good times.

 Next came the one that crawled, and then there was a doll who walked.  Wait, they may have been one in the same. lol

  I wanted these dolls, and they amused me for a bit, but that was the end of it.  They held almost no interest for me after I had them for a minute.  I was much more into the little people and weebles.  I used them to create stories with intricate plot lines.  Kind of the way I play the SIMS today.  Yep, I play the SIMS.  I have a whole country that is four or five generations deep now.  It's set in medieval times.  There are castles, etc........ but that is another blog. :)

Lets not forget Vicki's sister's dolls.  The Crissy dolls.  They have long hair, but there's a knob on their back that you can twist to make it short.  To make the hair long again you just yank it out of the dolls' head.  These dolls are (or were) still at Vicki's Moms, and to my joy I came across the red head one day.  Vicki's toddler, Meg, was there, and I thought she would get a kick out of it.  When I yanked the hair out to be long again the look on her face was priceless.  She screamed and ran away, which was not my intent.  Her Mother and I had a good laugh, and have laughed about it since.  I'm laughing now.  It. Was. Awesome.  Sorry Meghan.  I will pay for the therapy.

I'm sure I have mentioned that my Mom was the secretary for St. Anthony's Catholic Church here in Superior for over 30 years.  My siblings and I grew up playing in the rectory that is attached to the church, and got to know the housekeepers very well.  In fact I cleaned that rectory for Sr. Veronica during my junior and senior years of high school.  

Somewhere around 1975 the housekeeper was Dorothy Baker.  She was a character, and boy could she sew. She created this doll for a raffle price for the fall bazaar at the church.  I watched her make it, and then they used me in a photo for the news paper to advertise the bazaar.   Oh I loved that doll.  I wanted that doll.  I NEEDED that doll!  Yep, I won that doll (that had to have been fixed) and I loved that doll for probably five whole minutes.  What ever happened to her?  I do not know.

Note the 70's pants

Then there was my dolly.  She doesn't have a name, never did.  My Aunt Mary bought her for me when I was born, at the gift shop at St. Joseph's Hospital, in Superior.  She was head of nurses there, and one of the ladies who worked at the shop made the doll.  She came with a bonnet, a coat, shoes, socks, bloomers, a slip, and a dress.  My mother held that doll until I was ten years old.  I didn't even know it existed.  It's a good thing she did.  I have no idea where anything but the bloomers, slip, dress, and doll are.  The rest was lost long ago.  I didn't play with this doll really, but I have kept her with me since the time I got her.  She has her own rocking chair that I bought just for her at a craft show years back, and currently lives in the Goovers bedroom.  

No, I didn't braid my hair for the picture.  Happy coincidence. 

Over all these years I don't think that I have even bought one doll for my girls.  Barbie's for Ashlyn I think, but that's it.  I did do the Barbie thing, because again, I created stories for them, but I definitely wasn't a girl who played with baby dolls.

Green Thumb

My Father was a gardener, and  I'm guessing he learned it from his folks, out of necessity.  They were quite poor.  My Grandpa Meys lost a leg hopping a train back around 1920.  He was in his teens.  Work for disabled people back in those days was certainly hard to come by, so Grandpa did what he could, trapped, and I am going to assume gardened.

I am a gardener, and I learned by trial and error.  Heaven help you if you monkeyed around with Dad's gardens, and he certainly wasn't a fan of showing his kids how to do something.  I'm sure we (except for Kate, she hates it) picked up some knowledge just by watching what he was up to.  It's definitely in the blood though, my brother's and I are quite good at it, I must say.

My dad had veggie gardens (mmmm those Belgian peas, best eaten when sneaked) and beautiful flower gardens.  People stopped all the time to see his rose garden.  I'm sure I've written about that before.  He worked hard at it, and was proud of the fruits of his labors.  Rightly so.

I wish I could give more time to my gardens, but man alive, I can't work a full day, come home and deal with household stuff, and then go pick at the garden.  When I cut back my hours in a few years I am going to devote much more time to puttering around.  I love the little garden by the back door.  It's small enough that I can just stop by and pick a weed or two.

The Punisher (someone designed it to be shaped like a punisher skull....... )  garden is a very different story.  My goal is to have it be mostly perennial.  We're getting there.  It's a lot of hard work, on the side of a very steep hill.   It's hard to get a picture that shows the scope of this thing.  I might have an older one taken from the bottom.  Sad to say, the top is the only thing I'm working on this year.  At the moment, my foot just doesn't allow me to be standing on a hill pulling weeds.  Slowly I will get there.  The dogwood bush on the right is going insane, and I will have to take that back a bit in the fall.  I'm excited for the riot of color this will become in the next few weeks!  

Here's the veggie garden.  Tomato and pumpkin (first try and they are coming like gangbusters) are in the farther one, onion and peas are in the smaller middle part, and then beans and cukes in the nearer garden.  We've already been eating green onion, and the peas aren't far off.  I've done some weeding since this pic was taken.  It's never ending.  If I let that garden go for one year you would never know it was even there.  There's my new weed whacker in the shot.  I love it!  Light weight and powerful, perfect size for me.  It was a very exciting find, well, for me anyway.  

I also have a hosta garden under the large tree that you see to the left of the punisher garden.  I will save pics of that for now, as I just built a squirrel feeding station out of logs from the maple we had to cut down, and I think we might be using some of that maple for a border.  

My Dad was also big into trees.  He planted every single one of the twenty or so that were in our yard at one time.  I love them too, but am not great at identifying them.  Oh, we all know the easy ones. Birch, maple, etc.  We have two GIANT trees near the border in front that we finally had an arborist identify.   Turns out they are Balm of Gilead.  ????  What now?  That's a new one for me.  It's related to the aspen and poplar, and that's why we kept going back and forth thinking it was one or the other, but it didn't quite fit.  

The Corner

Good Saturday morning!  The Corner has undergone some construction, and hopefully I will come and sit here a while with you more frequently.  It isn't that I haven't had things to say, or misadventures to share, life is just busy.  Writing seems to be more of a therapy for me than anything, and I guess I haven't needed the "couch" in awhile.

I have also toyed with changing the blog for quite some time.  The look of it, the name of it, the content.........but the only thing changing (maybe) is the look.  I can't change anything else, because it's me.  Yes, my life is totally different from six (or seven) years ago when I began writing, but who I am hasn't changed all that much.

Everyone is well, the nieces and nephew are all off enjoying the summer.  The Brown Eyed Man still drives me bonkers, and Jake and Milkie are good.  We are thinking about ( have been talking about it for like a year now) adding a new baby to the mix.  The right puppy or kitty just hasn't come along yet.  That will be something to write about for sure, because  Milkie isn't going to be thrilled, and every time Jacob hears us talking about it he leaves the room.  The Brown Eyed Man really wants one. I, for the most part,do not.  More fun for him, more work for me is kind of how I see it.  Stay tuned!


Disclaimer:  The garden picture to the right is NOT from this year.  The perennials are more mature so they are bigger.  The weeds are too.  The front part where I put the annuals has been hit hard by bear and chipmunks.  I'm thinking about hitting the sales next week and replanting.  The lower garden has been mostly neglected, due to plantar fasciitis on my right foot.  Today is my "suck it up" day, and I'm going to try and get in there.  The thistle are almost as tall as me.  I'm this close to letting the whole thing go to the day lilies.   :)