sometimes Always

And as the afternoon passes into the evening, our vacation draws to a close. It’s been good, and I still will always and forever wish that it was longer or that I was just fabulously rich and didn’t need to work another day in my life.

We spent a couple of days just sitting at home. We had an early birthday lunch for me at Ted’s Montana Grill, where I ate a bison burger topped with mushrooms, Swiss cheese, and sour cream. It was like heaven exploded in my mouth.

That giant snowstorm we were supposed to get never happened, so I went out for a run on Wednesday morning while it was snowing out. I ran a mile from the house along the bike path, and then came back out onto the main road and then picked up a side street and ran through the back roads a bit before coming back out to the main road and then back to our street. When all was said and done and I was back at home, I’d been out for nearly an hour and covered almost 4 miles. Unfortunately I’d also made Eddie very worried because I told him I was only going to try and get in 5k (3.1 miles), so he met me in the drive way, all dressed and debating about going to look for me.

We spent Friday at the Boston Museum of Science, where we wandered around and played with shit, and took pictures of dioramas, and ate lunch with a well-behaved family of four. We checked out the Omni Theater, where I was thrilled beyond words to discover that the opening demonstration of the theater’s sound system still uses Leonard Nimoy asking “Who put the ‘bomp’ in the ‘bomp she-bomp she-bomp’?” just like it did the last time I was there with my Girl Scout troop over 20 years ago.

Since it was my birthday on Friday, and in our family you get to pick out whatever you want for dinner on your birthday, we feasted on my mother’s fantastic lasagna. Danielle came over, bringing with her a gift of a 4-pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade in a flavor I hadn’t had yet: crantini. It was pretty damned good. She also gave me a new game for the Wii, the Wii Sports Resort game, which so far seems pretty fun.

Mom was devious this year, having bought my birthday gift over a week ago but continuing to ask me what I wanted. When I told her that I needed new running shoes, she told me that she couldn’t afford to buy me some, which made it all the more surprising when I unwrapped a Garmin Forerunner 305. Eventually I did manage to get the Garmin to talk to my computer, and now I no longer need to pay attention to where I’ve run; I only need to know whereabouts I need to get to.

Continuing with 2010 being the “Year of the Fitness Stuff”, Eddie took me out yesterday and bought me a new pair of kicks, a pair of gray and bright orange Nike Lunarglides, which I’ll probably review after I do a few more runs in them. This is in addition to actually registering for the Rock & Roll Las Vegas Half-Marathon, and buying our flight tickets out there and reserving our hotel room.

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A few years ago, I signed up for Ancestry.com’s free membership and plugged in the basics of my family tree – just me, my parents, and my grandparents. Since then, I’d received monthly updates on the site’s latest offerings and services, as well as periodic info it would dig up on the 7 people that I’d put on the tree.

Out of boredom a week or so ago, I signed up for the basic account. At around $20 per month, it promised me access to anything and everything that I could possibly imagine to find on my dead relatives, so long as the information was based in the United States. Using Ancestry’s little “hints” I was able to find information on my paternal grandfather’s side of the family – the side no one has any information on because we’d never written down any family tree-type stuff. I knew his parents’ names, and that was enough to bring up several censuses worth of data on where the family had lived throughout the years, but I’m getting shit for information about them before they came over from Ireland.

My Nana, my maternal great-grandmother, had made not one but two of those “our family history” books. One of them we can’t seem to find, and the other is barely filled in. I used some of that information to trace back on her side of the family, which was much easier because half of them came over from England in the 1500’s and could be considered VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE back in the day, and the other half came over in the 1800’s.

One of the fun things that I’ve discovered about tracing the tree back as far as I can go (which I haven’t yet, I’m still picking up other branches back to 1400’s England) is the “One World Tree”. Trace a family tree back far enough, and combine it with the thousands of other people’s family trees, and eventually there’s some overlap. This is what the One World Tree is. And one of the beta features of this is the ability to find famous family members on your own tree. For instance, I’ve discovered that I’m distantly related to Queen Elizabeth. Langston Hughes, and Mary Todd Lincoln, and less-distantly related to George Bush.

What I haven’t found? I’ve found absolutely nothing on the fabled Indian in our family tree. I’ve figured out where in the tree this person should be, but since I don’t have a maiden name for one of my great-great-great-grandmothers, I’m at a dead end. I’ll have to dig through some marriage records.

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1. Go to the “Random Article” link on Wikipedia. Write down the title of the article. This is the name of your band.

2. Go to “Random Quotations” and the last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3. Go to Flickr and click on “Explore the Last Seven Days”. The third picture will be your album cover.

(my apologies if the image doesn’t show up in the feed, rest assured it is visible on the home page)

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I’ve sorely neglected posting as of late. This is mainly because last week was filled with complete morons at work, and I came home a few times all annoyed and pissy and just couldn’t wait for the week to be over. The weather has been frigid and I absolutely can’t stand being cold, which meant that from last Friday until Monday I was just shy of being considered an ice cube.

We did have some excitement last week. On Monday we had wicked strong winds and rain, which could have been really much worse if it wasn’t almost 60F outside. The fun part was watching the wind blow the front doors off the store. The store has your typical drug-store entryway, all glass with an automatic door. The winds were so so strong that they were blowing apart the windows at their seams, so after a few calls to the DM and loss prevention, the supervisor on duty was told “call the store manager and get him to come fix it.”

Because when you have customers walking through a death trap, you want the store manager to jury-rig the very heavy, steel and glass doorway with a few 2×4s from the Home Depot down the road.

Which is exactly what happened. While he was jamming wood into place, the DM and loss prevention showed up, and then a “professional” showed up, who promptly told the DM that the store should have been closed down as soon as shit started coming apart, because it should have been obvious that someone could have been killed (which it was very obvious – we were told not to let anyone park in the “fall zone” but yet still let people go through the entryway).

We did our taxes over the weekend. We’re going to be using the federal refund to buy our tickets to Las Vegas this weekend. Eddie is sitting behind me looking through the menus of various places to eat while we’re there. At this point it looks like we’ll more than likely be staying at the Luxor, and I’ve managed to convince Eddie that I really, really need to upgrade the room to a spa suite, because I’m going to take an hour or five in that bubbly spa tub after the race.

Some of the state refund will be going towards fixing our windshield, fixing Mal, and our vacation next week.

Around Christmas I decided that to avoid having to do the same thing that I did last year around this time – trying to use up my vacation time before it expired by taking one day at a time off here and there – I’d take a whole week off at once. Eddie decided that he’d take the same week off, so we’ll be home all next week doing nothing at all that we don’t need to do. Which means that we’ll be hitting up the Olive Garden for their soup & salad lunch special, getting our hair cut, going to a burger place that we’ve been told is AMAZING, and the highlight, a trip to into Boston to visit the Boston Museum of Science, where we’ll check out the Harry Potter exhibit up there and the giant Imax theater. I’m wanting to go up to the Wrentham Outlets to pay a visit to the Nike outlet up there and try and weasel my way into a pair of new birthday running sneakers (did I neglect to mention that MY BIRTHDAY IS NEXT FRIDAY??), since the Garmin Forerunner that I’m covetting is too far out of my price range for something that would be classified as “gadget I want but will use 4 times a week for an hour or two.” There’s also going to be running every single morning we’re home, and hopefully that will get my ass back into the routine again.

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