That Was The Weekend That Was
Now it can be told! I've been a bachelor since Election Day up until this weekend. My SIL house has been remodeled so that my MIL now has a mini-apartment within her house because she's too frail to be left alone, the last time she fell, she lay there for 45 minutes before she was found. Until the remodeling was done, the family took turns babysitting her. This past two weeks was my wife's turn.
I haven't been anywhere in the past two weeks, using most of my time to "declutter and putter", going around fixing all the things I planned to fix when I had the time, and simply getting rid of a lot of junk that had started to acculmulate. I made fairly good inroads, but there's still more junk to be gotten rid of.
Saturday I ran the usual errands, did a few chores then headed down to Pittsburgh to see my wife for the first time in nearly two weeks. I knew I would get to my BIL's house before anyone else would get home from the nursing home (I have a key), so I brought stuff to do.
I organized all of my genealogy notes. I now have a family tree instead of a collection of data. With a few minor exceptions here and there, I have the full name, year of birth and year of death for all of my direct ancestors back to my great-grandparents, all of whom immigrated to this country, which means tracking the family back further from this point will take more effort.
I also have lists of everyone's children. Unfortunately, I only have partial information on their children's spouses or any grandchildren. I apparently have second cousins in Florida that I've never met. Part of the problem is that for male children, I can check census records for the last name; for female children, I'd have to know the last name of the man they married. At least now I know where the gaps are.
I also brought along the table runner I've been sewing since forever. The curves make it too difficult to machine sew, so I sewing it by hand, I'm still less than halfway done. My wife finally came in, and we spent a lot of time catching up. Not everything can be done by email :) A long hot soak in the Jacuzzi and off to bed.
Sunday we slept in and then had brunch with cellio and her husband. We actually got to the restaurant a few minutes before them and took the last available parking space, they had to circle the block to find a spot. It was wonderful catching up, the food was excellent. Gullifty's on Murray Avenue if you're curious. Eventually, we had to head back to my BIL's house, we cleaned up, washed all our laundry, packed up and headed for home. I never did get to see my BIL, he didn't come home from his business trip until well after we left. We stopped at Super Buffet in Meadville on the way home. It's become almost traditional at this point. Finally got home about 8:30PM, I was so tired, I was in bed by 9.