I'm going to try something a little different today. I know that you know that I love love love to complain. LOVE IT. Only love it when the news is bad, only happy when it rains, that song may as well be about me. I don't mean to be, but I get a delicious sense of satisfaction when I get to be upset and rant about something. So tasty.

TODAY, however, my faithful minions  readers, I'll give a treat- Huzzah!- things that are making my cold heart warm and snuggly.

Numero Uno: The weather is finally acceptable to support human life. The humidity of the past two months has gone, as well as the need for the a/c. My asthma and electric bill are happy. 

Secondly: A Very Potter Musical and A Very Potter Sequel.  Holy shit, why did no one tell me about this earlier? The video quality is shit- you can't hear about 25% of the dialogue. Even if you aren't a HP fan, it's completely worth it to watch just for Draco. And it's made in Michigan! By people who look vaguely familiar to me! (And some of them are really starting to irritate me. I know I know Brian Rosenthal. I just can't remember from where. I was in the theater program at U of M, too, but 800 thousand years ago and a different campus.nnnnnnnnnn)

Trois: The very thing that lead me to AVPM and AVPS, Mark Reads Harry Potter.  It's a chapter by chapter review of the Harry Potter series by a first time HP reader. That site devoured my life  when I was trying to get caught up to this weeks reviews, since I only found it...this week. 

Vier: My new favorite cookbook, "Incredibly Easy Gluten-Free Recipes". HolyShitILoveThisBook.

I love cooking, I do I do I do. I hate most cookbooks I run across, especially those geared towards my dietary restrictions (For the record, I'm allergic to: Dairy, Egg, Wheat, "sensitive" to corn, and won't eat animal products. And I'm not a big fan of coconut.). I have several "allergy free!" cookbooks whose main agenda is apparently getting you to eat large quantities of meat. (Which, even if I wanted to eat meat, I'd have to avoid beef and chicken, because guess what! The protein I'm allergic to in both dairy and egg is found in the meat of the parent animals! So FU, idiot nutritionist my allergist wanted me to see!) 

Ahem. I'm also not the biggest fan of vegetarian cookbooks- vegan, yes, vegetarian, no. Mainly because the main ingredients used in vegetarian foods tends to be cheese and eggs. YUM. 

Back to this cookbook to end my need for more cookbooks: yes, there are meat recipes in it, but used in a way that tofu or some other food substance can be easily substituted, and all the recipes are mouthwatering. We've made two in the week we've had it and I'm itching to make more. It even has me excited to try quinoa! And I tend to avoid foods whose names aren't pronounced phonetically! 

Vijf: New musics! I think I'm finally starting to accept that there shall be no more Flickerstick albums, and probably no more Great Lakes Myth Society albums, the two bands that make getting up in the morning bearable. I'm not a book snob by any means- I'll give just about anything a shot. I am, however, a music snob of epic proportions. I don't mind this, though it drives my husband nuts when I'm always asking him to turn off whatever vile noise he has coming out of the speakers (of course, he just refers to me as a withered husk of a soul because I don't like angry yelly sexist crap music. Hmph.). In an effort to give myself something else to listen to occasionally, I've allowed the following bands into rotation:

The Black Keys: I first discovered them last year watching "Hung" (which takes place in Michigan! And the exterior scenes really are Michigan! Michigan Michigan Michigan!), and I less then three them even if they are from Ohio. 

Band of Skulls: you know, from that car commercial. Filmed in Detroit. Featuring the only non-Chrysler car I would willingly buy. I think I'm noticing a pattern here. Hey people that want me to listen to their music: make it associated with Detroit somehow and I will listen! 

It helps that both bands are actually good. 

Six: I received a lovely package from my step-grandmother, full of nice smelly things from Backyard Soaps, a company in, you guessed it, Michigan. They're in my adopted hometown of Port Huron and I love their stuff, but any place out here that sells it overcharges like woah, so Carol was nice enough to send us a box of bathbombs and room sprays.  

Annnnd that's about all the happy I can handle right now.

I'm related to who?

I don't even know where to begin. I am feeling a renewed desire to blog, not just for my personal enrichment, but to save any offspring the headache of trying to figure shit out about their family.

Not that everyone has a burning desire to know their family history. I always have, but I think that has to do with only having one parent growing up, so instead of focusing on the half that was missing, I threw myself into finding out as much as I could about my mom's side of the family. Being as close in age with my youngest uncle as I am, and being with my grandparents for a good chunk of my life, I tend to forget I even -have- another biological family.

I sealed my fate as family biographer when I was a preteen- my grandfather gave me a book that belonged to his grandmother, saying I'd be the only one to appreciate it's history. Then my grandmother did the same thing with her sister's books. And then, the pictures.

Oh. My. God. The pictures.

I come from a long line of shutter bugs. Which is awesome- I have a visual history of my family going back to the start of photography.Thousands and thousands and thousands of pictures. Actually seeing different features that we all have, and who had them them first is amazing. The problem? Well, problems? 1- my relatives didn't like to label pictures, so pinning down dates and names is...fun. 2- half of what's labeled is in Flemish, and in a beautiful but hard to read cursive handwriting. The Flemish I know isn't as helpful as I'd like.

This past weekend, my mom and her husband were in town- we spent the first two days in Boston, then he went to NYC, and my mom came back home with us. Sunday afternoon through Wednesday morning saw us  either pouring over pictures, trying to sort and label them, or trying to find evidence of my great-grandparents, from their gravesite to the houses they lived in while in Massachusetts.

We were able to label about 3,000 pictures. I have about 8 or 9 thousand to go. On top of figuring out who people are, I've been scanning them and putting them on Facebook for the rest of my family to see and enjoy.  As much as I may complain about it, I really love doing it. There's just a real sense of urgency since pretty much the only person who may know who some of the mystery people are is my grandmother, and she's several states away and recovering from back surgery so she isn't online that much at the moment. Mom took the Rosetta Stone of pictures home with her and is going to go visit Gram and see what she can find out. That just leaves the Belgian pictures. I'm not sure that any relatives are still around that may know who these people are (though, there has to be- my great grandfather was the youngest of 23. TWENTY-THREE. And he had a mess of nieces and nephews, so there has to be SOMEONE around who still knows these people. HAS TO.)

All our investigating left us with more questions instead of answering them. For starters- do you know how many of my forebears had children, then got married? Almost all of them. So much for this puritanical nonsense people are always going on about. One of my great-great grandmothers was 13 when she left Belgium for Argentina, and was 14 when she had my great-grandmother. Then moved back to Belgium and got married. Just. What. And I spent so much of my life feeling bad for being a bastard. Apparently we all are.