I got the finished text of Intruder ready to send to my agent, who will transmit it to DAW.
I have already transmitted the galleys of Betrayer.
We….are getting a new kitchen countertop. Ours had lost its finish, and is white, which means Jane has scrubbed every time a coffee cup drips—bigtime. It stains. It stains when you look at it. Hours spent on this damned countertop.
So—we tried to figure what’s the most urgent repair, besides the plastic-sheeting huge 5×5 hole in the bathroom shower wall, which we were supposed to fix this winter!…and it’s the kitchen counter. We found some in-stock imitation granite (labrador granite is the pattern) at Lowe’s, and we can save 300.00 by taking out the old countertop ourselves. This is going to entail lifting out a cast iron double sink and decoupling the garbage disposal and the dishwasher.
We’re starting today, and by Sunday will no sink and no dishwasher—bathtub water only. Monday the guy comes to put in the new countertop: cutting the hole for the sink is our sticking-point, or we could REALLY save on this operation. The countertop is not that pricey. We’ll let you know how many fingers we have left after getting the sink out. OSG is coming over to help us lift it.
Meanwhile it’s also tax time: year end stuff for us, just another month for the corporation, except that the corporate reports are on the calendar, not the fiscal year (the arbitrarily chosen year-end for a corporation); so I have to turn in the calendar year stuff, such as the employee and wage stuff.
Which means I also have to fight my way to the desk. And that means doing an office cleanout so I can get to stuff!
Jane is doing triage on the kitchen cabinets—and meanwhile found out we have a massive mold/leak problem in the mudroom, read: back kitchen steps and short tiled area. It’s never just one job—it’s got a way of becoming, now, a massive find-the-leak-and-fixit on a room of the house! I think it’s the door—another thing we’re not comfortable DIY-ing, because it’s like—if we have to call an installer, we have no back door for a week while they set up to fix it. So…we’ll probably have to pay installer costs on that, too.
At least we will save an hour a day that it now WON’T take to clean up after meals, thanks to shedding that detestable white countertop. I have set my sights also on that white kitchen floor, but we can live with that. Next up: I fear it’s going to need to be the mudroom, not the bathroom. And I bought some Formby’s stuff that will let me refinish the doors and fronts of the kitchen cabinets, so it will look much better in there! I have to wait on warm weather for that, to get ventilation.
You ladies are braver than I am. Disconnecting the sink, disposal, and dishwasher, hah. Lifting out the countertop, I’d need lots of help too; I’m not Mr. Muscle. (More like Mr. Pocket Protector, I suppose, hahaha.) A new kitchen countertop sounds very nice. A friend did the replacement for mine, when I had to get mine redone to accommodate a new stove a couple of years ago.
Bathrooms… I dread the cost of a tub plumbing job and related remodeling, and at this point, I’m not sure when/if I’ll be able to do it anyway. It will mean at least replacing the tub and tile on the wall, plus plumbing underneath, and possibly what amounts to remodeling the whole room. I’m using the guest bathroom instead, these days. Thankful it’s not the garden hose…. (Though in summer, I suppose that might even be preferable….) (Laughs hysterically.)
Yikes, about the mudroom and door. Another friend confessed recently, she has to have her back door and frame entirely replaced: the wood has rotted. She’s lamenting the high cost, on top of other expenses.
Great news about the galley proofing. That may really expedite the process.
I bought the Mnémos translation of Foreigner 1 into L’étranger, and am looking forward to its delivery in a week or so, via Amazon.fr, to my Texas doorstep.
Also…when it finally dawned on me that the Kindle has no monthly or annual fee, and that my budget will likely shrink drastically later this year, and that could mean my access to new books will be much limited… I’ve decided to buy myself an early birthday present. 🙂 Closed Circle’s ebooks will be among the first that go on the new device. At last, reading without a tiny screen or bringing my laptop and setting it up. Hurrah!
L’étranger is, alas, not available as a Kindle ebook; the French Amazon site has no links (yet) for the Kindle or its ebooks. Quel dommage c’est-il! — When I did the search to find the link to the book, I ran across L’étranger par Albert Camus, which I do not recall reading. Don’t know why it didn’t occur to me. So I ordered it also. — I wondered, then, if the connection had at all occurred to you, CJ, when you wrote or conceived of Foreigner?
Thanks!
I too am becoming extremely tempted by a kindle – but surely one can only read stuff bought and downloaded from Amazon? or … if you CJ are reading your galleys on Kindle, can you just download anything in pdf format from your computer?
You can read any pdf or mobi or prc file. Those formats it has no trouble with. Just plug it into your computer with a usb cable and treat it as a ‘device’ like a flash drive.
Good news on the books and galleys. I can’t wait for them to come out. I have been buying the hardbacks since Foreigner. When will they come to Closed Circle?
The Foreigner question is complicated by contracts, and DAW and I need to have a talk when the prevailing winds are right. 😉
And, BCS, don’t forget Project Gutenberg, a huge source of free legitimate public domain titles.
As long as your door frame or sill isn’t rotted/termited, replacing a door shouldn’t be too bad. I did it over one afternoon for my laundry room, but you may want to wait for warmer weather so all your heat doesn’t go whirling out the mudroom. Have you been able to determine where the water is coming from?
I was slightly jealous at first when you bought your house, because it sounded like you got a peach, compared to ours. It seems to have just taken a little longer for the expected repairs to appear — sorry! I have a major house overhaul in mind, but it will have to be done in stages, and I’m not looking forward to part 1: getting the permits to encose the back porch.
well, ours is solid, but had a compromised door, and what we call George Jetson era cabinetry: it’s unique—it’s retro, but it’s pretty dinged up. And once used, the hand-bar on the tub-shower broke the tile seal and poured water from the shower to the basement.Those are our two biggies. Well, outside the fact when they dug the foundations into glacial moraine, they poured all the rocks onto the front and back lawn and added turf atop. Then St Helens dumped volcanic ash on it. It’s not great lawn, which is why we took it out…but getting a spade into the moraine is a real exercise.
We have mice in our garage, and my solution is to shake some coyote urine we have for the pond rim on the garage floor: we’ll do that after the countertop guy does his work in there.
I swear it’s never dull, owning a house!
How can there be mice when you have cats? Turn them loose in there for a while. Perhaps all it would take is a used, ahem, litterbox to be in the garage for a little while so the mice get the picture!
Ysabel? Ysabel WORK for a living? [chuckle]. Our cats would have heart attacks trying.
Or die laughing at anyone so foolish as to presume…
My parents’ house was well enough sealed that the mice only got into it if the cats brought them in.
The cats wouldn’t actually deal with the mice: they’d get bored and let the mice go. Inside. Hence the mousetraps my parents had to have on hand. (Or, in one case, a rat trap.)
Kittens must be trained to hunt and kill. If Mom-Cat did not train her kittens, the adult cats may just play (catch and release) with the mice. This may give the cats (and mice) a workout, but it won’t get the mice out of the garage or house.
*snrk* George Jetson era cabinets — I can see that, as ours are about the same vintage. The Formica in the bathroom is so dated it’s back in vogue! Fortunately, it’s all in good condition so it doesn’t have to be replaced. The kitchen, OTOH, needs work, including replacing the sink cabinet that rotted out due to a slow leak in one of the valves. I replaced all the plumbing from the wall out up to the faucet, but the undersink still looks like Gollum should live there. Oy.
CJ: what’s the “Formby’s stuff” that you are planning to use to refinish your cabinets? When we first looked at our place outside Boston some 13 years ago (wow-time flies), I literally couldn’t remember what the kitchen was like when we left the tour. It is dim (aside from slippery, porcelain tile floor), with dull, fake wood finish cabinets and a now highly worn, mustard yellow formica counter top. What I really would like to do is entirely rearrange the location of the back door and the countertop/appliances and build out onto the back steps, buuuuut that is going to be a long-time happening. New countertop and brightly painted cabinets are much more likely. So. please report details.
The Formby’s refinisher is great for real varnish and actual furniture. We, however, just found out we have poly finish on these cabinets, added OVER varnish as an afterthought. Sigh. It would have been so easy to use Formby’s to liquefy the old finish and let it set dry and pristine again. (you use steel wool loaded with this stuff: it can remove dreadful scratches from prized family furniture. (Antiques: consult a dealer first!) and it’s great. BUT—it won’t touch plastic coat. Which is what someone did to this. SOOOOOOOOOO…we take steel wool and then 00 grade sandpaper in a sander to it and see if Min-wax can handle it, either clear or pre-stained. Staining is not for the novice without guidance: I can tell you the basics, watch your overlaps: they can stain double-dark before you can say Jack Robinson, and you are hosed. Wiping stain in several coats is easiest, but—again, if an overlap sets while you’re looking elsewhere, you’re hosed. So—Minwax, which includes stain IN the coating, is the easiest.
I’m a firm believer in wet sanding, it’s much more fast and efficient due to reduced friction and clogging of the pores. When we refinished all of our oak trim prior to selling our home, I prepped by wet-sanding with 00 and 000 steel wool and thinner and the dirt and oils just popped off. I followed up by applying a stained varnish with 000 steel wool as well and it came out great. Chemical gloves and tyvek sleeves are recommended. i think you’d be surprised how quickly 400 wet or dry sandpaper cuts with water. As fast or faster than a medium grit applied dry, but with a fine grain to the cut. I’d take the urethane off with 220 or 320 wet sanding until it’s almost gone and then shift to 400 wet with water or varnish thinner.
Thanks for that—we’ll try it.
If possible look into getting a D shaped sink as a replacement.Same amount of counter space – much more sink, and the plumbing is at the back which means that the underneath cabinet is useable. I am able to get a mop bucket *into* mine-or a roasting pan to soak without having to shimmy around the faucet (also offset to the side). I think that it is the thing that I will miss most when I move from this house.
Nice! However, we went for a plain two-sided stainless with faucet included: it should at least look nice, and doesn’t weigh near what the other does!
In addition to Project Gutenberg there’s Archive.Org, where I do a lot of research (I’m trying to write a book on the one room school houses in our area). Archive.Org has a lot of historical stuff.
The European Union is supposed to be making their own archive site, as is the government of France, but I don’t know what the status of either project is.
CJ, Been talking to the people at Fantasy Faction. A lot of them would be really interested in new Thieves World and Heros from Hell stories. I’m assuming that the tastes there are probably consistent with tastes elsewhere 🙂
Wayne
There’s is a lot of good stuff at Archive.org; however, much of it is poorly proof read – even as compared to Project Gutenberg. Project G has, at least, a minimal proof-read step between the Scan/OCR and Post steps. Archive is all over the place on this. Sometimes it’s just Scan and Post without OCR or Proofing. Depending on your need for the book and your threshold of pain, this may be a nit or a show-stopper.
If you are concerned about doing the right thing with regard to copyright, I suspect that PG is the more reliable guide.
None of this is intended to keep anyone away from Archive.org, which I use myself, just use with care.
Ah, the fun of owning a house! When I bought mine, I knew I had to repipe and replace the roof. Did that before/shortly after moving in. Then I have a living room floor that needs to be replaced because a leak in the chimney (thankfully an easy fix… the flashing had gotten bent so that water was pooling and spilling in instead of running off, so unbending that was all it took) has caused the flooring (engineered wood, I think) to buckle and crumble in several spots. But of course, that floor extends into the kitchen, and I really want to redo the layout in there (eliminate the pantry and move the fridge there so that I can open up the wall where the fridge currently is and put in an island for more counter space and storage), and if I do that, I am debating between refacing and replacing the cabinets. Replacing the counters is a given… whoever decided tile is a good counter surface should be shot, in my opinion! And I also want to update the master bath… replace the fiberglass shower surround with real tile, remove the carpet (yes, carpet!) with a coordinating tile, and that means replacing the vanity at the same time. And of course, before I get to any of that, I decided that the windows from 1985 had to be replaced to keep the utility bills in line, and now I am looking at painting the outside which desperately needs it to protect the wood trim. Such fun! But at some point it will all get done.
Working on our house is like those slide puzzles I had as a kid. You know, move the squares around until the picture was intact. To get one job done around here entails moving the whole puzzle, sometimes more than once. It’s often easier to do nothing which is why my functional but dreadful bathroom is still so ugly. If we replace the shower, the floor has to change, but that floor goes through into the walk-in closet,(and WHO wants to move all that stuff?)…and on and on.
Well, we’re making coffee in the living room and blew the breaker when the electric fireplace’s heater came on. We got the smaller cabinet top pulled, got the glue scraped off, sanded some bad spots on the cabinet; I got the office dug out, did the IRS reports for payroll (us), and got a stack of things for Jane to go through and get out electronically.
Tomorrow we pull the big cabinet top, disconnecting the sink and garbage disposal and dishwasher, AND turning off the water; we clear it of glue and screw holes, then saw it into manageable lengths, because we think we’re going to use it in the basement for work counter space. I have a crockpot full of beans that may become our cookstation and food source for a couple of days, at least as regards supper. We can wash essential dishes in the bathroom sink.
So it’s going to be interesting, but so far so good. 6′ countertop is not too heavy to lift: the 13 footer will be fine if we get it cut in an 8′ and the rest, minus sink.
Wish us luck.
For entertainment this evening I was having a go at trying to figure out the genealogy of the Wilsons and Boones: Sarah Boone was the daughter of John Boone, who married a cousin, the son of John’s brother Benjamin—I think. Which means the whole relationship has to be entered as both my 4th-great grandmother and my 5th-great grandmother. I had it all figured, with the duplicated names and all…And I dropped a stitch, and lost track. Wah! Not to mention that Sarah’s cousin Ms. Wilson married a man also named Wilson, and EVERY genealogy is confused, not knowing what a trap they’ve wandered into, especially since the Wilsons kept marrying into the Boones and the Harrises over 3 generations, with many Johns, John I Wilson, John II Wilson, and John III Wilson, who is married to a Harris, who is related to the Boones. Plus there are about 5 different Benjamin Boones, all the sons of Boones named John, who may have sons named Squire…and they all lived in the same county. Except Humphrey Boone and his daughter, who was contemporary with them but a state away, only related 4 generations back, and may have actually met or corresponded with them.
Oy, the intermarried families: I think you get issued one in every tree.
(What I have is a *cross-linked* tree, where someone on one line marries someone on a different line. It’s happened four or five times.)
Just make sure you don’t have the person in there two or more times. It’s bad enough having them there once.
That’s what happened last night; they’re duplicated enough, and Ms. Sarah and John Boone and that whole line ARE in there twice, but I’m going to read the names off to Jane and we’ll get a list, by generation, so that we don’t duplicate more than’s right.
The Wilsons, bless ’em, not only cross-married with the Boones in multiple generations, one branch of Wilsons cross-married with another branch of Wilsons in multiple generations, and then Sarah Boone had the temerity to marry one of THOSE Boones who had the Wilsons in the family tree WHILE being the daughter of John, who already did.
The Wilsons are an ongoing headache. They were all out there in the wilds of the Carolinas doing what they did probably with occasional blessing of clergy, and official paperwork consisting of the family Bible, and it’s a wonder that anybody knows who was which, especially since most names repeat generation after generation in families derived from 8 offspring in the first one. It’s a living wonder the whole of the US isn’t related to a Wilson or a Boone in some degree.
A hint from one of the message boards on identifying duplicate people: name them junior, senior, 3rd, etc until you figure out who is who. After you have merged the duplicates then put the names back the way they should be.
My wife is a keen amateur genealogist. She was doing some stuff for a guy we knew. His ancestry included families like you are talking about, lots of intermarriage between a group of people who all came from the same town in Europe. Then she hit the fun stuff. At the time she was using Personal Ancestral File, genealogy software supplied by the Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints, a really nice solid package.
Anyway, every so often a relative would call Jobie, and Jobie would come over with a list of all the updates Heather needed to make. One time it got confusing. Jobie had written in a man marrying a man (this was about 20 years ago, same sex marriage wasn’t legal in Canada at that time). It was obvious that something wasn’t right, so Heather called Jobie, he came over, she showed him what was going on, and he left scratching his head.
The next day Jobie came in with a crooked smile on his face. Apparently the guy in question had undergone a sex change operation. So Heather went back to Personal Ancestral File, and after banging her head on the wall for a couple of hours, picked up the phone and called the church hotline.
Apparently some little old lady (who probably knew lots about genealogy) answered the phone. Heather explained the problem. There was stunned silence on the other end of the line. This wasn’t a problem that the church had ever run into before…
Heather ended up changing his sex to female, and putting in a note explaining that he’d undergone a sex change operation, since Personal Ancestral File wouldn’t allow same sex marriages. I suspect it still doesn’t. And of course there wouldn’t be any issue.
Ain’t genealogy fun?
Wayne
Family Tree Maker doesn’t handle anything like that either. There’s been a lot of heated discussion on the FTM message boards as to what are the definitions of “spouse” and “relationship”. It didn’t help that the latest version (2011) changed a lot of perfectly good “Unknown Spouse” to “No Spouse Entered” creating a relationship where there wasn’t one.
Now I’ve got to go back and review all my relationships.
The software is going to have to figure it out sooner or later that not every nation or family in the world’s long history does things exactly the same way…or will do them that way in the future. The little old lady would not like to have met some of my ancestors at all, and it would be a wonder if all of them even bothered to register their liaisons—even in early Oklahoma, where counties did not yet exist, and, for that matter, my relatives were there ‘informally’, courtesy of the Kiowa tribe, I know for a fact things were not just in apple-pie order with records and certificates; and I just cannot imagine old Bloody Sven applying for a marriage certificate. Never mind the Wilsons and the Boones.
SO…Shower leak you described as around the basin/tub? Is is not filed with a flexible sealant? Ours went and water would pour downstairs when showering when the weight of water plus person caused a gap to appear. Fixed it by scraping out all of the old dried up sealant and refilling gap with a good dollop of silicone sealant which stretches under the strain. And good luck with the worktop!
We hoped that was all it was, but the doofus or charlatan who installed the shower bar had NOT bolted it to the studs, but straight through the tile and into the wallboard; water followed the screws into the wallboard, soaked that, and the wallboard reached the state of gypsum mush with tile atop. So we removed the tile—no great chore, since it came off in our hands, and chiseled out the wallboard into good uncompromised board. The board in question should have been that concrete-like stuff that can’t be soaked. It wasn’t/isn’t. It’s just plain old gypsum wallboard, and I’m sure that’s what’s all the way around the shower.
UGH! Sorry to hear that. I’m definitely gonna tank myself a wetroom in the next house, probably on the ground floor with overflow drainage straight outside! Guess you focus on the kitchen so you can be warm and fed while finishing everything else that comes along. PS Really looking forward to the next installment…
On the geoealogy front, a couple of points:
I was reading lately about kinship terms, how various cultures track who’s related to whom and how, by blood or marriage or adoption or godparents or things like “blood brothers” or “soul sisters” or (something I hadn’t heard of) “milk siblings” (same wet nurse). Very interesting stuff; I only scratched the surface that day. (I was interested in terms of how another culture, or another species, might view kinship.) It seems there are various cultures among American Indians and elsewhere, who might consider one’s aunts or uncles as equivalent to one’s parents, while other cultures may consider one’s cousins or their parents as potential marriage partners (if I understood right, I think that was if they were by marriage instead of by blood, I wasn’t clear there). There are cultures where descent and inheritance and sometimes counsel are done through the female lines (mother to children to mother to children). There are cultures where kinship words are much more specific to say just who that particular cousin is and how he or she is related, where English gets into a logical yet complex “Nth cousin Rth removed,” which I still can’t seem to remember, despite rereading now and then. (One is how many levels (generations) of the tree, another is how many branches (nodes) in some way.) — I think the way for me to remember that for sure is to write down how a cousin I’m close to and his family are related to me, and how I’m related to them, the terms used. — Anyway, the various possibilities were really intriguing. I did not find out what I’d wanted to know about Scottish clans, septs, and so on.
My dad’s family had lived in the same general area for over 150 years, which was really something. His dad was a wealth of info on the entire area, for several counties around, of family and friend lore, who traded with whom, what happened historically, all sorts of things. He told my dad a lot of that, growing up, oral history in action. But tragically, neither he nor my dad wrote much at all down, and I didn’t live there and don’t have a great memory for such things. He had very little of what we’d call formal schooling, beyond high school, if that. It was typical for his generation and for the area. Yet people went to him for things like advice on legal contracts, for surveying (he was trained) and so on. He and grandma taught all their kids (my dad too) to read and write and do arithmetic *before* they went off to the local schoolhouse. Education was key to them, even though they had very little schoolhouse learning. Also, my dad’s parents were rather unusual: As conservative as they were, my grandpa and grandma saw to it that each child got an equal share of the family farm, rather than just passing it to my dad as the firstborn male heir, and they raised them so that there was no “women’s work.” My dad and my uncle pitched in, and my dad actually helped raise my uncle. All my aunts on both sides are independent-minded. My dad *liked* that in my mom too. He didn’t *want* a doormat for a wife. LOL, she wasn’t, that’s for sure. 🙂
It’s one of the reasons I like CJ’s strong female characters. They aren’t likely to run around in heels and a flimsy dress, crying and being helpless. Oh, they might occasionally be in heels and a flimsy dress (if they’re human), and they might cry (heck, so might the men and boys), but helpless? No. Not. Heheh.
— The other genealogical point was to chime in about those special cases in family trees. The trouble with the discussion that’s likely going on on those forums (I haven’t seen them) is that, like it or not, people *do* have some unsual relationships. Besides adoptions, fostering, godparents, there are second (serial) marriages, blended families, or families where aunt and uncle or grandparents or siblings raise someone else’s kids. But that just scratches the surface. Cohabiting but not married. Illegitimate but just as much “blood kin.” What about the child born where the young man and young woman don’t marry, and one or both depart from the child? What about the child born from, ah, a lack of consent on the part of the mother? Or not really acknowledged by either parent’s family or community? (For example, mixed ethnic/racial or religious or even political ties, so goodness me, we can’t talk about that! Never mind that one or more generations later, someone would dearly love to know if that happened.) — But there are, yes, also cases where perhaps one or another partner might be outside of the community norm (or perhaps well within it?) but same-sex, or “third sex / two-spirit” or the like, such as, yes, sex-change or born intersexed. Or if that seems too wild, there is the very simple case where some mom or dad raises their kids together with a good friend or roommate, either the opposite or same sex, who is, for all intents and purposes, also “mom” or “dad.” — Now, some people may not approve of some of those options, of course. But they *do* happen. So, like it or not, logically, the genealogy software needs to provide for those cases. And I’d say, an unknown person but a known relationship, is a very different case from knowing neither bit of information, so that ought to (IMHO) be handled differently by the software.
In my own family tree, I know of one case (at least) where the family *did* acknowledge the union of a white man and a Native American Indian woman. There are also cases on another branch where family lore (and area history and lore) support the idea that there were unions of some kind (“Indian blood” at least) in the family, yet so far, nothing documented (records lost to disaster unplanned or otherwise) besides a well-known and historically supported tale of a man who might be an ancestor (it’s likely) and his friend / blood brother / half-brother who were forcibly divided by events and personal ties and beliefs, apparently, in which case, the half-Indian man was killed. (That is the case of one Lt. Vincent Hobbs / Hobbes and Chief Benge / Bench, in the Cumberland Gap area. Very sad tale. I can’t imagine how it would feel to be Lt. Hobbs, rewarded against his will for killing a man who had been a friend or relative. Chief Benge or Bench was, if I remember right, a Cherokee or one of their related or allied nations.) (It is somewhat possible, even likely, that I may have Cherokee or other Five Civilized Tribes distant cousins on both sides of my family, but as yet, I can’t document that, and am still looking to see if one photo survived a move and water damage both sides of the move.) — Now that I think about it, if there were enough basis in documentation, that (the story of Hobbs and Benge) would make a good non-fiction or fiction novel. However, from what I’ve read, it was a matter of historical record, but not much record survives. It might be tough, but not impossible, to write something, fiction or non-fiction, about it. — There is one slim volume, locally published in that area, called “The Bear Grass” which covers that and other history and lore.
Heh. In CJ’s (or Jane’s, or Lynn’s) books, the crying usually indicates that the protagonist has gotten very VERY riled up and is about to do something. Exactly what depends on circumstances.
I’ve often thought that what you need for some family trees is more like a 3-D modeling program, especially if they are interconnected across several lines of descent. 2-D only works if the cross-connections are few in number.
I was pondering those “unusual” relationships when looking at an old cemetery in Vermont one vacation. There were several along the lines of “Miss Lucinda Jones, dear companion of Mr. John Smith” which had me wondering about exactly what that relationship was. I know from Miss Manners that at that time, the use of Miss/Mrs/Ms was interchangeable, since they are all abbreviations of “Mistress”, but I would expect the same last name if they were married. If they were blood relations, I would expect sister/aunt/mother instead of “dear companion”. Which seems to leave either a legal relationship, such as ward, although there I would expect something like ward, an employer/employee relationship, or an acknowledged relationship not blessed by clergy. Anyone have any insights?
That’s unusual. She could have been a hired companion, as in private nurse or caretaker for a disabled person, but as you say—other relationships are possible. I know of one that involved a guy who didn’t know his mother was the housekeeper: the house was isolated, the mother was a total invalid, the whole extended family knew the truth—but the guy was in his 40’s, met the rest of the family fairly at weddings and funerals, and nobody had told him that the lady buried somewhat across the cemetary as the beloved housekeeper of the well-to-do household was actually his mother. The children of other households old enough to be in on the secret were all cautioned not to say anything. So I don’t know if he ever found out.
One of these days routine DNA records are going to make that a little less easy.
Oh yeah, genealogy is fun. When Heather first started working on mine, she talked to all of the relatives. Aunt Grace knew that there was something terrible in the family tree, but she didn’t know what, we’d have to talk to Aunt Audrey.
Apparently Aunt Audrey’d been reading the family bible (she would have been about ten) and a piece of paper feel out, she picked it up, read it, and took it to her mom to ask about it. The horrible thing that Aunt Grace didn’t know about was that this was her father’s second marriage, the piece of paper was the annulment for the first!
Now exactly why my grandmother wanted to keep everything a huge secret no one knows now. Everybody in town knew about both of my grandfather’s marriages. Hell, with a population 800 it was hard not to know what everyone had for breakfast…
Of course attitudes have changed towards divorce and annulments, these days they aren’t a big deal. In 1918 they were.
Agreed about CJ’s characters. Wrote a bad filk song once about how Jimmy Kirk and Jean Luc Picard are a bunch of wimps next to Signy Mallory.
Wayne
3-d modeling for a tree would be great—someday, let’s hope!