*knock knock knock* Housekeeping!

It's a word, after having a web site up and running since 1998, that is both necessary and the bane of my existence.  I'm finding it's the same for the pages I've created on Facebook. 

Why is housekeeping so important?

Well, Grasshopper, the links that one puts into a web site sometimes disappear from the internet, whether it be because of an internet glitch, a third party removing their internet existence, or simply updates to other people's web pages.  Photos that were creatively borrowed are taken down or moved to other photo albums.  On Facebook, accounts are hacked and the owner opts to simply delete the account and start another.  Sometimes, the third party involved becomes annoyed with the web traffic and decides they hate me.

Ok, so on that last one, it's probably nothing personal against yours truly, but suffice to say that every once in a while (in my case, generally once a year), the links should be checked and any non-working links repaired or taken down.

Such is the case with my female model for "The Tiger's Cub".  Knowing her on a personal as well as a professional level, the young lady who posed for Aloriah Starbird has some fan issues.  She keeps changing her "stage name" because some people from her past keep getting a little too strange and stalker-ish, so while she was calling herself "Elizza-Rayn Belle Louve" when I posted photos of her over the summer, she's had to change that name - again - and hasn't reposted the album that I was borrowing photos from.  Makes my life as a web designer a little more interesting, as I'm trying to help her professional life along, but have to keep changing the links.....

In the meantime, Dylan Griner, my model for Chase Benton, has updated some of his sites so that the photos I "creatively borrowed" no longer appear there, but at least it's the right web site....

So, if you're visiting The Northern Bard, or the Facebook pages for Night of the Tiger or The Tiger's Cub and you follow a link that sends you off onto a strange internet page instead of the web site I was hoping to direct you to, please let me know so I can correct the link between trips in to clean house.

In the meantime, PLEASE visit the pages for Dylan Griner, Liz Belle Louve, Joshua M. Shelton, and Sean Armenta, Theo Theodoridis, Jarah Mariano, and the others whom I've linked to.  I very much appreciate the work all of these fine people have done, I appreciate that none of them have given me grief for associating them with my characters, and I'd love to see the newest models (Dylan and Liz) as well as the photographers (Joshua and Sean) benefit from my use of their fine work.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some beds to make and some pillows to fluff........

One foot in the past, one foot in the present, and my eyes on the future....

The Holiday Season.

Funny how the separate holidays that I remember celebrating individually as a child have all become one giant retail mess these days.  It starts with the Back To School sales, which clear the merchandise off the aisles for Halloween, which clears the same aisles for the Thanksgiving/Christmas merchandise...

I liked it better before all the hoopla of Black Friday became such a huge thing.  Yes, I know that it technically started in the 1960's, but as a small child, I never HEARD of stores opening at midnight, or shoppers getting punched by other shoppers because someone wanted something that they didn't get into their own cart in time...

But since I could go on for a huge rant about the world going to Hell in a hand basket and the related bad behavior we see on days like Black Friday - and that isn't what I came here to talk about - I'll just end that there and take a step back.

I came to talk about family, and the celebrations that we used to have with them when I was young.  Thanksgiving was a huge gathering at Memere and Pepere's farm, with everyone contributing something toward the feast.  The adults ate at the big table in the kitchen.  Due to a space issue, the children all ate at smaller tables in the living room.  The food was served up buffet style with as many trips back to refill one's plate as could be accomplished without technically exploding from eating too much.  (I reference Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life" - specifically the "Mr. Creosote" scene: http://youtu.be/lhbHTjMLN5c to show what we always thought would happen.)

Christmas was also held at Memere and Pepere's farm, with those who had the second set of grandparents generally visiting them on Christmas Eve so that we would all be at the farm for Christmas Day.  (My grandparents on my dad's side were both deceased by the time I was celebrating my 6th Christmas, so I only remember the celebration with my mom's side.)  There was, once again, a huge feast with every family contributing something, then the opening of the presents once the ladies had done up the dishes and were able to join us.  My Uncle Dick, not much of a singer himself, but very enthusiastic about singing, would lead the children in song while we waited - and sometimes, what he called for wasn't necessarily what we sang.  There was one year that is fondly remembered when Three Dog Night had put out a song called "Joy to the World", and when he asked for "Joy to the World", we all looked at each other and broke out with the first line: "Jeremiah was a bullfrog.  Was a good friend of mine."  (The look on his face was priceless......)

Tomorrow, I'll be continuing with what has become our current tradition.  My husband will probably go out and take a walk through the woods under the premise of hunting for one of the last days that deer hunting is allowed.  (He's never shot anything, so I think of it as his fall hiking trips with a gun under his arm....*grin*)  I'll be up early, preparing enough food for a small army.  Our children, who are now out of the house, will probably stop in at some point to either join in the feast or get some yummy leftovers to take home and devour at their leisure.  Even in my own house, the "family holiday" has mutated into something that doesn't involve much "family" because of work schedules that don't mesh well.

As I stated in an earlier post, my hope for the future is that I'll eventually have a piece of property with a large lodge house and a bunch of guest cabins for friends and family.  My wish for the future of my Thanksgiving and Christmas tradition is that I can, someday, have a place where people can come and stay comfortably for a few days, to visit and have a huge feast like the ones we had when I was young.  If my books begin to sell nicely, it would be very nice to be able to offer food and sanctuary to those who need to get away from the world, ignore the fact that the retail industry is forcing Christmas shopping to start earlier each year, and come to a place in the Maine woods where a relaxing time can be had by all.

By the way, I have never gone to a Black Friday sale and never wish to.  (My husband and daughter went for a special gift for me a couple of years back and it's a wonder I didn't have to bail them out of jail, it was so violent.)  Truth be told, my Christmas shopping never stops, as I find things that I think people will like, purchase them, and put them in a special hidey spot all year round.  I was a little shorter on funds this year than in years past, but there are things in the hidey spot just waiting for "wrapping day".  For the past two years in retail, I simply have tried to help out the customers, clear them through my check out line as fast as possible, and avoid getting hit, as I'm one of those people who won't recall doing so, but will injure anyone stupid enough to hit me.  (The old quote from television's The Hulk could be modified to fit me:  "Don't make [her] angry.  You wouldn't like [her] when [she's] angry.")

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it....or Happy Hanukkah....or whatever you celebrate during this holiday-heavy time of year. 

Just give me a chance to prove I won't be a spoiled rich kid......

The title is a comment that has gone through my head more than once over my lifetime - especially this morning, while watching a "Behind the Music" segment on Leif Garrett.  He was a teen idol back when I was a teen.  (To be brutally honest, we're the same age, as I was born in May and he was born in November of the same year.)  Watching the details of the life he and other teen stars led, it's no wonder so many turned to drugs after having every minute of every day planned out for them, then suddenly getting dropped like a hot potato when the next big thing came along.....

I used to think that kind of life would be so much fun, so easy with all the money you wanted at your disposal, and all you had to do was hop up on stage, sing a few songs, and try to avoid the grasping fingers of frenzied fans on the way to your get-away vehicle.  Instead, to quote a line from "Some Like It Hot", the common sentiment from teen idols is: "I'm tired of getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop."

My husband and I joke about the fact that I play the lottery from time to time, especially the big Powerball jackpots, and we discuss what we would do if we won that much money.  Friends talk about fancy houses, swimming pools, traveling to every place they've ever wanted to see, and nice cars to drive.  Us?  We want a chunk of property with a lake or a pond, preferably one of the many we see for sale in the northern part of our state that sell as over 400 acres for less than one million dollars.  We want to have a central lodge house where friends and family can gather for group meals and fun times.  We want to be able to have small, rustic cabins tucked around the property, far enough apart that you can feel like you're secluded from all civilization while visiting with us, with solar energy as the primary source of power.  The cabins would be close enough to the water to be an easy trot to be able to put in canoes or kayaks to paddle around and get close to nature, but not so close that there would be any danger of polluting it.

The cabins wouldn't be for rent, but on a first come first serve basis providing that our guests can follow the simple rules we follow when we go out camping ourselves:
If you carry it in, carry it out.
Keep your cabin clean and, if possible, leave it better than you found it for the next person.
You break it, you replace it.

For our guests, it would allow a chance to unplug from their normal lives and reconnect to nature.  For us, it would be the kind of peaceful place we always seek out when we go on vacations.  The sounds we want to go to sleep to at night are the cry of the loon and the croak of the bullfrog.  The peace and quiet would allow for me to be able to concentrate my energy on the current work in progress.  For my husband, it would allow him to tie flies and fish until he's so sick of fishing that he'll beg to go into town to just do something different for a change.

And, should my career as a writer build while we live there, it would be so far off the grid that any fans wouldn't be able to locate me.....

Of course, I've never had the chance to prove that I would survive this way, but I keep saying that title line to the Powers That Be, hoping to prove to them that I wouldn't become a drug addicted lunatic should I be given a lot of money......

*singing* Trad-i-tion tradition......

I've recently posted a status on Facebook about Christmas Candy, family traditions - and my feelings about making the traditional candy and cookies to send out in the packages my husband and I have been jokingly calling "Care Packages" for years now.  Since I had such an interesting reaction to that post, I thought I'd share my feelings here in greater detail:

Let me start by saying that I was raised in a family that managed to keep the bills paid, but there was never an excess of cash.  My maternal grandmother, of French Canadian descent, and therefore called "Memere" (grandmother in the French Canadian slang), would make mittens all year round.  Raised in a family of 16 children in which the males went out into the fields all day while the women cooked, cleaned, and made all the clothing for the family, it was traditional to have new mittens each year, even if the old mittens from last year were still serviceable.  At my house, when sent outside to play, we would stay outside until our mittens were soaked with melted snow, then go inside, warm up for a bit, get a dry pair of mittens after putting the wet ones on a drying rack, and go back out to play until that pair of mittens was soaked.

When I moved out of the old homestead and spent my first Christmas with my then-boyfriend's family, there was a bit of culture shock, as his family believed in spending TONS of money on Christmas presents (and brand names had a special place in his mother's heart), but they also had some traditions involving food items.  Top of that traditional list was hand made candy and fudge, so I spent several days assisting the woman who would eventually be my sister-in-law, learning how to make the traditional candies.  Since my boyfriend and I didn't have much money to be able to go out to the stores to buy presents, I did as I had always done: I made gifts for everyone on our list.

That first Christmas was a bit tense when his mother didn't seem thrilled by the gifts we gave her, but his dad, a native Vermonter who had been raised similar to my Memere, understood the amount of love that went into the handmade gifts.  When my boyfriend and I got married and, still short of funds at Christmas, revived some other traditional gifts that had been allowed to fall by the wayside when his mother was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, such as the Princess Pine wreath.  (For those who've never seen Princess Pine, it's a variety of club moss that grows in shady areas of the woods.  If harvested gently, it will propagate, providing free material for a truly beautiful Christmas wreath that lasts for a long time after the holiday.)  And I continued to give my mother-in-law special presents that I made myself, like an embroidered piece of cross-stitched flowers in the shape of a heart that reads "Bless This Home" in the center.  (THAT piece, presented in a picture frame so she could hang it on her wall, was something that actually brought tears to her eyes, as it was a talent she had never possessed and seemed to finally make her realize that, in order to give her such a thing, I had been working on it for the best part of a year.  Perhaps it helped for her to see me sitting there, keeping her company while her husband and mine were both working, stitching on the angel tree topper I was making for my own mother.  She purchased a craft book for me to give me more ideas on what to make after that Christmas.)

So here I am, 32 years after that first Christmas when I learned to make candy, and although the "Care Packages" still contain the same traditional treats, I've modified a couple of things.  There will still be peppermint patties, spearmint patties and wintergreen patties dipped in chocolate, but after several years in which the boiled fondant centers failed to come out properly, I've changed the recipe for the centers to a never-fail method that is less time consuming, but just as tasty.  Peanut butter roll ups that had a tendency to fall apart during the dipping process have been changed to what I call "form candies" - meaning that I have little plastic forms that I bought at a craft store.  The chocolate gets "painted" into the form, allowed to harden a bit, then are filled with a creamier peanut butter center and topped with a little drizzle of chocolate.  (The result looks a lot like the miniature Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, but they don't taste the same as Reeses.)  Brand new cookie cutters I found last year will result in the addition of mini gingerbread cookies, the finding of a long-lost recipe will mean the revival of bite-sized almond cookies, and my husband has charged me with reviving a cookie that his grandmother, who'd had a stroke at the point I joined the family, used to make when he was a child.

The reason for my Facebook status mentioning the candies was simply this:  Some of the people who got leftover candies from last year's traditional candy fest kept asking for more, giving excuses that the recipient hadn't been able to taste the candies before they were gone.  The excuses were valid enough, I suppose.  One batch of candies, being taken home on a city bus, were stolen by another rider.  Another batch was set on the table and other family members ate them all, leaving just an empty box for the recipient. 

The problem on my end is simply this:  The candy making supplies have gone steadily up in cost since I first learned to do this.  Wilton Candy Melts, which were about $1 per bag when I first started doing this and were a great, easy alternative to melting chocolate blocks or chocolate chips with edible paraffin wax, allowing better control over the consistency of the dipping chocolate, are now between $3.50 to $6 per bag depending on where I shop and how many others happen to be making candy at the same time as I am.  Confectioners Sugar and Sweetened Condensed Milk have doubled in price.  The flavoring, most notably the Wintergreen Oil, has become nearly impossible to find on a grocery store shelf, so I have to go to a cooking specialty store and pay an arm and a leg for a bottle smaller than my thumb that makes about two batches of candy before it's gone.  In short, the "Care Packages" that used to cost less for me to make than it cost to buy the premade candies and cookies are now easily double what I would cost me to just walk into the grocery store and buy the same items to separate between the packages we send out.

There's also a time issue.  The dipped chocolates are mixed in my mixer, then dropped by the half-teaspoon onto waxed paper, flattened out, and then have to sit for one hour on each side to dry enough to make them solid enough to survive the dipping process.  With a special melter that keeps the chocolate at a steadier temperature than the old double-boiler method I used to use makes the dipping go very fast, but it's still an easy 4 hour process for each flavor of dipped candy with a yield of about 48 candies per batch.  In order to make enough for all the people who we send them to, it's an easy 2 batches in each flavor - or a solid 24 hours of work just on dipped chocolates.

The peanut butter cups, as mentioned above, involve melting the chocolate in a squeeze bottle, squeezing the chocolate into the forms and using small paint brushes to make sure the form is properly coated - especially the sides, as a thin chocolate side will result in a crushed candy when one tries to move it.  Then there's a short "dry time" so that the chocolate doesn't make the filling melt.  Then the tops need to be solidly filled with chocolate, which is brushed out to the sides to make sure that no leaks are left around the top of the candy and that the peanut butter filling isn't going to leak out as the packages travel to spots in Maine, Vermont, Colorado, Florida and other such points on the map.  A recent timing from start to finish was that it took 3 full hours to produce batch of 36 peanut butter cups.  I usually make about 5 to 6 batches, so that's another 15 5o 18 hours of candy making.

And that doesn't include the fudge my husband makes or the cookies, and each year, I've started the process a little earlier to allow for us to get the "Care Packages" mailed out so that they all arrive at their destinations by Christmas.  By the time the last package to family and friends leaves my hands and I'm distributing any leftover goodies to our work places, the words "candy", "chocolate" and "Christmas" have become cuss words that I don't want to hear for a while.

So what did I post publically to Facebook?

I noted in short form what I've just related to you:  The candy making is expensive, time consuming, and done only for the sake of Tradition, NOT because I enjoy doing so.  I only intend on making candy for the months of November and December, so if the "Care Package" is left on a bus, eaten by family, or allowed to rot, I WON'T be continuing to make candy to order this year.  I have two books that I need to work on, a public appearance to prepare for, my "regular" job and regular house duties to attend to......

And it's time for me to stop letting former co-workers bully me into spending my "free" time on things that they were already given, but didn't take care of.  The time that I have that isn't already spoken for needs to start being directed toward my children and grandchildren, making them gifts that come from the heart instead of from a store shelf.  I don't want the family traditions to die with me.

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

Soren Kierkegaard made the statement that I've used for today's title, but his comment isn't the only inspiration for today's post.  I've been talking with many friends and relatives about their troubles of late, encouraging them to have faith that life is going to work out for them eventually, and encouraging them to have patience.  It's a sentiment I've heard many times in my own life, and as I've been going about the business of being me today, I'm looking back at my own past and seeing how the times that were most trying in my life were the times that have put me where I am today....

I've spoken in a past blog about cancer and my father.  At the time that I was living through it, it was Hell on Earth.  When I returned to college after my loss, I was taking a Creative Writing class that encouraged me to tear the scabs off my still healing emotions, poke the wound and cause the feelings to bleed out, then describe them in meter and rhyme so that others could feel what I was feeling.

Without that class, I wouldn't have started writing poetry.

Years later, a friend's daughter saw my poems while she was babysitting, was moved to tears by some of the more pain-filled poems, and encouraged me to send a couple of them in to a new local paper's seasonal poetry contest.  The publisher of the local paper loved my work and encouraged me to do more.

Without that young woman's suggestion, I wouldn't have become a local celebrity known as "The Poet Lady".

My mother-in-law, who was quite put out that I had gained a status in town that made people forget that the only reason that I had moved there in the first place was because of HER son, made several snide remarks.  Her remarks, rather than discouraging me from continuing to write (which I would have done prior to losing my dad), made me write a short story and send it to a national magazine to try to prove her wrong.

Without her rude remark, I would have never had the courage to write such a steamy short story and send it in for publication - nor would I have been encouraged to continue writing.

At the time that I was writing poems and that short story, I was using an electric typewriter - which meant that any editing that I was doing on my finished work.  I had been reading about word processors and how much easier it was to edit things with their use, but we were poor and unable to even think about owning such a thing.  Then my husband picked up a side job that involved cleaning a furnace for a woman who complained that she needed something bigger than her little Datsun pickup to get her, her children and all their possessions to her home state, over 1,000 miles away, but she couldn't afford to rent a UHaul.  Since we were driving a full sized pickup in better repair than her truck, my husband did "a little horse trading", swapping our truck for her truck and her Tandy HX 1000 computer.  It wasn't internet capable and all documents had to be saved on floppy discs, since it only had 256 mb of memory, but it would suffice for what I wanted it for.

Without that chance meeting, I wouldn't have begun work on "Night of the Tiger".

Several years later, when the Tandy died and a friend gave us a Compac computer he'd put in his closet when he decided to upgrade to a newer computer, I had just been introduced to the internet.  I would come home from my job as a janitor, and if my husband was working late, I would feed the children and then go into a chat room to "play" with some new friends I had made.  I was also staying in touch with another friend via email and still working on "Night of the Tiger", but progress was slow and I still had several chapters to go in order to finish.

Then came November 11, 1997.  Veteran's Day.  A day that I still had to work, but was doing some chores for my janitorial job that weren't on the normal roster.  It would also be the last day of my pain-free existence.  When I awoke on November 12th and tried to get out of bed to start my day, I literally went to my knees, screaming in agony.  All the bending, heavy lifting and twisting involved in my job had caused a bulge in the disc between L5 and S1, and the bulge caused my vertebrae to move, which caused a pinch to my sciatic nerve, sending shooting pains from my back down to the tips of my toes.  I ended up being heavily drugged with pain killers and put under the strictest order to do "NO bending, NO lifting, NO twisting".  Always a very busy person, I was going nuts when a friend from the chat room suggested that I spend my time learning to program web pages.  To practice, I started publishing my poems online, and as I published the poems and started looking for more things to practice with, I turned again to my almost finished story - and completed it.

Sending the finished manuscript to publishing houses, I was disappointed to get rejection slips - or sometimes, just the unopened envelope with the words "We do not accept unagented material" even though their listing in the Writer's Market said they did.  A complaint to my friend via email produced a lead to a new company that was forming with a new way of publishing books:  Electronic books!

So, without the unexpected back injury and resultant restrictions, I would never have finished my first novel, nor would I have had it published.

I could go on about other things that have happened and the changes in direction that they caused in my life, but I suspect you see the point of this post now.  When I left high school, my dream was to become either an actress or to become a high school English teacher who could also encourage young actors by running the Drama Club.  Here I am, almost 35 years post graduation, doing neither, but with a new vocation that seems to suit me much better.  Each of the things I've chronicled above changed me, and the huge blocks that were the bane of my existence at the time that they were happening in my life became the building blocks for a new dream.  If someone had told me way back in 1979 that I would be a published writer, I would have laughed at them, yet here I am.....

Life is going to throw monkey wrenches at you.  Learn how to juggle with them.

Life is going to put blocks in your chosen path that you won't be able to just climb over.  Learn to do as a river does, changing the flow so that the block just becomes a place where you can take a rest while going back over your memories of your life and see how it changed you.

Life is going to give you bruises and painful scars that you will carry with you for either the short term or for the rest of your life.  Don't let you pain sideline you.  Get up, dust yourself off, and know that others have lived through this.  So will you.

And on the anniversary of such things as your last pain-free Veteran's Day, take a moment to thank the men and women who have pains that make yours look like paper cuts in comparison and reflect on where your life might have gone had such a thing never happened to you.....

Thank you, Veterans, for your service.  Without you, I wouldn't have the freedom to write this blog and post it on the internet........

When does a hobby become an obsession? I'll have to get back to you.....

Some of my friends have been asking me how it feels to be making money from what used to be a hobby: writing.  If I ever make a LOT of money at my hobby, I'll have to come up with an answer for that, but at the moment, I still consider writing to be a hobby - and not my only hobby.

Another of my hobbies started when I was in college, after overhearing an uncle comment about a genealogy book that had the wrong information about my great-grandfather.  Per my Uncle Herb, there was a book that he had looked at called "The Book of Dow" by Robert Piercy Dow, which chronicled three men with the last name of Dow who were immigrants to America during Colonial times.  He stated that this book, having traced the descendants of these three men until 1927, as it was published just one year before my dad was born, was incorrect when it came to our ancestor, one James Parker Dow.  It stated that he was the son of Alexander Dow of China, Maine "by conjecture", but Uncle Herb had always heard that James was the son of Samuel Dow and Roxanne Lamont.

This comment got my curiosity up, and since the library at the college I was attending had a copy in their special records area, I spent a lot of time in the library, as the special records are not allowed to circulate.  This hobby started in the fall of 1980, when I had just lost my dad to cancer and felt very lost and vulnerable, as a way of getting closer to a part of my family tree.  In the years since, I've discovered that there are little feuds going on between some of the family members, so although they are all willing to speak with me about their own research results, I'm not allowed to freely share things among these members without using the BCC function in my email.

I've learned a lot about genealogical tracing over the years.  Among the things I've learned is this:

1) Ancestry.com is a marvelous tool, but the information found there should always be taken with a grain of salt - ESPECIALLY when looking at the family trees posted by other people.  Some actually have researched the facts, but others, like Robert Piercy Dow, have depended on conjectures that they have then posted as fact.  It's always worthwhile to consider the other family trees as "good leads", but then research the information like a detective working a cold case, going to town and state vital records before accepting the lead as a fact.

2) One's relatives don't take it well when it is pointed out that an ancestor, during a time when such things as mental illness and disease were considered God-given punishments for wrong-doings, may well have lied about when, where or how a family member may have met his or her end.  Family rumor is preferred over direct fact for these people, and they would rather perpetrate the lie than allow the truth to come out into the open.

3) Posting a question in an open forum can bring about wonderful new information - and make a connection with a descendant of another family member that can blossom from two researchers sharing information to a very wonderful friendship.

4) NEVER blow off someone who contacts you with a question about something they saw in YOUR family tree!  One of my best leads to date came through someone who was researching her own family tree and wanted to know if the James P. Dow I've been searching for might have been related to someone who would have been her great-grandfather's step-mother.  She provided me with information that I had never seen before from a town I would have never considered searching, and had I blown off her question, I would have still been on a dead end road with my tracing of that one family member.

5) Don't even joke to some relatives about the family being "New England Rednecks" - even if you can prove that it's true!  On a couple of lines of ancestors who settled in Massachusetts, there is some obvious inbreeding action, with several instances of common ancestors in the family tree.  It appears that there was no one closer than second or third cousins, but still.....inbreeding happened in the colonies due to a lack of population.

My sister, when doing a project in 6th grade, had asked my dad where our ancestors came from.  We all knew that my mother's ancestors were from Canada, but what about his?  Dad, always a bit of a jokester, told her that we were "Heinz 57s" - meaning of extremely mixed blood, but he didn't know exactly what.  She was so angry with him for that comment that he placated her by sending her over to speak with one of his older sisters.  My sister cam back to announce that she had been told the following list of countries that made up the Dow clan:  Scotland, Ireland, England, France, Native American - and one other that slips my mind at the moment, because it took her seven fingers to list them all off when she included Canadian. 

Over the years, I've proven ties to all the countries involved except for the Native American line - mostly because the natives didn't have a written language, and therefore, no written records of who was marrying whom.  In reading lots of history books, it has been stated many times that natives who wanted to marry into the white man's society had to have a last name - which the natives also didn't have.  Some of the people would use an animal (bear, wolf, etc.), their location (Conway, Ossipee, etc.)  or a color (black, white, etc.) as their last name in the church records, but since the clergy made no effort to record much more than that, records tend to be a little sketchy.  I'll keep pushing, but it's like finding a needle in a haystack.  One surprise was finding that we had an ancestor from the Netherlands, whom we had never been told about.

On the fun side of things, I've discovered that my father's mother, whose family name was "Burrill", was a descendant of John Alden and Priscilla Mullin, whose courtship was made famous by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  It seems John and Priscilla's granddaughter, Mercy, married a John Burrill....and the rest, as they say, is history.

Needless to say, when the writing of works of fiction isn't going well, I take a trip to a library or historical society and start digging to see if I can prove my current list of "leads".  I've been into the Maine Room at the Portland Public Library so often that the regular librarian in charge of that room now greets me by saying "Back again?" or "I hadn't seen you in so long, I thought you gave up!"

So, when does a hobby become an obsession?  I think my genealogical hobby is getting awfully close......