"I Found You, Kunta Kinte!" (or something like that....)

My grandmother, Addie Francis Burrill Dow, always insisted that we had Indian blood - or at least, that was how she said it. It was before the whole "Native Americans" thing had come about, as she passed away when I was 6 in 1967, and the native population was still reeling after almost 300 years of being "the enemy". She didn't seem to know how far back that the blood ran, but she and several of her children had the darker skin, black hair and brown eyes that came with it.

When I lost my dad to lymphoma in 1980, I made my first attempt at finding my roots, spending hours in the Fogler Library at UMO studying "The Book of Dow". It was a somewhat failed attempt at "finding my roots" because of one simple word: "conjuncture".  It seems that Robert Piercy Dow, one year before my dad was born, had ruled James Parker Dow as the son of Alexander Dow of China, Maine "by conjuncture", as James had passed away in 1876, there were no other Dows in the area, so therefore he MUST belong to Alexander.....

I ignored the word "conjuncture", traced Charles Dow all the way to a Thomas Dow who arrived here in 1639, and I thought I was done.

Until my uncle told me that, to the best of his knowledge, James wasn't Alexander's son.

Back to square one, and when I wasn't getting anywhere on James, I started on Addie and her "indian blood", finding the Mayflower romance of John Alden and Priscilla Mullen leading to a Burrill marrying their granddaughter and a "founding fathers of Corinna" gig. Not much else was available online, the Maine State Historical Society and the Maine Room in the Portland Library got VERY tired of seeing me - and there was not one mention of any "natives" in what I had available.

In 2002, I joined Ancestry.com, hoping to find more information. On James Dow, there was nothing. But on my grandmother's tree.....

I've been slowly plodding along, seeing each member to "the Old Country" before I give up on that line. As my aunt told us many moons ago, I've found the Scottish ancestor, the English ancestor, the Irish ancestor, the French ancestor, a couple of unexpected Dutchmen.....

And then, pay dirt!

There I was, about to give it up for the night, when the name "Margaret Oinguina Diguina Wampanoag" caught my eye - married a full year before the Mayflower came to these shores. Her father, Quanequina Chief Wampanoag and mother, Ora Ova Diguina, appeared there with her. There was some mention of "the Chiefs fourth wife" giving birth to "Margaret", which I suspect was given to her as a "Christian Name" before she married Gabriel Wheldon.

I sat for several minutes before the news properly hit.

I had finally found the "native in the woodpile", as one uncle called her.

She had married an Englishman a year before the big "Mayflower run" in Plymouth.

She was Wampanoag, the daughter of the Chief.

She appears again in my Merrick line, as a Hopkins relative married into the Merrick line and produced yet another part of my family tree, but that's not unusual. It seems the Nickerson line produced a Nickerson grandson who married a great-granddaughter who was a Nickerson....

Anyone want some moonshine while I continue on with the intermingling of the Redneck Ancestors? *grin*

At any rate, I can now understand my grandmother's lack of attention to the Mayflower. Why be all "my ancestors came over on the Mayflower in 1620" when you had a relative living here by the time the Mayflower came in?

Ah, Addie, your mother taught you right. There were English settlers well before the Mayflower and you came from one of them who mated with a Wampanoag maiden.

Now if I can only find James' parents.......

UPDATE 6/8/17:

An email got me searching for Gabriel - and it appears that, if he DID marry "Margaret", she was a second wife - but that doesn't agree with the other times or other children.

I'm still searching for the "indian in the woodshed"......

Thanksgiving Thoughts

I'm trying to encourage myself to start the "Turkey Day" stuff by going out to the freezer and bringing in the bird so that it can start defrosting. (It comes in SO frozen from the store that I've discovered in years past that this is necessary.) I need to get the garbage to the dump as it rarely goes well trying to get it there for the first week past Thanksgiving. I blame Arlo Guthrie and his popular song that takes place over Thanksgiving.....

Any excuse in a storm.....

*grin*

And I need to list my Thanksgiving Menu so that I can properly mark stuff off as it gets started on Thanksgiving morning. (Another thing discovered in past years. Bill's family had traditions I had never heard of. My family had traditions his family had never heard of. Between the two of us, we've come up with a menu that works - and it really works best if I have a list so we don't forget something like the "drunken turkey" glaze like I did one year...

Of course, it helps that I'm starting my day with some baklava that my husband got for me at Masa.....

Any port in a storm.....

(Realizing I have two "in a storm" references, I sign out, partially to begin the day, but also to refresh my dictionary skills.....)

Obamacare, Smobamacare

Well before we added on my brain surgery, we had a hospital bill. (Okay, "bills", but I was keeping up with them.) I had made an arrangement to pay $150 for two separate bills and was trying - in June - to get those bills condensated because, by the END of June, we were going to be adding Bill's ankle surgery to the list.

Well, anyone who's been reading my blog since June 24 knows how THAT surgery worked out!

Needless to say, my husband has taken on the bills, and about 40 days ago, he noted that one of the hospital bills stopped coming, so he called their billing team and asked them to "look into it"....

Yeah! They "looked into it" all right!

Seems that the billing team decided that, DESPITE what they have been told and DESPITE what the arrangements were, they decided that $150 per month on THIS bill was going to a collection agency....

Nice! So instead of sending US any form of "notice", or calling my husband's cell phone - or EVEN leaving a message on our home phone, we now have to deal with the collection agency.

And that's not all!

DESPITE being informed at every doctor visit that we're WELL BEYOND the point of coming up with a "fee" for every doctor visit (because I'm WELL BEYOND the "paid fee" for the insurance company), we keep having to contact the American Cancer Society to inform them that WE DON'T OWE YOU ANY MORE MONEY!

And Obamacare?

Yeah! That saved us TONS of money, including a "recovery room" for EVERY MRI visit. (There IS no "recovery room". I go in, they put the little tube in to deliver the "contrast", they pull it out and tell me "have a nice day", and I go out. NO RECOVERY ROOM!)

So did Obamacare save me ANYTHING?

No!

Has it saved my insurance company (which my husband gets through work) any money?

No!

Did ANYTHING get paid by Obamacare AT ALL?

NO!

And the worst part is that, in order to NOT get "dinged" by the Obamacare, I have to provide "proof of insurance" every year now with my taxes.....

So....

If you're one of the hospitals that we owe tons of money to, LOOK OVER YOUR BILLS BEFORE THEY LEAVE YOUR DESK AND MAKE SURE THERE IS NO "RECOVERY ROOM" (or other such things that I DIDN'T receive while I was there) TO MAKE US HAVE ANOTHER LOOK-SEE AT WHAT YOU BILLED THE INSURANCE COMPANY FOR! (It's bad enough that my husband is working 60 plus hours per week to have to do YOUR job for you, and I CERTAINLY hear about it when he's saying "How did you have a recovery room when they came to the room where you were at 11:30 P.M., put you on an elevator to bring you down for the MRI, then returned you to your bed upstairs?")

If you're billing me for some "fee" that you think you deserve, CALL MY INSURANCE COMPANY AND ASK!

If you're a newly hired Collection Agency for my "previous bill", WE HAVE BEEN PAYING EVERY BILL AND THE HOSPITAL HAS NO GROUNDS FOR HIRING YOU SHORT OF SOMEONE IN BILLING DECIDING TO MAKE YOU DO THE MONTHLY BILLING SO THEY CAN HAVE TEA AND CRUMPETS INSTEAD OF DOING THIER JOB!

And if you're representing Obamacare, WASN'T THIS SUPPOSED TO STOP THIS BILLING CYCLE STUFF? All I've seen so far is that the Obamacare has RAISED my bills because I use an independent insurance company instead of some government-funded "superpower" to lower my bills. How about something for those of us who've been paying ass-over-teapot to private insurance companies FOR YEARS before this so-called "benefit"?

Bill almost has enough in his savings account/"fishing" account to pay off one of our credit cards. While all you HOSPITALS are goofing around with recovery rooms for MRI's, billing me for things I never got, and basically fucking my life up, we're going to pay a credit card INSTEAD OF YOU!

Have a nice day, all you non-hospital people, and for the hospital people, HAVE A NICE TIME AT THE COURTS!

Baffled, bewildered and.....Here Comes the Hulk!

I started off Monday of this week with Chemotherapy drugs. They're very specific about when I take them, with a two hour fast, then the Termador, then another hour of fasting before I can eat again. Despite the doctor telling me that most people do this just before bed (when I'd need to take my Keppra - all four pills - and a Phenyton), I find it easier to eat my lunch at 11:30, take the Zofran at 1:30, then the Termador at 2, when I take my second Phenyton.

You see, I've taken to taking a nap at about 2:30 - 4:30 most days, so as soon as I've taken my pills, I go and make myself comfortable on the futon. Some days, I get into the movie I've set up in the Blu-Ray and just lay there and rest. Other days, I find myself coming awake at between 4:30 and 5 o'clock.

And then it's up to Bill to figure out what I'm trying to say for the first little while, which sometimes is a half an hour, but often is a struggle for the evening...

Poor Bill.....

But then this Tuesday, with our election, I had to make a decision: Do I go out and hope for the best to do my duty, or do I take a loss and hope others make up that vote?

With all the negative ads, PARTICULARLY for the people who were from another district, but who were running the ads on MY tv, I went and voted.....and plan on hitting up the media stations with a "No Negative Ads" campaign for the next election.....

Why should I, in the Congressional Two catagory, be inundated with the Congressional One ads WHEN I DON'T EVEN GET TO VOTE FOR THESE A-HOLES?  (I never even saw an add for the people I needed to vote on!)

So, for all of you who live in the United States, we NEED to stop this! The negative ads, most of whom I noted in an earlier post, NEED TO STOP!  We need a system that limits the negativity, most of which I've been putting up with/turning off the ads on for TWO YEARS! AND MOST OF THESE ADS ARE FOR PEOPLE WE AREN'T ALLOWED TO VOTE FOR!

So, for those who haven't seen this, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but by the DNC laws, she lost the Electoral College. (Someone way back in the history of the DNC decided that this would be better than the "one vote per person", so you have your popular vote, which tells one story, and then you have the Electoral College vote, which, for instance, means that Maine gets 4 votes in the Electoral College. The results don't always match. It's how we ended up with Hillary over Bernie Sanders, because HE won the popular vote, but the people she paid in the Electorial College got her that vote. Karma, for sure, that Hillary lost by the EC vote after "pulling off" the win over Bernie, but.....) [Addendums one and two: two places one can find the Electoral College.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=electoral%20college&eob=enn/p//0/0///////////
and
https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/about.htm]

All things aside, the DNC has a BUNCH of unsatisfied people protesting Trump's leadership. It's their own fault for the Electoral College thing (more here: https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/about.html), and ALL of America would be satisfied with the "one vote p\er person" side of things. I'm going to let it all die down, then I plan on getting in touch with the House of Representatives and the Senate to get rid of that stupid bill. WE'RE ALL ADULTS AND CAN TAKE OUT THAT STUPID RULE!

Maybe, but 2020, we can have a DECENT election, with DECENT candidates, who ACTUALLY CARE whether or not we have a decent race!

In the meantime, as my family has insisted that I AM the Hulk, I have one thing to say to ANYONE who makes the mistake of coming into my yard over the next few months for this petition or that petition:

HULK SMASH!

For anyone who makes the mistake of stopping in for any other reason, let me get my mask down off the wall so that you can have the proper Deadpool response to your inquiry.....

And The Results on the "Ghosties" is......

I realized that, after yesterday's "study", and MRI and a visit to the neurosurgeon, I forgot to come in to share the results....

The study, aimed at finding out how much of my brain is left and helping others to cope, baffled Sarah. (As I keep telling Bill, it's not what I can get to move past my mouth that bothers me, as inside my brain, I have all the things I've ever learned at my disposal....but I can't get it past my lips when I want to.) She pointed out to us that, when we're doing the "word game" (I'm given a letter and have to come up with words that begin with "A" or some such) that I'm coming up with things like "antigone"....

Then on to the MRI, which introduced me to another Millinocket boy who's down here making money instead of living where he'd prefer - another fun guy who was teasing a new tech as they inserted a tube so that they could inject the same stuff that showed the cancer on the first MRI in June.

And then there was the neurosurgeon visit, which we had to wait for the MRI results to come in before we could advance. The neurosurgeon brought up the last MRI I'd had in July, post surgery, which showed a lot of "ghostlings" that we'd done the radiation to destroy. The injection of the stuff that the MRI staff had put in came next - and the results were phenominal! Most of the little "ghost toasties" were gone!

In February, I'll have another MRI, another visit with the neurosurgeon - and hopefully, more good news. For now, I'm basking.....

November 1 - Are The Ghosts Still There?

Tomorrow marks the day for the MRI after radiation, which is also, hopefully, the day that the doctor tells me that we got all the little ghostlings. With any luck, I can be told that the chemotherapy can clear them all up and, by next year, I can be cancer free for several more years...

And then I realize how close we are to Thanksgiving and Christmas. My house, despite my best efforts, is a mess.  I have way too many things to do and no time to do them.

But my siblings have been helping, of a sort. The thing is this...

They all keep reminding me that Halloween was just yesterday. One can keep Halloween decorations up for two weeks.

*grin*

Of course, I can do some things as I'm be bopping around the house (in the morning, before nap attacks happen). There's yeast rolls, that can be baked, frozen and thawed as needed throughout the season. There are apples to use up as apple cake or pie that would be easy and can also be frozen...