Turning back the years........

One of my relatives recently joked that I'm ALWAYS on Facebook.  They're right, in a way, as I look at Facebook as my daily contact with people who I wouldn't get to see otherwise - whether they be friends from former workplaces, past neighbors, relatives (which over half of my "friends list" actually are).

On Facebook, the newest trend is to post old photographs for "Turn Back Thursday" (abbreviated as TBT by  most who participate).

Man, do I ever have a LOT of old photographs!  I have things from the 1800's right up to last week.  It's always an interesting task to make that decision on what photo to post for the week.

Not so with this post in this blog, as three are more photos than I'm going to have room for in the memorial post I wanted to do in a couple of weeks.  What better way to do the "Turn Back" than to simply post the link to this post where I can have a little bit more of a permanent link for the person who was my very bestest best friend growing up, my partner in crime, the other side of the coin that was me, than to post the photos I've been coming across and tell about the part of my heart that was taken from me when I was 20?

June 14, 1961 was the birth date for this person, just three weeks after my own birth.  His name was Timothy James Bartlett, and he was my cousin.

This first photo is from our first Christmas together.  My walker was made of wood and I had become very used to the way it handled.  Tim's was made of metal and he was also very used to the way it handled.  Even though we hadn't started talking yet, we already shared an almost psychic bond, looking at each other before making a beeline for the Christmas tree, making our parents work very hard to try to keep us from tearing down the tree.

Then someone had the brilliant idea of switching walkers.

We got very distracted by the walkers that didn't behave like the ones we were used to, and Timmy seemed very determined to get his back, even though he couldn't figure out the mechanics of how to do so.  It made for a couple of very cute photos and also saved Memere's Christmas tree.

Tim's dad was in the Navy, so we didn't see each other again for a while, when the family returned from being stationed in Hawaii when we were in first grade.  When Disney released "Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day" that winter, 1968, we were all gathered again at Memere's house to watch "The Wonderful World of Disney".  Unaware that no one else could do such a thing, I sang "The Tigger Song" after the show was over, having memorized it on that first hearing.  Timmy decided that, since I already knew the song, I HAD to be Tigger.  Some of my relatives STILL call me "Tigger", because "They're bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy, Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun!
But the most wonderful thing about Tiggers is I'm the only one".  Um, yeah.  I can be a little "over the top happy" at a lot of these gatherings......

At the end of that school year, the Bartletts were reassigned, eventually returning to Maine permanently when Tim and I were in sixth grade.  While his parents chose a place to buy a house, we were once again classmates, and then Tim was just a few towns over, so we became even closer friends.  At the family gatherings, we tended to hang out together, and the year we turned 14, we got into trouble by sharing one of Aunt Dot's chairs and discussing Tolkien.  Seems we had our heads too close together, and one of my sisters went out to the parents insisting that Tim and I were kissing.

Yeah.  Ok.  From this photo that Pepere put into a collage that I eventually ended up with, I guess you could say he was a good looking young man.  But seriously?  We were practically forehead to forehead, discussing favorite characters and favorite scenes.  He had started using the nickname "Gandalf" and walking around saying "Gandalf the Grey was sorta gay, but Gandalf the White is outta sight!"  We discussed which character would most represent me, but Tim teasingly told me that, no matter which Tolkien nickname I chose for myself, I would ALWAYS be Tigger.....

Where did anyone get the idea I would be necking with my cousin?

We tried to be a little more careful about where we had our "tete-a-tete" chats, but they still happened - regularly.  When my parents weren't able to go to his graduation from high school, my sis and I got dressed up and went to represent.  These are the last photos I have of my beloved cousin:

I had just moved in with my college boyfriend at the beginning of my final semester at BCC/UMO and I was trying to decide what I was going to chose as my major for the next semester.  I had already lost my "rudder", as my dad, who had always helped me to steer my life, had passed away from cancer in July 1980.  Tim was planning on going into the service himself even while acting as the wind in my sails, encouraging me to continue with my education and make something of myself.

Then the phone call came through from my mom.  Tim had been at a send off party with a bunch of his friends.  His brothers had all climbed into one car to go straight home, but Tim had called "shot gun" for a friend's vehicle, taking another friend home on the way.  According to the driver, they hit a small patch of black ice, and he wasn't real familiar with what to do when put into a spin.  Timmy was laughing, then there was the thud and all got really quiet.  They had hit a tree on the side of the road, breaking the leg of the kid in the back seat and snapping Tim's neck instantly.  The wind in my sail was gone at the tender age of 20.  For me, still struggling with the grief of watching my father die a slow, painful death, it was the death knell for my college career.  Not only could I NOT chose between the acting career I had entered college to pursue and the writing career that I was being encouraged to go for, but NOTHING made sense any more.  The two men who had been my entire world, the two male voices who had always listened to my concerns and helped me with their opinions about which direction I should chose were gone....

I still have days, even almost 33 years after I lost him, that I find myself wanting to pick up the phone and call Tim to run some annoying thing past him and get his view on it.  I need his silly commentary, his "old soul in a young body" wisdom, and to share a laugh as I get encouraged, once again, to keep going and to keep being that unique person that Tim knew I always was.

Some days, I need to have someone tell me again that, no matter what other name I might chose to go by, I'm still, and always will be, Tigger in Timmy's eyes.

June 14, 2014.
He would have been 53, just like me.
He probably would have HATED "Turn Back Thursday" and this "weepy memorial" to him.

But I DO believe he would have LOVED what Peter Jackson has done with "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings".  I think of him whenever I hear this tune:

The Song of the Lonely Mountain

So, Tim, there you have it:  I still miss you and wish I could spend just one more birthday with you.

With much love,
"Tigger" 

 

What happens when "Do It Yourself" types shouldn't have done it themselves

This year, as I'm trying to get outside to tend to my flower gardens and do the spring cleaning, my husband is trying to get a few projects done that should result in a lower cost for heating the house when he's finished.

You see, when we bought our house in 1998, we were madly in love with it, because it was unique and showed major potential for being a magnificent home when we did some remodeling to remove some of the "kinks" that the previous homeowner had caused to occur.  Then life happened.

Instead of spending the yearly income tax refund on remodeling, as we planned to do when pushing through the paperwork for the mortgage, we've had little "hiccups".  Here are just a few of those:

A beam that held up the front porch was rotting when the inspector did the walk through and gave us a list of things that had to be fixed before we could get financing.  He mentioned replacing the porch rail, but missed the beam.  To avoid a ton of paperwork, we propped up the roof and put a new deck under it in 2000.  The roof still needs to be replaced and is on the docket for next year's repairs.  

The former owner KNEW her septic system was on the way out and needed to be replaced.  She'd had various companies bid for the work, one of whom had even marked out where the new septic tank and leach field area would go with sticks that had been pounded into the ground.  (We learned about this when the neighbor across the street, who was friends with my husband's grandparents, came over and asked why we'd removed the sticks.)  We got the new septic put in during the summer of 2002.

My husband has had a broken wrist at work and a broken foot while riding a friend's jet ski.  He was able to go to work, but got no overtime while those injuries healed - and, in the case of the wrist, while he healed twice, as the screws and plate they used to put him back together caused problems and had to be removed again after a year.  Between him not being healthy enough to tackle the work and using the income tax to cover the bills that would have been taken care of by the overtime, those years were a wash when it came time to do remodeling.

In addition to taking out walls to give the whole first floor a very "open" feel, the former owners had added a "sun room/greenhouse" onto the back of the house.  According to the specs on the permit they got through the town, this was to be glass walled and put onto sonar tubes.  That isn't what they did.  The addition was solid sided with big plexiglass windows and a large sliding door leading to the back yard, but obviously no one ever explained "support beams" to these do it yourselfers.  The roof above the glass doors started to collapse, so one whole summer was dedicated to removing the glass door, properly supporting the back wall, and putting in smaller door.  It turned into a much larger project than expected because nothing was properly weatherproofed as they built, so instead of just taking apart and rebuilding one small section of the wall, the entire length had to be re-done.  Instead of having the money to fix up the part under the plexiglass windows where they put wood right onto the dirt with no cement footer to prevent rot and no protection against the insects and critters that come up from the dirt to eat the wood, the cash we had was all eaten up in the materials to fix their mess.  The "greenhouse" portion is one of the sections of the house that will just be getting taken off and not rebuilt, but the wall between the "greenhouse" and the main house has to be rebuilt first.

And of course, we have two children whom we've bailed out for a couple of years when they needed financial help, but couldn't get the loans they needed.

In short, the work we foresaw having to do when we first bought the house is finally getting started this year.  A couple of the walls that have been slowly starting to bow a little from having support beams removed are being opened up so that we can assess any extra work that we'll need to do, as the first "rewall" project showed that, when they took the walls out, they put good wood under rotting timbers, meaning that the support structure is in even worse condition than we thought, so we need to do more work than we thought was going to be needed.  (The photo below shows one of these rotted timbers, for those who want to see what I'm talking about.  The large beam that takes up most of this shot was put in under a water damaged beam, so the top of the larger beam was starting to rot as well.)

I've been doing something of a photo diary of the progress on this current project on Facebook, so suffice to say that the rotting stuff has been removed, new wood has been installed, and the wall closed up to make a desperately needed set of kitchen shelves.  The finished shelving unit is about 8 feet by 8 feet (a little over 2 meters square for my readers who use the metric system), and I'm looking forward to some of the rotted bits coming off in the next project.  At the time of this post, this is what I currently have where this big hole in the wall existed:

(Within the coming week, there will be framework added to the front and it will have doors added, but it's much more impressive than the hole....)

Now if I can just get enough of the books to sell to cover some of the materials needed that are going to go above and beyond the current money we have available.......

*smile*

\UPDATE 5/16:  The shelves are nearing completion, they have two layers of polyurethane painted on, and this morning, I stenciled on ivy leaves before doing two more layers of polyurethane.  My hubby still needs to add on three more boards, then the doors, but this is how this little project looks as of the moment:

(One of my mother-in-law's neighbors stenciled every room of her house, which I found tremendously beautiful, so I vowed to do the same one day.  Guess it's the day....)  Soon, we're on to project number 2, which will culminate with the removal of a room that, according to the town office, wasn't built to specs anyway, and therefore doesn't exist.......

When history comes alive......

As I've spoken of in other posts, I've been researching my family tree for years now, and am working on getting an interactive web site going that will allow other family members to follow the branches of the tree in whichever direction they wish.  I started with my dad's male line - which peters out pretty quickly at my great-grandfather - so I continued on with my paternal great-grandmother, following her male line back to the 1600's, when a man named Richard Baildon (who changed the spelling of his name to "Belding" when he was recorded as arriving in Connecticut in 1635) was the first of the line to set foot on American soil.

Sometimes, when first finding information on my forefathers, little things slide by until I start to search for proof of what others have posted as the God's Honest Truth.  One of those little details slid home unexpectedly yesterday.....

7 generations back from my great-grandmother, there is a man named Samuel Belding, the son of Richard, who, according to some of these people who have recorded information without researching it, was born in America in 1632.  (Quite the feat to be born here when his parents didn't arrive in Connecticut until 3 years after his birth, no?)  When recording the information - with a disclaimer that I'm still looking at the records for this particular person - I noted that his wife and youngest son have the same date for their death.

While it's not unusual for the people in early America to have been taken down by some sort of epidemic, there is usually a few days between the deaths, as different people will succumb to a fever or other illness at a different pace.  That these two family members would have died on the exact same date touched off a Sherlock Holmes-style reaction, so I followed the little wiggling leaf on Ancestry.com to see what historical hints anyone else may have posted.

A member story indicated that there was a disaster in the town where the Beldings were living, and when I Googled "September 19, 1677" and the town of Hatfield, Massachusetts, I got this:  Hatfield Massachusetts Indian Attack

I had been questioning why some of the children were born in Hatfield and some were born in other towns.  I had forgotten my American History when trying to deduce why they would have moved out of Hatfield and then moved right back again.  I forgot that the natives in the New World weren't the idealized "good people" who we hear about helping the settlers survive when we hear the story of the first Thanksgiving Feast.....

And the hostility of the native tribes resulted in a 47-year-old woman and her 5-year-old son being killed in an attack that resulted in 12 dead, 4 wounded, and 17 captured.  The hostages were marched up the Connecticut River valley, to Lake Champlain, and onward into Canada.  It took several months for a rescue party to get permission to go after them, and, miraculously, most were able to be rescued and returned to their families.

While I tuck this tale away for the time being, to be researched in further detail at a later time to confirm my ancestor's involvement in this incident, this brought history to life for me.  It's one thing to sit in a classroom in high school or college and listen to such tales about the early days here in America, not really feeling tied to it because of the number of years that have passed.  It's quite another thing to find that one's own relations were forced to move from one stockaded town to another or die at the hands of what may possibly be another group of relations, as there is a rumor of a native American ancestor somewhere in the mix of my genes.....

It may prove very interesting to find out which tribe attacked Hatfield - and which tribe the rumored "Indian in the Woodpile" came from....

In the meantime, I've given the family members who asked me to post this a little something to think about.  I'm hoping that, like me, they find the past reaching out to touch them more personally than it ever has before, urging other, younger family members to take up this gauntlet and continue this research after I join my ancestors on the other side of the ethereal veil.

Perhaps I'll be leaving an interesting legacy after all......

Blogging Phenomena

I started this blog at the advice of many "experts" on media marketing with the explicit purpose of gaining more attention for the book that was in the publishing process at the time.  It HAS boosted sales a bit, making my quarterly check look more like the yearly income I had from "Night of the Tiger", but not to the point I had hoped it would.  In short, I won't be retiring from my day job in the near future to go on book signing tours, but I truly appreciate all the lovely feedback, good and bad, as it makes me a better writer to know where I'm failing my fans.....

But the blog has done something unexpected as well.

My other accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Google +, etc. have come alive since I started this sharing of my thoughts with the world at large.  Friends from high school and college, many of whom I lost touch with many eons ago, are hailing me when I least expect it.  I joyfully add them to my contact lists and our friendship continues on as if we just saw each other yesterday instead of over 30 years ago.

People from places I've never visited also come through the other accounts, sometimes just doing a "follow", sometimes asking to be friends because they want to get to know the person under the writing hat.  While in certain ways these international connections make me worry a little that the NSA is going to start watching me more closely, causing me to think twice about the kind of things I share, it's also something that fills me with awe.  Before I started blogging, I would see visitors from Russia, and China, and Germany on the list of IP addresses provided by my Tripod account, but until the blog, I wasn't being approached by any of them.

It's a rather humbling experience to have a strange person request my friendship and, in response to my "how do I know you?" query, to have them respond "I just finished your book(s), love your writing style, and want to be updated as to when the next one is coming out."  It's one thing for me to be sitting here seeing the IP address and that they found my page through a Yandex search, which is a Russian search engine.  It's quite another thing entirely to see them post things in their native language and, on translating their post, discover that they're thanking me for adding them to my lists and telling their friends to buy my books....

I can say "Thank you" a million times over and still not express how such a thing makes me feel.

I write, as I've expressed before, because it keeps my mental works from getting all gummed up with bits and pieces of storylines, preventing a brain  explosion that would surely see me bouncing around a rubber room in the special jacket with the extra long hug-yourself sleeves.  I write for my own satisfaction, going back to edit and re-edit until it's the kind of story that I like to read myself on those nights when I can't sleep and can't find any mindless amusement on the Boob Tube.  These new friends and followers that I've been collecting the past year are slowly making me come to the realization that my selfish little writing thing, started in a series of journals and only being released into the public faction in more recent years, is actually worth all the time I put into it (even if it sometimes causes arguments between my husband and myself when I get so deeply into the writing that the housework is ignored for several days).......

So, yet again, I thank all of my blog visitors, and I look forward to seeing some of you elsewhere.  I thank you for your kind words and criticisms.  But most of all, I thank you for your kindnesses that, despite the vocabulary available to me via dictionaries and thesauruses, I simply can't find enough words to tell you how it all makes me feel.

Blessed be.

"Any sane man claiming to be a Dow is an imposter"

The quote that makes up my title for today is something that was said by Major Joseph Dow of the United States to President James Monroe in 1818.  I came across it in a lovely book that could easily hurt you, should you drop it while moving it:  "The Book of Dow" by Robert Piercy Dow.  It's a great way to start a journey into the Dow Family Tree - just as long as you keep in mind that you should really check the facts through other sources.

I started my family research with this book in September of 1980, after losing my dad to cancer.  I wanted to discover why my uncle was saying that it was incorrect when it put James Parker Dow with Alexander Dow "by conjecture".....

and I'm still trying to find out who James REALLY belonged to, as I have proven that James was not related to Alexander even though they were in the same town when James married Susan Lovina Belden.

In the meantime, as noted in a couple of earlier blog posts, I've traced lots of the other lines, but I haven't been sharing the information anywhere but on Ancestry.com.  Several relatives have been encouraging me to start a web site so that they can see what I've been finding.....

In my own little form of Dow insanity, I've added more storage space to my web site, The Northern Bard ( http://galadriel_emmons.tripod.com/ ) and started programming the pages.  The idea was that, when you click on a person's name when they are shown as the child of a couple, you are taken to that person's marriage and children.  If you click on that same person's name from their own page, you get brought to the page for their parents.  In this way, you can follow the branches of the family tree back several generations, or you can investigate the lines of siblings, or wander - probably for days or weeks, when it comes down to that - throughout the whole tree until you visit all of the 1800+ people I have listed on Ancestry.com at this point in time.

In the meantime, each time I go into Ancestry.com to collect the info I need to make the next page, the little wiggling leaves that lead me to the necessary records to prove or disprove the information I have are tempting me to continue the research.....and, at the moment, I'm trying my best to ignore them.  Once I have all the people who are already in my tree to my web site, I'll look at some of those other wiggling leaves and add any new info to the pages I'm currently creating.

In short, this little bow to those who have been asking me to share my information may turn into something that will keep me programming pages until I go into the great beyond to meet all the people I've been writing about - and I'll have to make sure to give one of my descendants all the necessary tools to continue what appears to be an ongoing project.

If you happen to be related to the Dow family from Corinna, Maine, please feel free to visit the pages that begin with a quick intro at The Dow Family Tree page ( http://galadriel_emmons.tripod.com/dow.family.tree.html ) and drop me a line if you have any corrections or stories that you would like me to add.  If you're just curious, there are a lot of other last names that are going to be included over the multitudes of generations I've traced, so you, too, may find a common relative in the ancient lines.

A little warning before you go, however:  There are a couple of lines I've discovered that make the jokes about rednecks and trees not branching very real.  Please keep in mind that, in the early days of settling America, there weren't a lot of people to chose from when getting married, so sometimes second and third cousins were marrying.

And we here in the United States claim not to understand how we all got so stupid......

*shrug*

And now let me introduce my very special guest star.......

I noted in a blog not too long ago that I was getting a second tattoo, and had posted the "first draft".  This was what I got tagged in as a final draft on April 8th by my lovely tattoo artist, Jen Jacques:

She had cleaned up some of the elements that she didn't like on the first draft, added a couple of leaves as kind of a backdrop, to make him stand out a little better - and floored me, as this is much more than what I was expecting even though I've seen a lot of her other work and have been sincerely impressed in the past.

Then came the 'big day", I arrived at the tattoo parlor psyched despite knowing I was setting myself up for a painful experience, as the first part isn't too bad, but when she gets into shading and making sure that everything is perfect, meaning she's going over already raw skin, it can get pretty painful....

But OMG!  The finished product is well worth every second of stiffness from having to sit still for a long period while she's working!  This is the first intro to "Occie" (which, when you say it aloud, sounds like "Ozzy") the Ocelot:

I look at certain elements, like inside his ears and his gorgeous eyes, and I can't help but feel honored that this beautiful young lady spent so much time and trouble to make this a truly epic piece for me to carry with me!  Once again, I'm saying that I'm not going to get another tattoo, but then again, if not for an off-hand comment by a friend about the tiger (whom I've been calling "Shere Khan" after the Jungle Book), I wouldn't now have Occie......*grin*

So, if you're coming to the Portland, Maine area and would like a truly awesome piece of art to take home with you, something permanent and one of a kind, might I suggest looking up Jen Jacques?  Until June, she's at Til Death Tattoo on Fore Street, and then she's moving on to Lucky's Tattoo Company on Exchange Street.  You, too, could have such an awesome piece of art to show off.....

When a writer SHOULDN'T write......

I'm having a week that I'm pretending that there ISN'T a file in my computer called "A Wild Tiger's Heart".  It's not that the characters aren't still showing me the images, nor that I'm not putting notes into a separate file to remind me of the scenes at a later time, but this is NOT the time that I want to do serious work on the project.

Why?

Because my son works nights, usually getting home from work around 2 a.m., his lovely lady is away for a ten day special assignment, and, since they can't afford such a thing as a live-in nanny for her six-year-old and their 20-month-old, Yamma is doing a lot of babysitting this week.  On nights when the older child doesn't need to go to school the next morning, they're spending the night at our house - which means the children are awake later than normal because they have a hard time falling asleep in a strange place - and because I can't sleep until the children are both out for the night, that means a little sleep deprivation for yours truly.....

And because I've had some interesting editing experiences when I've written things with this much sleep deprivation in the past - or when interrupted by my husband or children in the middle of a hot and heavy scene in which whatever they came into the room saying ended up having to be taken out of the scene - I've promised myself that I won't continue the serious work until I've managed to get my synapses firing in the right order again.

In the meantime, the research has taken on a new direction with a simple status on Facebook in which I've asked any of my friends and family who've traveled to the places that Chase, Ree and Kelly are currently going to please give me their thoughts and impressions.  (I only asked them for the first three destinations, so you're getting more than they did.)  In the interest of giving my Constant Readers here on the blog the same opportunity, I'm going to do a little SPOILER ALERT here and ask some specific questions of any of you who live in or have traveled to the following places, where the characters are spending three weeks per country, beginning just after Christmas at the top of the list:

Ireland - specifically Derry (correction: Dublin - I told you I was tired), Cork (focusing on Blarney Castle and the Rock Close) and Belfast (celebrating New Years Day in Derry and moving south before going to Northern Ireland to transfer onward via ferry)
Scotland - Glasgow, Edinburgh (focusing on Mary King's Close) and the Isle of Skye (late January to mid February)
England - driving from Scotland to such iconic things as Stonehenge, London, and any other places of interest you think might need to be included as part of Kelly's "Bucket List" (Heathrow is featured briefly, as Kelly sends Chase and Ree back to America before continuing the trip solo in early March)
France - Kelly meets a friend in Paris, but has also hinted of some time in the countryside, so where would YOU suggest she go? (March into early April)
Italy - Rome, Capri and Venice are Kelly's top three destinations, but Kyle runs into a couple of minor issues that cause him to ask her to extend her trip by a couple of weeks.  Where would you go in late April/early May if you unexpectedly had to extend your vacation?

Now, the main questions I have about such spots are:

1) What are the homes and countryside like?  I've seen some photos of most of these places, but people tend to only take the most picturesque shots, so what would you note about the area NOT captured by touristy web sites?

2) Are there specific restaurants or shops that might be "off the grid" as far as the tour guides that you would recommend?  We ARE talking a mother and daughter who get uncomfortable in large crowds due to being able to feel the emotions around them, so the trio would tend to want to go to less crowded spots.

3) And naturally, I'm looking for personal descriptions of some of the tourist traps.  How crowded might they be in the off season period when Kelly specifically planned her trip to avoid crowds?  What are the people in these places like when approached by Americans?

Thank you for any feedback you feel compelled to provide.  And now if you'll excuse me, I need to brew a second pot of coffee if I'm going to make it through until 1 a.m. - or possibly later, as my son is like me and will stay late to complete any tasks before he signs out of work.......


And one last note:  A MAJOR thank you to all my visitors here!  I'm only 5 visits short of 1000 views as of this morning - less than a full year after starting this blog on the suggestion of some friends.  The thought that there have been that many clicks on this one humble spot on the internet staggers my mind - and I will be forever grateful.