At the request of my little sister Mel and with the desire to get the most out of my money spent at ancesty.com, I am going to blog about some of the more exciting things I've uncovered about our family history. I have A LOT of information about the Kinkades and some well documented families on the Burgess side. At the moment I don't have a great deal of onformation about the Aspelund/Wallner side. While the Kinkade-Burgess side can be traced back to the earliest American colonists, the Aspelund-Wallner clans came to America much later. Their histories, therefore, are buried in German and Norwegian (as well as Irish) records and I will focus on them when I can. For now it is much easier to focus on the families that are easy to study.
Since I have most recently spent HOURS on Grandpa Kinkade's mother's (Blanche) family I will start there. In fact, it is the most interesting in terms of American history as it is the line that can be traced back to the Mayflower. Since it is Canadian Thanksgiving I will start there. Not tonight. I have a new Dexter recorded :)
All in all, over the past few months I have uncovered Kings, Princesses, adventurers, sea captains, soldiers, mistresses of kings, puritans, pilgrims and prostitutes. I have found stories from every major war fought on American soil. The hours I have spent searching for our ancestors has made history come alive. I know I'm a dork. But the kids will thank me someday when they have a project to do on American history :)
OK, time for TV. Tomorrow....the Mayflower.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Saturday, May 29, 2010
The road to sanity
In an effort to maintian my sanity, I have decided to document the final year we have left to live in Vancouver. I hope that through this exercise I find a way to live with this year of stagnation. The cold, wet, never ending weather that is bringing all the crazy to the surface of my life. Who knows. Maybe I'll find a way to exist here. I'm tired of complaining on facebook and I feel that I need to vent. Without venting, things may get even uglier around here. It is my goal to try to spare the people in my life the pain of my constant complaining. So here goes.
Before I begin, I must apologise to all the good people of Vancouver. I'm sure many of you love this place. I'm not sure what my issue is, but the Pacific Northwest has never (and I'm beginning to believe) will never agree with me. You'd think with my ethnic history (english, scoth, welsh, irish) it would be in my blood to tolerate gloom. But, I NEED sun and big skies.
A little history (for context).....I am a misplaced Coloradoan. I grew up in Fort Collins in the front range about an hour north of Denver. After college (Biochemistry-CSU), I moved to the bay area in California for 8+ years. There, I got married, had twins and a nice little career in the biotech industry. When the kids were 3 months old we moved back home to Fort Collins. It was a dream come true. We spent 4 months floating around between my parents house and neighbor's until we finally bought and moved into our house on Salem St. It was instantly wonderful :) The house is big and spacious and after living in a 800sf house in redwood city, it was a 3400sf dream. We finally had room to breathe and a big backyard for the kids. It was all a wonderful blend of family and neighbors. We really loved it there. To make a long story short, out of the blue my husband came home one night last summer and told me we were going to be recolated to Vancouver, British Columbia for 2 years. My life has been one big crap pile since that night. Happiness and contentment made way for insecurity and misery. We had to pack up our house into the basement and pack a carload of stuff and move. My high school friend and her family are renting our house. We rent a small home in Burnaby, living next to our landlords. To be fair, I have never had a good attitude about this move. Normally, I would expect low expectations would lead to pleasant surprises. But, no pleasant surprises yet. Six months along and I'm still waiting. There are a few moments where the crippling homesickness hasn't been eating away at me. Those moments, coincidentally (0r not) seem to coincide with sunshine. A thing that is rarely present in this part of the world.
I am constantly fighting the desire to give into my misery, but I'm done. The final straw is this summer. I've been told by EVERYONE, that putting up with the hell of winter (it rained EVERY day last November. I didn't see the sun the first 2.5 months I lived here) was worth it for the spectacular summers. Well, here it is....June (almost) and highs are in the 50s and rain, rain, rain....as far as the eye can see (14 days). And when I did a little research, I found that the average high temps in June over the last 30 years don't break 67 degF. I realized that I might be stuck in perpetual winter with two 2 year olds. And no friends. And nowhere to go. And nothing to do.
For the record the pool is open in Fort Collins (where we have LIVED the last 2 sumers) and temps are in the 90's. At this moment I'm contiplating leaving this place and spending the summer in Fort Collins. A move that may make me and the children happy, but will undoubtedly be bad for our family. I'm afraid we are going to have to learn to live with the misery. Here's hoping this blog helps us along.
Before I begin, I must apologise to all the good people of Vancouver. I'm sure many of you love this place. I'm not sure what my issue is, but the Pacific Northwest has never (and I'm beginning to believe) will never agree with me. You'd think with my ethnic history (english, scoth, welsh, irish) it would be in my blood to tolerate gloom. But, I NEED sun and big skies.
A little history (for context).....I am a misplaced Coloradoan. I grew up in Fort Collins in the front range about an hour north of Denver. After college (Biochemistry-CSU), I moved to the bay area in California for 8+ years. There, I got married, had twins and a nice little career in the biotech industry. When the kids were 3 months old we moved back home to Fort Collins. It was a dream come true. We spent 4 months floating around between my parents house and neighbor's until we finally bought and moved into our house on Salem St. It was instantly wonderful :) The house is big and spacious and after living in a 800sf house in redwood city, it was a 3400sf dream. We finally had room to breathe and a big backyard for the kids. It was all a wonderful blend of family and neighbors. We really loved it there. To make a long story short, out of the blue my husband came home one night last summer and told me we were going to be recolated to Vancouver, British Columbia for 2 years. My life has been one big crap pile since that night. Happiness and contentment made way for insecurity and misery. We had to pack up our house into the basement and pack a carload of stuff and move. My high school friend and her family are renting our house. We rent a small home in Burnaby, living next to our landlords. To be fair, I have never had a good attitude about this move. Normally, I would expect low expectations would lead to pleasant surprises. But, no pleasant surprises yet. Six months along and I'm still waiting. There are a few moments where the crippling homesickness hasn't been eating away at me. Those moments, coincidentally (0r not) seem to coincide with sunshine. A thing that is rarely present in this part of the world.
I am constantly fighting the desire to give into my misery, but I'm done. The final straw is this summer. I've been told by EVERYONE, that putting up with the hell of winter (it rained EVERY day last November. I didn't see the sun the first 2.5 months I lived here) was worth it for the spectacular summers. Well, here it is....June (almost) and highs are in the 50s and rain, rain, rain....as far as the eye can see (14 days). And when I did a little research, I found that the average high temps in June over the last 30 years don't break 67 degF. I realized that I might be stuck in perpetual winter with two 2 year olds. And no friends. And nowhere to go. And nothing to do.
For the record the pool is open in Fort Collins (where we have LIVED the last 2 sumers) and temps are in the 90's. At this moment I'm contiplating leaving this place and spending the summer in Fort Collins. A move that may make me and the children happy, but will undoubtedly be bad for our family. I'm afraid we are going to have to learn to live with the misery. Here's hoping this blog helps us along.
For the record. 54degC 88% humidity rain
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