Egg Cookers, Moving and Genealogy

I bought myself an egg cooker. It seems like a stupid, space eating gadget to buy when making hard boiled eggs in a pan of water works perfectly fine. But I told myself with an electric egg cooker I can walk away and not burn the house down. That’s called justifying my purchase to label it a safety device but, darn it, I can’t hear the stove timer go off anymore…or the doorbell and who knows what else. Now if I could figure out a way to justify getting a new blender I’d be a happy camper. The one I have works fine---I use it every day with the high protein diet I’m on---but I’ve got a bug up my butt about owning one that is chrome and black and matches my coffee pot and toaster. Maybe I could pretend that Bush is still in office and he just told us all to go out shopping to help the economy. Practice patriotism with your credit card, I’m still smirking about that idea from a sitting president, no less.

I’ve been very busy on the computer this past week researching everything from vacate lots and new home building prices to used and brand new condos to manufactured home parks and manufactured homes---both new and used. The more I learn the more frustrating it gets. I should have known better, but I didn’t follow Glinda the Good Witch from the North’s advice about starting at the beginning so I wasted a lot of time picking out floor plans and dealers of new manufactured homes when I should have done more research on the two home parks where I’d like living. “Surprise, surprise, surprise.” as Gomer Pyle used to say on the Andy Griffith Show, they don’t have any lots available to place a new manufactured home. (Let’s be politically incorrect here and call them ‘trailers’, ‘manufactured homes’ is too long to type.) My favorite of the two parks is expanding but they don’t know when. Okay, I could wait a year, in fact a year would get a lot downsizing done. But they can’t give me a time table when they expect the expansion to happen. Both parks allow dogs BUT if your dog is a problem then they can tell you to get rid of it. That would be like asking you to get rid of your kid! If Levi barks too much is that any worse than teenagers who annoy old ladies with their skate boards and yelling? I think not! Everything has a yin and a yang. You love your kids and your dogs, hate the noise they make, but a world with too much yin or too much yang would slide off its axle.  

And that dog policy at the “trailer” park is what led me to researching condos in my target area. I found one that is a zero steps community with a clubhouse and social schedule. Perfect. But before I get my head fully emerged in their floor plans I have requested their pet policy and condo fees rate. I hate giving my contact information out to these places but there is no other way to get vital input that will help me decide what I want to do with the rest of my life. Levi will only be seven on the 23^rd of this month. It’s not like I can wait for him to kick the bucket to make my decisions and choices easier and even if he was two feet under---I can’t dig a deeper grave at my age---I’d probably want another Levi in my life. Only next time I’m getting a dog that is no bigger than a bread box, has a bark like a cricket. One of my niece’s daughter-in-laws has a dog that is smaller than most cats and I swear it has a bigger wardrobe than I do. That may be a slight exaggeration but I can’t help it, I have dog-size envy. When I got Levi they told me he’d only grow to twelve pounds and he is pushing thirty, and no, his vet only wants him to lose one pound, so he’s not doing protein shakes with me. Come spring, he’ll be able to walk that pound off, no problem.

I’ve also started working on a genealogy tree and eventual book for my Mom’s side of the family. (I did one for my Dad’s side in 2013.) Already I’ve found a scandal. I’m actually building on some research that was done by my great-aunt in the pre-computer age and she claimed that my great-grandfather was assigned to an Army post at Leavenworth, Kansas but the 1900 census shows that he was listed as an inmate. I’ll bet she never thought that cat would get out of the bag! So here I was at midnight trying to research why he was in prison…most likely for desertion from his infantry post, I suspected. Wrong. When I mentioned this to my oldest niece she was able to find proof that in 1900 Leavenworth was a hospital, not a prison. My great-grandfather had taken a bullet in the head during the war and was mostly likely he was being treated for reoccurring issues. It’s funny how people you’ve never met can come to life when you start fleshing them out on a genealogy chart. Then again, I’m the person who thinks an electric egg cooker is fascinating, so don’t go by me. Most people’s eyes get glazed over from boredom when you talk about genealogy too long, so I’m stopping right here. ©