Monday, October 13, 2008

A New Blog And Nice Visit

Yesterday I had a very nice visit with my granmother and my nephew. I have been gathering some geneology information on her family and wanted to take her what I found out so far and have her gather some pictures and verify the information. I've actually managed to find quite a bit so far. I left here around noon or so and picked up some chicken sandwiches from Hardees for her, myself, and my nephew Dylan and we had a nice lunch. My nephew Dylan lives right down the road from her and walked his dog down to visit while I was there. Once I showed her the family information I had typed up, it seemed to trigger memories of some of the family that she recognized and she began giving me little tidbits about each one. I asked her to look over the information in the next few days and write down or tape record anything she could remember about them and dig out some old photos for me to later put into a book. Today I also received an email from someone responding to the post I put up a few weeks ago on the genealogy.com message boards. He says that he is a distant relative of one of my ancesters and I look forward to corresponding with him. I showed the information to my nephew (who is 14 yrs old) but he really did not seem that interested but hopefully one day he will appreciate it. He is very much into history and reading a lot so maybe eventually he will become interested in geneology.

I have also created a new blog here on blogspot to keep a record of how I found my information so I can remember the journey for years to come at http://nldfamgen.blogspot.com/ My grandmother will soon be 88 yrs old and is still going strong. Her mother lived to be almost 90 herself. It's nice to know that I have quite a few family members who lived very long and fullfilled lives. It gives me great hope:)

Monday, October 6, 2008

A Blog About Chip's Birthday Week

I thought I'd just blog about this past week again. Saturday was Chip's 47th birthday but we kind of start things a little early and keep it late as usual. We usually take a week to celebrate each others birthday because not all the family members can celebrate all at one time. On Friday I took Chip to the Red Lobster for their all you can eat shrimp deal which was absolutely delicious and then we had to go to Walmart to get some groceries. Usually about every year we try to outdo each other on the Happy Birthday wishes from different restaurants and stores so at dinner I had them come out at Red Lobster and sing Happy Birthday to him and then at Walmart I had them to make an announcement over the loud speaker wishing him a Happy 47th Birthday which I think sufficiently embarrassed him:) On Sat. his parents and his sister's family took us out for his birthday to Cracker Barrel which was great too. Sat. night is chicken and rice night which is incredibly good so we both got that. After dinner and looking around their store we all sat out on their front porch with all the rocking chairs and had a very nice hr to 2 hr family moment of remembering old tales of when he and his sister were little and having some nice laughs. He enjoyed this very much since usually 1 or 2 members of the family end up missing birhtday dinners for one reason or another and it's very unusual for everyone to get together. He is still talking about how nice it was to have everyone together. Tonight for dinner I am going to fix the frozen scallops since that is one of his favorite meals. I just hope I don't screw them up because I've never fixed them before? I may try 2 or 3 different methods of cooking them just to have a variety and see how he likes them best? Of course if we end up going to any more restaurants or going shopping in the next few day I have to see if I can embarrass him some more with the PA announcements:) Well that's my little blog for now:)

Friday, October 3, 2008

Thinking About Doing Blogging Experiments?

I've been thinking about doing some blogging experiments lately? Particularly for the purpose of making money. I've been researching how to accomplish this task and I am trying to think of some interesting and creative titles that will have some impact and sustainability? I've always wanted to be a writer of some type but could never really decide how I wanted to accomplish it? I did try my hand at screenwriting at one point when I was much younger but never did anything with it. Maybe this will be the beginning of a career for me but I still have quite a bit of studying to do yet. I guess we will see:)

Monday, September 29, 2008

A Blog About This Past Week

I thought I'd just blog about my week. Well today I watched the Redskins/Cowboy game. YEAH REDSKINS! They won it! It was a close one at the end though. Going back to Monday though,I went to go see my grandmother who will be turning 88 yrs old in Oct. I hadn't seen her in a while which was entirely my fault. I need to take more time to go visit with her. Our visit was very nice though. I gathered some family information from her (this is my mother's mother) and have been working again this week on our family history and have gone back a few generations. Soon I will be getting quite a bit of information from my 3rd cousin in WV who has traced our family for quite a while and has a lot of info and pictures her aunt left her. That will definitely help me with my research although it will only be on my grandmother's mothers side of the family, I still have some to do on her father's side although I have gone back to 1800 already with him but I seem to be stuck because it's been debatable whether he was Irish or not and whether his wife was Scottish? There is also some Native American blood in my family but hopefully my 3rd cousin will have that info? My uncle did research on my dad's side of the family when he was in college and we discovered that we are of Scotch/Irish descent and now it is starting to look like we are of the same descent on my mom's side of the family as well with some Native American blood thrown in too. This past year I have really become very interested in geneology and have been able to find out a lot by just googling names and dates. There is usually always somebody else trying to find the same person you are looking for or someone that they are closely related too.

Something else I've been doing this week is trying to do more cooking at home. I've found a lot of great recipes on youtube and done some variation with some of them. Some of the things I've made have been Shepherd's Pie, French Toast with fried apples, Crab Cakes, and Sticky Rice with Magos and Banana's. Chip really seemed to enjoy them:) Well I guess that's all for now:)

Sunday, September 21, 2008

A Nice Fun Day Yesterday:)

Well it's been a while since I blogged so I thought I'd talk about our day yesterday. Chip has been talking about this Chesapeake Heritage Day for about a month now because it had a civil war demo going on with the firing cannons and such so he was really excited to go. We left here between 11am - Noon. We get to the park and it was a pretty pitiful excuse for a festival. They have a huge park and only about two sections of it were being used with everthing spread out so you had to walk forever to get to a section you wanted to see. They had a food area with only about 4 vendors with only bbq, hot dogs, and hamburgers. An area for the civil war tents and demos which was not much of anything. They used to have a dedicated Civil War Days at the Chesapeake Public Library in the past few yrs but ended up closing that and putting them at the Heritage Festival which really must have limited what they could do there? They had a a tent for very few crafters and a few people demonstrating a few old time trades like blacksmith and weaving baskets. They also had a very small petting zoo and a demo of a sheep dog hearding sheep. For a Heritage Festival there really was not many heritages represented. We only stayed for about 1/2 hr. It really took less time than that to cover it although we did get BBQ w/ chips & drink for $5 as our lunch that took some time. Since we were so close to Greenbrier Mall we stopped there and did a little shopping and then since Chesapeake Square Mall was on the way home we decided to stop there too since we do not get to Chesapeake often. Once we got there we looked around and talked about the John Anderson concert at the Smithfield County Fair. Chip actually met him in Florida when he stayed there and worked for a while so he is a fan and I like his music too so since he was not going to go on til 9pm we decided to go ahead to that as well. We got there around 7pm and ran into Chip's brother in law and 2 kids. We then went to get some supper in the food court tent and I was able to get my favorite festival food "gyros". I ate one there and it was so good I had to get one to take home. I had the guy just put some meat on the bread and give me the sauce on the side. YUM!!! Although they were $8 they were huge and almost too much to eat. By this time my electric wheelchair was running down and on red which means it needs to be charged real soon so I went around and bummed some electricity from a very nice vendor who let me sit by his booth for a while to put more juice in my chair. I really wish we had gone to this fair for the day since it was pretty big and a lot more fun but I didn't really get the chance to enjoy it though since I had to take the time to juice up the chair and then go strait to the concert. John Anderson was great though and I'm really glad we got to go. By the time we got outta there it was around 11pm so we had been gone about 12 hrs and I had been up much earlier than before we left so I was dead tired last night. Overall though it was really a great day even though I had forgotten to put the sd card in the video camera and all the pictures I took with it are not there since there is no memory in the camera:( Well that's my blog for the day. Night:)

Friday, September 12, 2008

Another Day, Another Blog:)

Today 9/11/08 I took Chip to his doctor's appt, then went to dinner at Thai Erawan and then to Books A Million in a little strip mall area. We had a really nice dinner, I love Thai Food! I had this dish with lg. flat noodles, broccoli, chicken, and carrots in a sweet soy sauce with a little heat added to it (I can't remember the name of it though? DELICIOUS! I couldn't eat it all so I brought the rest home and shared it with Chip a little while ago. Chip had a dish called Perfectly Ginger (English translation?) with scallops, carrots, ginger, and rice. I had a small taste of it at the restaurant and it was delicious too. I bought some stuff to try to make my own version of his dish, I just hope I do justice to it when I try it. I also picked up the books I had ordered from Books A Million. A couple copies of the Boxcar kids series book #113 which talks about geocaching (I was surprised how accurate their info was in the book:) Well, I'm off now to get some Breyers Reese's ice cream outta the freezer. YUM!

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Great Couple of Weeks!

These last couple of weeks have been pretty nice. Last week Chip and I did some housesitting for his parents while his parents and his sister's family went to Nags Head. We had the whole house to ourselves which was nice out on the lake. We came home this past Monday and have been spending some lazy days here at home and then today we went to the Geocaching Hampton Roads 6th Annual Picnic. We got there a little late but there was plenty of food left, then we went to do some geocaches in the park. We got 4 in the park and one on the way home. I gave away a few of our signature pins and did some geocoin trading too. We stopped at City Center on the way home because we thought that the Va Symphony was going to be giving a free concert by the big fountain but when we got there the stage was empty so we went to find the cache that was located next to the Omni Hotel there anyway. I went into the Omni to ask if the symphony was playing tonight but they told me they had played last night! BUMMER!!! Oh well, at least we found another cache and it was not a total wasted trip to stop. The funny thing was that when we went to get the cache it was in a far corner of a parking lot and there was a car parked there with a young couple in it. I think they were making out:) We heard a lot of giggling while looking for the cache. I don't think they paid us any mind though. Overall it was a great day with great weather and thank goodness it didn't rain although it was pretty much overcast all day. We also won a door prize of a tb/coin too:) Lots of fun! Here are some pics of the picnic http://s230.photobucket.com/albums/ee41/Nochipra/GCHR%20Picnic%202008/

Sunday, August 10, 2008

A Very Nice Evening:)

Last night 8/9/08 Chip and I decided to go to the City Center and check out one of the movies that the dept of parks and rec. are putting on during the month of Aug. on Sat. nights. It was a great night with temps around the low 80's in the day and prob. in the 70''s or 60's in the evening. We got there early and got a front row spot in front of the large screen they had outside in front of the large beautiful fountain with the surrounding Marriott hotel and upscale shops behind that. After picking our spot I went to the stand while Chip held our spot and I got some free popcorn and a couple of sodas to enjoy while watching the movie under the stars. The movies was started between 8 or 8:30 pm. The movies they play are family movies and there were a lot of people, at least a couple hundred with their families or with their dates, significant others, or possible couples on their first dates. It was very romantic:) For a children's movie Charlottes Web is a very much a movie that can be enjoyed by adults as well. It was a very emtional movie and was moved to tears toward the end. I can remember reading the book when I was young and the movie did a great job of capturing it. Although the movie has been out a while, I had not seen it and it made the occassion very special to see it under the stars holding hands with my sweetheart. Afterwards we went to Sonic and got a late night dinner and ice cream. It was a great night indeed:)

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

A New Day A New Blog

Today we are going out since Chip has a doctor's appt., then we are probably going to the mall. I'm hoping I can talk him into going to get some Thai food tonight? I guess I've finally gotten more into the new age of technology, I usually keep twitter on the whole time the computer is on and creating this blogspot was a bit step for me too. I even signed up on Second Life which is kind of like a sims game online but the reason I found and joined that is because I joined the gimpgirl site where they have weekly support meeting on Second Life. It really is a cool site and I'm sure I will be spending quite bit of time in there too. Well, that's it for now:)

Sunday, August 3, 2008

Just added twitter updates to my blog!

Twitter is Great!

Cool! I just signed up with the Hampton Roads Twitter meetup group. I hope we can attend some of the meetings some time:) I also found a great civil war site for Chip through Twitter too.

Friday, August 1, 2008

Finished watching all of Amtrekkers Youtube videos. Totally Awesome.
Well, I'm slowly getting back to a descent sleeping schedule. I went to bed around 2pm yesterday and got up around 1:30 am this morning. I might actually be able to stay up til dark tonight!

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Been up all night! Again!

I've really got to get back into a good sleeping pattern. This sleeping during the best part of the day and staying up all night is for the birds! Since I stayed up I went to Hardees and got some breakfast. Made out pretty good when I got double the order of strawberry biscuits I ordered because I had to wait so long. I've been playing on Twitter and Facebook again too adding some comments and pics. Well it's getting close to bed time, I'm really sleepy now and it almost noon. I hate when I do this! Good night/day.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Our Time to Time Blogs and Thoughts!

Hi all,

This is our very first blog ever! I've heard of blogging for quite some time now but never got around to doing it yet but now have decided to get into the craze! Be back later!