Yes, we're still alive

I have no idea what we've been so busy with for the last two months, but apparently it wasn't writing posts for our blog! We are still here, though, for you loyal readers who wonder about such things.

We had one really good storm in early May which prompted us to replenish our emergency supplies and practice for the possibility of losing our house to a tornado. It fizzled out right before it got to our house, but it was good practice.

Red is not good

Waiting out the storm in the basement

Fang spent some time in May ferociously defending our home from vicious mallard attack.

Grrrrr!

Errol spent much of the last two months doing what he does best...

Why isn't anyone rubbing my belly?

We both got on a genealogy kick a while back, and spent much of our time perusing the internet for clues about our family trees. It's been fun to research the history of each of our families. We talked to our parents and grandparents first, to gather up any information they had, and then we started searching the free websites, and after we'd gathered all we could there, we each signed up for two week free trials on ancestry.com to finish up our research. I, Michelle, was much more successful than Jeff was, but I think that's because parts of my family have been in the US much longer than Jeff's have. We typically ran into dead ends once we found the parents of the person who immigrated to the US. We found some surprises that no one in our families knew about, and collected stories of ancestors who were present at major events in US history. I discovered ancestors who helped found New York, who bought land from William Penn, who came over on the Mayflower, who were Huguenots, and even explorers. Last weekend, we went up to see my grandparents to show them what we'd discovered about their family trees. I asked whether they had any old photographs, and they produced several photos of their parents and grandparents. I've borrowed a bunch of those for scanning so I can make a book for my siblings and cousins some day.

A photograph of my great-grandparents, Amaziah and Lillie Mead

We're also starting to plan another trip for the fall. Jeff had a hankering earlier this year to go back to Paris, and also to go see the chateaux of the Loire, so we're going to go over to France again. We've been watching the Band of Brothers mini-series lately, so we decided to make a trip up to Normandy to see the WWII sites up there as well. We're particularly excited about this Paris visit, because we've rented an apartment there for a week, so we'll be able to really shop the street markets, the boulangeries, the fromageries, the patisseries, and the charcuteries for tasty dinner ingredients this time. I've already made myself a personal map showing all the best places to shop in the neighborhood around our apartment.

Tasty shopping

So that's what's been going on around here for the last couple of months. That, and mowing the lawn a lot. It finally got hot here this week, so hopefully we'll be able to go back to mowing once a week instead of twice a week. :)