No One is Safe From Crazies!

Eldest son called tonight to tell us the school where he teaches is trending on CNN.
The reason?
Authorities thwarted a student's mass murder plot planned to be carried out at the school.

Go HERE to read about it.

YIKES!

Sluggy

And the Winner is......

This box of goodies from this Boring Blog Box Giveaway will be winging it's way toward the winner, who turns out to be..........

Annamarie Voss!

 

Annamarie VossOctober 11, 2015 at 2:51 AM

What a great selection of items, some I have tried but some I have not and I always love to give new items a try. avosslm at gmail dot com

 

Congratulations Annamarie!!

 

Now just send me an email from the email address you supplied with your full name and mailing address and I'll get this prize out in the mail this week to you.

 

Thank you to everyone who played along and we'll have another Giveaway up on deck soon.

 

Sluggy

Don't Forget to Enter!......Ends Saturday Night

Just a reminder to enter my Giveaway before it ends Saturday night at 11:59pm, October 24th.

The link is HERE.

I will be off digging out, the rest of this weekend, after returning home from our trip.

Too much unpacking, laundry to do, bills to pay, grocery shopping and food to prepare over the next few days.
I'll be back on Monday for sure but maybe by Sunday, at least to announce the Boring Blog Box Giveaway Winner!

I hope your weekend turns out the way you wish

Sluggy

Death Certificates for Geneological Purposes

Since the state of Virginia has finally released many death certificates online earlier this year I have been combing through scads of records on Ancestry trying to get all my ancestors' death information safely filed away.

While it may seem at first glance a pretty morbid hobby, this filing away causes of death for people long gone from this world, it has pointed out to me in a real way how very hard life was in the past compared to today.

With the number of ways to be "offed" so numerous and close at hand, say, 100 years ago, keeping a family intact was against the odds.  While divorce was not very common back then, or at least not talked about or admitted to in polite company, death stalked your and my ancestors closely and made widows and orphans of many of your now long dead family members.

Medical care was rudimentary if available at all, so that many illnesses and diseases that are easily survived today took people down at any age.
Especially cruel was dying in childbirth suddenly, at an age when most women are in their prime physically.

And domestic abuse took many men and women as well, because of the social taboo against divorcing a rotten or down right murderous spouse.
Women didn't work as a general rule but kept the home and raised the children so when a mother died, often the children were farmed off to extended family or if none were able to take them in, these young ones landed in orphanages.
Often a widower would remarry as soon as possible to provide a new mother to take care of his children.

If the man of the house died his widow and kids were left destitute with no source of income. If the widow was employable she went to work(and made barely enough to survive let alone raise her children)and the children were left with relatives or on the door step of a charity house/orphanage.
If a widow was lucky enough to find a new husband quickly many times he didn't want to take on providing for her dead husband's children and they were still farmed out to relatives or an orphanage.  It is cruel but true that often widows had to make a choice between her children and her new husband and due to having to survive themselves, the widows had to choose the new husbands over their own children.
Heck I know someone younger than myself who found out as an adult after her mother died that she had a half-sibling she never knew about.  Her mother had been married before marrying her own father and he refused to raise that child so the mother had nothing to do with her first child and never told her subsequent children she had with this second husband about her previous life and family.
Ah, family secrets.......

And with the death certificates available for viewing I have found my first murder/suicide.
Not on my direct line but in a family related by marriage.
So sad and knowing the details now it fully fleshes out some of these folks as real people which makes these deaths even more tragic.

Sometimes this genealogy stuff cuts right to your heart.

Sluggy



 

2015 Road Trip Day 5-6 AR to LA & Beyond.....

If you want to catch up on the earlier reports on this trip
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4


On Day 5 we left Little Rock and headed West across Arkansas, before dropping South into The NW corner of Louisiana.

We passed lot of a billboards for this place, supposedly a massive country buffet type restaurant.
We passed it well before lunch time came so didn't get to experience it.

But we did have a plan to stop at this place for lunch in Arkadelphia............

Hubs got a fried catfish sammich with slaw..........

I got a pork tenderloin sammich with a salad.  Sammiches are made with white bread, pickles and packets of mayo and mustard on the side.

It was hot and fresh.
They also had an extensive list of fried pies so I had to!

Mmmm, as the bag says, "peach".
The look on my face should say it all......

Lot of country and tacky tchotchke décor but the food was good and the prices reasonable.

Nobody leaves hungry at Fat Boys.

We were back in the car and heading further west into Texarkana.
There are two Texarkanas actually.
One half of the town is in Arkansas, the other half in Texas.

 

The town is bisected by State St. and the Courthouse, Federal Building, Post Office building was constructed in the center of the road so that if you stand on the South side of the building you can stand in two states at one time by straddling the state line.
There is a sign there for photo-ops.

 

Hubs takes his turn in front of the sign.

Across the street from the Federal building is a bar decorated with Texas football symbols/sayings on one side and Arkansas football stuff on the other side.

A bit more driving west and we swung South and down into Louisiana.......

Got to Shreveport, checked into our hotel, rested a bit and then headed back out to our Daughter's house.

We took her out to a local Italian restaurant her boyfriend's mother recommended.
I had already blown my diet with a fried pie so how much more worse could it be to have a cannoli too? lolz

The Daughter having a coffee after dinner.

The Daughter and Hubs.

The next day, on Friday, we had a mission.
The previous week this had happened to Daughter's car........

*Notice the SEE ROCK CITY license plate*

Daughter worked for a business that was open 24/7 so often had to drive there or back in the wee hours of the night/morning.  They had been experiencing bad weather all Spring in Louisiana.....driving rains, winds, storms.
Daughter was on her way to work in the wee hours, down a country road with no lighting right at the tail end of a horrendous storm.  She came over a rise and bend in the road and a tree limb was across the road.  She slammed on her brakes which snapped a brake cable and she went sliding into the tree limb and obviously from the photo you can see the tree limb won.

Daughter came out of this much better than the car thankfully.
But now she needed a new car to get to work and back.
So our first full day in LA was spent accompanying her car shopping.
Fun, fun.....

We went to see the Giant Rat(or is it a Hamster?)first......

She loved this little new car but everyone deemed it too small, especially if she had anymore fights with tree limbs......

We ended up at a Toyota dealership down the road next and we found this used(a lease turn-in) Honda........

She drove it around, we discussed, we huddled with the salesman and went over the numbers and Daughter bought the car.  She picked it up the next morning............

A sturdy, safer car with low miles that she can afford.
The rest of the day was all about eating and shopping.
First off Daughter took us to the Twister Root Burger Co.

It's a fun place where they serve burgers.  You can get your typical beef burger or a more exotic meat burger.  Daughter and I chose a half duck/half elk burger.

They have a self-serve pickle bar with varieties of pickles you can scarf down.

When you pay you get a ticket and they call your ticket when your burgers are ready.
Of course, here is the ticket we got......

"Coming Mother....."

The beverages were self-serve.
The label on the tea container of the right should read "Sweet Tea".

The wall/ceiling behind the bar in there was covered in guitars....

But the BEST part was the chalkboard walls in the ladies' room.
Someone had written a bunch of Chuck Norris-isms......

 

We hung out at the hotel in the afternoon and went swimming in the pool there, did some imbibing and chatting too and then went out for dinner at a place nearby......

 

Sam's is a local eatery using local seasonal ingredients and homemade sides. Daughter & I split my order of shrimp and her order of fried catfish....the fry the whole fish.

 Shrimp as big as your hand, Jumbo Shrimp-the oxymoronic phrase. lolz

A little more yakking and Daughter left for home and we turned in for the night.
Thus ended Day 6 of the 2015 Louisiana Road Trip.

Sluggy