Just Call Me Miss Smiley

I haven't been writing much lately.  I wouldn't call it writer's block, just not much going on that seemed blog-worthy.  Well, not even that there hasn't been much going on, there's been plenty going on around here.  In the last week, we've had friends over to the house for dinner, had his family over for dinner, had dinner with my family twice, went out to dinner out with my mom, and played a round of mini-golf with his whole family.

We've been really busy this summer and most of it is self-inflicted.  My honey really likes having people over to the house, so we usually have his parents or his best friends over for dinner about once a week.  I really like spending time with my family so we're usually over at my mom's house a couple nights a week.  Throw in a baby shower, a few runs to the dump for his mom, and a Game of Thrones marathon and we had a packed week.

I'm not complaining!  I'm really happy right now.  I have a near-constant smile on my face lately, especially if a certain handsome honey is nearby. 

This is what I look like most of the time now.

Since it's summer vacation, I have a lot of free time on my hands.  Some of that time is spent in domestic pursuits.  I finally had a culinary success!  I made absolutely delicious pork barbecue last week.  It was awesome!  The making of a successful meal was awesome, the pork barbecue was just really, really good.  Plus, there is the never ending laundry pile that grows even as I am running the washing machine.

Some of the time is spent working on personal pursuits.  I am an avid genealogist and I use my summer down time to do research on my family tree.  Gotta love ancestry.com and how easy they make it to do research from your own home.  This summer, I have two objectives for my genealogy project: 1) incorporate the data from the newly released 1940 census into my online family tree and 2) create a family tree for my honey.  My honey told me not long after we started dating that he thought he was Irish because of his red hair, but he wasn't sure because he didn't know that much about his family history.  The perfect challenge for a summer genealogist! 

The online family tree I created looks a bit more professional than this one.

I started out with my honey's name, his parents' names, and where they were all born and started building a family tree from scratch.  One side of his family tree became very easy to research after my honey's mom heard about my project.  My honey texted her a few questions about birthdays for aunts and uncles one night and the next thing I knew she was flooding his phone with names and dates of relatives he'd never met.

"You thought red hair made you Irish?! Hahaha!"

But the coolest part of the honey family history project was being able to solve a family mystery.  My honey's paternal great grandfather was orphaned as a child and no one in the family knew anything about that side of the family.  While looking up his great grandfather in the 1940 census, I was able to find out the names of my honey's long lost and previously unknown great, great grandparents and their parents and so on and so forth.  Mystery solved!  I still haven't found any Irish relatives yet.  The red hair might just be a genetic fluke.









When I'm not trying to be the next Julia Child or researching multiple family trees, I'm having fun flirting with my honey via text while he's at work.  That might have something to do with the perpetual smile thing, don't you think?