This & That

The orange-painted idiot made me upset again with his "shit hole countries" comment, so I've stayed away from the blog.  Then the accidental Ballistic Missiles Incoming message in Hawaii on Saturday was frightening, with the White House comment that it was a normal drill for the state, a hateful follow-up.  -  I must say that I am looking forward to Steve Bannon giving testimony to the Intelligence committee, and to Mueller...
 
     My cats are fine and dandy, and I'm currently watching over (taking care of) Pip and Squeak.  They get two meals each day that are served in two separate servings - both girls had intestinal blockages requiring surgery when they were less than a year old.  So they get a mixture of canned food, cooked squash, and water for the first course of each meal, followed by a heaping tablespoon of dry food.  They also get L-Lysine every other day mixed into the wet morning meal.  They are both very loving kitties, and greet me at the door, pawing at the glass each time I arrive.  They make me feel good.

    In genealogy, I've been cleaning up  and placing "standardized" dates and places into the family tree on the Family Search website....  I've spent two days working on straightening out one set of cousins.   In Virginia, between 1860 and 1920, births were reported to the city, county, state, and voting district the parents lived in.  A lot of the children, while having a birth date recorded, were also marked "sex unknown;"  someone has gone through those birth registrations and entered both a boy and girl baby to the family, without checking to see whose birth date matches the registration.  It's a bit frustrating, but I also feel good about getting the records set straight.  (As in, no, this couple did not have 23 kids, they had 12 - eleven of the entries were over-zealous double and triple entries...)
   I'm working on my family tree at the moment, because I know and recognize the names easily.  When I'm working on Beatrice's tree, I get frustrated because of several factors - the spelling of  French Creole names is very arbitrary, and I needed a respite from trying to imagine any and every way a name could be spelled.  I looked a long time for the parents of a lady named Lorinda Cadie (according to her husband's death certificate); I found that her father's first name was Toussan, or a variant thereof.  I finally found her parents, whose last name was spelled Cadet, by looking up the first name Toussaint, with a guesstimated birth date, in and around the Parish where the girl was born. 
   It's always a learning experience when doing the family tree - I've discovered several more Beebe family and Quillen family connections in my clean-up efforts - and also found that we are related to the Captain Timothy Hill family, which I didn't know before....