It's About Time -- Of Course . . .

What could be more timely . . . the spring ahead time change. It kinda snuck up on us this time. We thought that we had a few more weeks. We have noticed that it is staying light later each day and the mornings are bright and sunny as well. After tomorrow it will be a bit darker when we get up, but we always get used to it after a few days. The evening light will be nice.

It is really about time, in fact it is almost spring, which arrives in less than two weeks. This week, here in Sonoma County it seems like spring. There are trees and flowers in bloom, the birds are active and the sounds of baseball are beginning to be a daily thing out back of our yard.

We actually almost walked over to watch the baseball events, but decided to wait until we see some uniformed players -- that should be coming very soon.

We can't forget that tonight at bedtime we need to change at least some of our clocks forward by one hour. Some of our clocks are controlled by the satellite and/or computer so they don't need to be manually changed. Still others do need to be changed . . .

TV programming lately for us has been sparse except for this week we have watched one of the new season nine episodes of WDYTYA.

Courteney Cox was the first featured celebrity to have genealogical results shared with her and with us the viewers, last Sunday night.

Courteney, it turns out has a long line of British Royalty that she connects with and in very interesting ways.

It would be so nice to be able to show a family tree that identifies real ancestors, Royal or not Royal.
Her family tree is proven back to the tenth or eleventh century, maybe earlier even. I have been able to show the HILES line almost through the seventeenth century.

For Gail's side, on one line we can go back almost as far as Courteney's line. We keep hoping to expand other lines also.

This Sunday night on TLC's WDYTYA, they are featuring Julie Bowen and they promise to have some shocking revelations about her family -- always sounds interesting to me.

Unfortunately, always hanging over my head is the dreaded tax return for the current year.

Just this last week, when I actually decided to mean business and gather all our "stuff" and put this thing to rest, we see that we did not have everything that we needed and had to send for the info.

It is a good and bad thing in that, I can put off  for about another seven days (snail mail) attempting to finish.

The bad thing is that I won't have any excuses when the needed documents do show up . . .

We'll face that when it happens. The simplification of the tax system can't come fast enough -- though as we have said before -- "be careful for what you wish" . . .

But even though I have the "tax stuff" going on, everyday I try to work on some aspect of the family tree.

This helps me be grounded and energized as I lose myself climbing through the branches.

I have found a lot of interesting people and things and facts, just not so much that I feel worthy of reporting about, though it is all put into the tree.

I'm constantly amazed at the branches that I find and the fact that so many different surnames are surprisingly related to us.

In the tree that I have on Ancestry.com there are two people short of 15,000 today. That may even change later today if I need "grounding" . . .

We still read throughout the day and every night before drifting off to dreamland. Some books on the nightstand cause us to drift off earlier than others:

Last night we just finished "The Year of Living Danishly" and we are both happy about that. While the book was very interesting and humorous, we think we could have done with about six months or so.

We did learn a lot about Danish life and it is safe to say that we don't feel that we could stand some of the lifestyle -- e.g. the winter months, when cold and darkness prevail and folks remain inside their homes for huge periods of time.

Tonight, we will start reading "The Stranger in my Genes" by Bill Griffeth. It is about the results of DNA revealing just who is in their family tree -- so we look forward to finding that out.

Prior to "Danishly" we read "The Dash", "The Cozy Life" and "Silent Legacy", all fascinating in their own ways. We are doing are best to keep those "Amazon" delivery services -- soon to be drones, maybe -- active.

One thing we can say for sure from our perspective:

We think that it is "normal" to find the many circumstances and the varied types of folks in a family tree, making it then, normal . . . that makes sense, right?

That is a bit of our week. See you all "in a few"!