Why do I include Family Tree stuff on this Blog?

I was asked an interesting question last night.

Why do I include family tree stuff on a blog about living with fibro?

Interesting.

Mainly, because I'm a genealogist and I spend many hours 'looking for dead people' as I call the hobby.

Come Spring, a lot of my postings will turn to baseball (and will contain references to such right through to October).

Be warned.

Since this blog is chronicling the day-to-day challenges of living with fibro (when it isn't just fibro) and part of living is doing what you love to do, I incorporate some of my more intriguing genealogical finds here.

And, several of my family members have been flocking to the site of late, seemingly quite enjoying the strolls down memory lane.

As it turns out, the diversion has also served another purpose for me.

One I hadn't thought of until this morning, in fact.

When I get immersed in a project, such as developing the page I put up here yesterday in honour of my father's birthday, I get really, really distracted.

And while my hips still hurt, I'm not thinking about how badly they hurt.

I'm ignoring the pain because I'm getting a high from the finds and from the satisfaction of seeing the page evolve.

You see, the seed for the page came from the newspaper announcement of my grandparents' holding a birthday party for my father's first birthday.  Finding that clipping a few weeks before the anniversary of what would have been his 84th birthday simply provided fodder for a page on my blog.

And it grew from there.

Because, as any writer can tell you, a story just kind of grows.

I really never know until I start a posting here what I'm going to talk about (except in cases like yesterday when I plan a specific topic for a specific date).

And once I start, I certainly never know where it's going.

Kind of like today.

I had no idea what to post today.

Hence, I'm babbling.

I was going to talk about how my pain level has not been increasing any more as I'm further decreasing my Cesamet dosage (I'm down to 2 mg per day -- 1mg in the morning; 1mg at bedtime). 

We figure the dosage is so low now, my body doesn't realize it's getting any pain meds so when I further reduce again (on Saturday, by another .5mg), I guess my pain won't increase beyond the 'excruciating' level that it's at now.

I'm using the pain management tools I have at my disposal, (icing; massage tub; acupen; traction) but unfortunately this is a rare week where I don't have physio.  Just happens to be the same week I find out that the leads for my TENs machine are broken; new ones have been ordered and should arrive at least by the end of the week (I hope).

Anyway, in the meantime, I'm still enjoying poking around finding new snippets for my family tree research and I'm working on a few 'special' pages to put up here at appropriate times.

On Monday, I received a fabulous envelope from a new-found cousin in England, sending me more info on his line and he included photos of my maternal grandmother's cousins, about whom I knew nothing until a few years ago.  I love this digging around and finding descendants of people who long ago went missing!

And the letter he sent made reference to his having a photo of six gentlemen, two of whom are his mother's grandfather and father.

That means that he has a photo of my grandmother's paternal grandfather and uncle!

He has promised to put it in the mail to me immediately (he thought he had sent it to me already!)

That is one photo I can't wait to receive.  I just wish he had a photo of my grandmother's father!

So now, I'm going to get back to poking around, to see what else I can find because one of these days, I'm gonna put in all in a book (hmmmmm, where have I heard that before?)