I got some more genealogical info from Mom today. Seems like I've got a little more Viking in me than I previously believed.

There's:

me (b. 1964) <-- Frances Johnson (b. 1936) <-- F. Stanley Johnson (b. 1905) <-- Nils Johnson [ne Johanesson](b. 1879?) <-- Ole Johannesson (b. ?) <-- Johannes Jacobson) <-- Jacob Ulrickson (b.?) <--Ulrick Jacobsen (b. 1702, Trondheim, Norway)

So from my mom's side straight through her paternal lineage, I've got another connection to my Viking heritage!


Can't ya just see it in my flowing blond hair and blue eyes?

Just set a new household record for highest single word score in Scrabble--"frothing" across two triple word squares for 176 pts! I made another bingo a few turns later to end up at 524 pts for the game, one point shy of my highest game ever, but I had four bingos in that one.

My friend and physician Angie was in a horrible car "accident"; a big group of people at her family reunion got hit from behind by an SUV as they were taking a walk. Angie is alive, having her second leg surgery today, but two people and two dogs were killed. The SOB is up on second-degree murder charges.

details at: http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2009/07/fatal_hitandrun_at_upper_penin.html

Sorry I'm so awesome. I just can't help it!

It turns out that the big-ass ooky glob of omentum, ovary, fascia and other connective tissues they took out of my wife was comparable in size and shape to a case of Altoids or a deck of cards. Yeah, that's right in the gonads, folks. Imagine something like that being RIGHT THAR! And then imagine it being taken out and your tummy being stitched up.

She's been okayed to play low-key racquetball immediately, full-blown as soon as she feels like it. SCA heavy sparring in two weeks; full-on in four to six weeks. Rapier as soon as she feels okay.

And she's finally been cleared by her physician to assault her husband like a starving coyote.

And I will attempt a feat of daring which should only be attempted by those athletes who've undergone rigorous training and have been equipped by the best safety equipment. I shall attempt to jump all 206 of my wife's bones.

A grade school chorus performing the day after a classmate was shot and killed.



The school motto is "Persist and Prevail."

Dulci's surgery went extremely well. Surgery started at 8:00 yesterday a.m., and we were home by noon. She spent most of the rest of the day snoring like a chainsaw, with brief moments consuming peanut-butter cup ice cream :) She's able to walk around, albeit slowly, and can sit upright long enough for me to beat her at Scrabble.

It turns out the tummy pains she's been suffering since late winter were due to a walnut/golfball-sized goobered-up mess of things which aren't supposed to be tied together. It looks on the pictures like a little reddish almond stuck to a wad of chicken fat and foam rubber, all covered in plastic wrap and double-sided packaging tape. So she lost a bit of her omentum, her right ovary and Fallopian tube. But she gained a one-inch scar on her right hip, a quarter-inch one her left, and a goofy-looking navel. Compared to what it could have been, this was great!

She'll be continuing to take it very easy for the next few days. She'll be parked on the couch for the hockey game tonight, and will be off work until Monday at least. We're about 99% sure she'll be at Squire's Tourney this Saturday, but I'm insisting she leave her armor at home.

Everything went well; just about the best-case scenario.

Dulci's having minor surgery today. Everyone send positive vibes, okay? Luke, Cosmas & Damian, and Gerard Majella especially.

Let ya'll know how it turns out Monday evening.

Coronation was fun. Fun travel companions, drinking pineapple wine with Master P and his Special Guy on Friday night, lots of pomp and pageantry, etc. But I had this odd sense of deja vu in the church. I chalked it up to all of the stained-glass windows and statuary depicting saints and ignored it.

Then I talked with my mom last night and mentioned what a cool site we'd been to. "St. Stanislaus in Cleveland?" she gasped.
"Uh, yeah, Mom..."
"Don't you remember? That's where Father Willy was murdered!"

Wow. Smack. Fr. William "Willy" Gulas, a Franciscan priest, longtime friend of the family, the guy who said my dad's funeral Mass, one of a group of Franciscans who always came by our house on Dec. 26 to pelt me with walnuts (that's the Feast of St. Stephen, who was martyred by stoning, and my first name is Steve; I guess monks like to have their fun in odd ways). He was the son of Polish immigrants, so getting transferred to St. Stanislaus from St. Thomas Aquinas in Saginaw was a sort of dream come true for him. He loved it there and did a lot of good work--besides ministering to the large number of people from "The Old Country", he'd buy up abandoned properties in the neighborhood and turn them into temporary rent-free houses for homeless families.

Then about 6 or 7 years ago he was murdered by a guy who is what mental health professionals call a "whackjob-nutcase", who's now serving a life sentence. Willy had filed a document years before stating that if he ever died as a victim of violent crime, he didn't want his killer face the death penalty.

So no wonder the church looked familiar; I'd seen pictures from all the news coverage at the time, as well as the ones my mom took at Willy's funeral.

Shudder...

In the vein of "Star Trek vs. Star Wars", "Alien vs. Predator" and "Aunt Jemimah vs. Mrs. Butterworth", I've been recently thinking about "Bruce Campbell vs. William Shatner." Turns out I'm not the first person to think of that.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/30/shatnerquake-bizarro.html

Due to some family death related crap, I got to talk to one of my dad's high school/college friends today. Well, like my dad's best friend ever; the guy who named his first son after my dad's first son (me!).

Dulci and I went over to K's house to see some pics of him with my dad and my Uncle Dick back In The Day. WOW!!!

Got to see pics that K had:
My dad at a party with a bucket covering his face (bail behind his head) drinking beer through a snorkel tube, circa 1960. :) He was chatting up some sorority girls, and they all seem to be laughing back. :)
A pic of my dad with slide-rule in hand and physics texts in front of him, writing down results in a lab book. There were at least 8 empty Black Label cans at his feet. :) I love my genes!
My dad lying on his back on a porch, barefoot, stretching a phone receiver through a screen door at a frat house for some privacy to talk to his Special Gal (my Mom)
My Uncle Dick's 1963 Corvette turning in a 9.8 sec quarter mile in 1964. Two weeks later, they went down to Ohio for the Winter Nationals, and their truck broke down. And the car that won the WN was slower than Uncle Dick's 'Vette!
My dad at several frat parties. Wow. I'm slack-jawed. I thought "Animal House" was a comical exaggeration. Now I have seen photographic proof of Emergency Room aftermath due to my own beloved father's encouragement of frat house stupidity.

****

K also gave us a tour of his pretty extensive collection of beer stuff. Whoa. I've got a few hundred beer cans that are mostly significant, and maybe a few special steins and glasses.
K has literally *tens of thousands* of glasses, steins, bottles, signs and paraphenalia. I'm in awe!! There's really a couple of million dollars worth of stuff in K's basement!
Hand-painted cut-glass Weiss-bier steins by the hundreds (we tallied up 300 with 2 shelves left to go!)!

****

Apparently, I'm not the only one in the family who loves beer, girls, toys, and the outdoors. http://memorial.yourtribute.com/RichardWGaumer/video.aspx?mode=view&videoType=videotribute&videoId=23242

Can American automakers be far behind?

NSFW!!

Okay, Dulci and I both won. I took the first game 437-436!!! High-fives all around, lots of loving trashtalk. :)

She insisted on an immediate rematch, and won 404-382. Yet I got a bingo playing "COITION" :D which definitely has to get me points toward our personal Hall of Fame!

Dulci had Friday off from work. She had planned on visiting her dying Uncle CC sometime this week, but her Aunt R told her she better come sooner. So Dulci went with her sister to visit CC, and had a nice visit with him and Aunt R while CC was awake and cogent. They chatted about old times, family pets, holiday parties, and other nice memories. Dulci came home with lots of stories about CC's time in minor-league hockey.
It was pretty busy Saturday, with a big (for us) SCA event. Dulci made a lot of excuses to keep ducking out to make and receive calls about CC, but he seemed to do just fine. I think we pulled off the event pretty well, if a little nerve-wracked. We drove home listening to Spartan basketball and calling in to family.
This afternoon, we got a bad phone call, but not the one we expected. Dulci has worked for years at a wildlife rescue center and has befriended many good and wonderful creatures. One of her dearest non-human friends was Prima, a one-winged Red-tail Hawk of unparalleled character. Poor Prima passed today to a world where she has both wings, and the ground is full of fat, slow mice.
That was sad enough, and grounds for tears.

But Uncle CC passed from this world as well. I know he's finally free from pain, and he's joined Dulci's dad in whatever joyous place indulgent fathers go. I'm sure he's lacing on his ethereal skates and body-checking all of his hockey buddies who have gone before him. But it's still sad for Dulci, losing another of her heroes.

I can haz sparrow-burger, plz? :)

Okay, my NCAA pool is still 98th percentile, but I don't care...

Friday I stayed on the couch with my Special Gal, both screaming at the TV as The Tourney was played. Beer and pretzels for dinner, the remains of which are still on the floor.

Saturday, I went with my Special Gal and two other lovelies to a dealers' gem show. Wow! There are some fabulous stones out there! A tanzanite that would pay off my house, a blue diamond bracelet for $14k that I know I could flip for $18k if I had the money to do it, a loose diamond bigger than my pinkie knuckle. We got a small bag of pearls and some pendants that we'll hopefully sell at a profit. I got a jeweler's hammer and Dulci got a Chinese green turquoise pendant. But I spent the whole day with three lovely women at a gem show!!! That's such a Taurus thing... :)

And then in the evening, I did Guy Stuff and played wargames with pewter miniatures (Full Thrust rules, for those who care) and head-to-head computer games. I dominated WWII U-boat scenario, lost pathetically in a Star Trek scenario, and had a sort of draw in a Civil War scenario (it was a knife-edge, 50-50 scene we'll have to play out sometime...).

Sunday we slept late, ate well, and went to a Red Wings game while listening to the MSU basketball broadcast in the car. Spartans won while we were in the Joe Louis parking garage, playing the radio as loud as our Prius can.

Dulci wowed the crowd around us, go figure, but the Red Wings still lost. Apparently, we got a brief moment on Fox TV, with me in my MSU hockey jersey, and Dulci in her Russian Dynamos Pavel Datsyuk jersey.

Anyway, it was nice coupla days...

One of my four Yahoo! Tourney brackets is now a perfect 16 for 16!!

My first bracket is all Big Ten, Spartans all the way, baby!

My second bracket is an afterthought of the first.

My third bracket is a totally random coin-flip, just to see.

My fourth bracket is my intellectual choices.


The perfect one in the first round? Number two :)

Best movie line heard in a long time, "When I was younger, I was attacked by a phalanx of Portuguese Men-o-war. But you know what? They're not even men. They are cowardly fish, made out of jelly!"