things to be pleased about, vol. 2: a more succinct post summing up the crap I left out of the last

[dragonlady7]

• got off my butt and made an icon out of 11-greats-grandma's kickass oldskool Puritan-goth headstone (check it out, above! am I grim and seventeenth-century or what? [I'm serious, she was actually a Puritan.])


• got a letter from Katy from Baghdad (on a really cool Catwoman airmail blank) in which she is cheerful, herself, and not being shot at


• the fact that I cleaned the tub the other day means that I can take a nice long hot bath in there now without fear of The Gunge


• when I get out of said bath, Juanita will be waiting for me with her thick-n-thirsty terrycloth self


• the fact that they had the bar overstaffed meant that in the dinner rush I didn't have to run more than twice


• Dave called me to let me know he was leaving school at 9 pm, and to see if I'd made the bus, and just to chat a little because he likes me, isn't that nice?


• Dave's cousin has an easy-money IT do-in-a-weekend kinda jobbie for him to do for money, oh my


• Dave's same cousin may well have some more fairly-easy-money consulting gigs in future for Dave to do, for money, can you imagine? Money! Praise the lord and Dave's cousin


• when I came home, one of my daffodils was blooming in the front yard, and there will soon be three more!


• I get paid tomorrow woohoo!

Comments

[kittyc1978.livejournal.com]

YAY! Daffodils and Paychecks!!! All the other things I also celebrate with you! Now, Sweet Peas, are you talking veggie or flowers? I love both!

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Sweet peas are flowers. The veggies I have to plant as well are regular peas and sugar snap peas. Sugar snap peas are Dave's favorites, but I love taking peas out of the pod, so I got both kinds. I really don't know where the heck to plant them all, though. I'll definitely follow the package hint and save some of the peas to plant in a second planting in two weeks so the harvest will be longer! And next year, I'm going to plant them even earlier! And I'm so totally starting plants indoors next year so I can have flowers and veggies earlier. I'm so impatient. it's only been a day and I keep going to peek at the basket where I planted some of the flowers just to see if they're coming up yet.

[vulgarweed.livejournal.com]

Wow. Really cool tombstone! Where is it? (I got to hang out in the old burial ground in Marblehead, MA, once - now I ded from creepy historic vibe, yay!)

What's really amazing is she made it to 97! Not so common back then. Still not common, for that matter.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Ann Denison was extremely cool.
She married for the first time at thirtysomething, and left her very wealthy family to run off to the wilderness of 1640s New England (which had just had one major Indian war that had annihilated about 30% of its population, and twenty years later had another).
I think she was actually a couple years older than George, her husband. (He led the secession of his little town from Connecticut to Massachusetts over issues of religious freedom, and was the only one not pardoned by the Connecticut government when the king (whose father, by the way, George had helped defeat in the Civil War of the 40's) redrew the map of the Colonies and put his town back in Connecticut.) George died in his late seventies or early eighties, an old man by those standards, while at a session of the colonial government.
Ann outlived most of her children, and a couple of her grandchildren. But, going through the family tables, there are quite a number of women who lived to be in their nineties. Most recently, my great-grandmother Denison died at 92 in about 1988.
Another really neat thing to note in the family tables was how few of the women of my line married young. The youngest one in my grandmother's maternal line was, I think, 19. Most of them were in their mid to late twenties, even at the time of the Revolution or the Civil War. No child brides here! (My grandmother herself was 30. Actually, my paternal grandmother was 30 as well, older than her husband and college-educated, and she had five children and lived to 86 with [almost] all her wits.)

i think Ann is somewhere around Mystic-- the Denison estate is still there, with the great house George's grandson built still intact. I think Stonington is the name of the town with the burial ground. George's stone is definitely in Hartford, where he died; I have a t-shirt from that cemetery, that my mom got when she went to visit him. I think that one's called the Ancient Burial Ground and yes, the t-shirt has a winged death's-head motif. (Unfortunately, in navy on gray-- white on black would be so much way cooler but I think they're trying not to attract the goths and stuff.)

Puritans were both very cool and very creepy, and in fact were nothing like history makes them out to be. I really want to write a novel about Captain George and Lady Ann (as the descendants historical society calls them) but it's proving too hard to get into the vibe. Puritans, honestly, were weird.