What's the word...

I thought yesterday's early morning wakeup call from the timing device was bad enough. This morning though it went off at 0445, and I had set it that way too. Am I a devil for punishment?

Nope not me. So why the early start? I’ll tell you, cos The Man had acquiesced to working. Not only that he’s going to do it again tomorrow. What’s the word? Well it isn’t the bird I can tell you. A kiwi-ism there, ‘Bluebird’s the word’. Have a look at this clip and you might understand.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeJ9OOVnW7Q

The Man has an ulterior motive for working. we are saving hard to buy a camper and him doing a bit extra will mean a good contribution to our camper fund. I’m not generally fan of him doing extra hours but as this is a four day weekend it won’t be so bad.

So what am I going to do with the day today? I have a plan. Those of you who know me also know that I am into my family history. So I thought it would be a great opportunity to head into town a bit later and go to the big library. The Man had already checked that they have a full subscription to Ancestry. Great I thought. I’ll spend a couple of hours at the computer and then meet the man for lunch. What I hadn’t checked was if they would be open.. And they were not. Well I can tell you Bluebird was defiantly not the word that sprang to mind. It hadn’t been a simple run to get there either as the train line I wanted to travel on had major delays due to signal failure. Oh well not a lot I could do about it. So after a coffee with The Man I came home.

It did give me the opportunity to get the washing done and to have a good tidy up. It is amazing how much washing we two create and how untidy our little flat gets with just the two of us. A quick walk  around the corner to the supermarket to get some nice fresh hot cross buns as well as a few other supplies and we are set for a nice tea when he gets home, which will be later than usual because his finishing time is 1830.

I’ve just out of curiosity done a word count, and since I began to blog on January first I have written more than 37,000 words. Wow.

Thinking about the topic of family history and also a comment one of my daughters made about how she is learning such a lot about me from my writing made me think. If I had written just a small amount about the family story I would be very well and truly along the way to completing it. So I think each time I blog about what The Man and I are doing I will try to write a memory or two down as well. So here goes.

I do remember some of the stories that Mum told about her own childhood, but it was not until many years after she had died that I became interested in my own family history. It all began with a sociology assignment in my first year of Nursing. And like many family historians oh how I wish she or Dad was still here to tell me more. He has been gone for more than ten years, so I knew him as an adult, and I had begun to talk to him about family history, not so Mum.

 And the older I get the more I wonder at the sort of person she was. I miss her more now, that I am in my 60’s than I ever did when I was 20. Is it perhaps that I realise the potential for the relationship, as the relationships with my own children and grandchildren continues to develop and change?  I was fifteen when she died. From what I remember about that age I was a normal obnoxious teenager; more interested in, and influenced by my peers, than my parents.   I want to tell her story, and Dad’s. I want my grandies to know a little about these two special people, not just the bare facts of when and where they were born and died.