Today's Activities Include: other sick kid

As expected, A. is home sick today. My walking partner came over for a visit, at which point I realized what a disaster the counter and table are and spent the next 30 minutes trying to beat the mess back to the center of the surface. I was partially successful. I also excavated Valentine's candy and pencils out of the kids bags of crap from Valentine's.

Last night I went to the Horseshoe with T., in Hudson. I got the filet mignon, which is a really thick cut there. I ordered medium rare, and almost changed it to medium because, sure enough, it came out bloody in the middle. I didn't even have to say anything. The server took one look at the middle when I cut into it and grabbed the plate. It came back medium, which is fine by me. Teach me to order medium rare. The manhattan default there is maker's mark.

Fantastic article about one of the sweetest kink couples

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/arts/music/a-composer-and-his-wife-creativity-through-kink.html

H.P. knows Mollena, and I get updates from her periodically and saw some of the wedding photos that circulated, and before that, some photos of them as a couple. They are, easily, two of the most adorable people in kink.

I particularly love this paragraph:

"Mr. Haas contrasted the effect on his style to the struggles of Schubert and Tchaikovsky with homosexuality. “What you perceive is not the fact that they desired men,” he said, “but the sadness about the impossibility to make love a reality. And I think that has been part of my music. The fundamental pessimism. You never will get what you want because it’s not possible to get it. That is how my life has changed so intensely.”"

Mollena has been teaching this, and living this, for a long while. I love that she has now attained an even better platform to communicate how important it is for people to be able to love who they love, in the way that they give and receive love.

I am amazed that I woke up today to an NYT article about this couple. It is reassuring that, however one might feel about the attitudes of some groups within our society, as a whole, the arc of history is headed in the right direction.

Finding a marriage record

One of my husband's relatives is slowly working through an application process that involves some minor genealogical research. The task that she was stuck on involved my husband's great-grandparents: we knew where they were living when they got married, and we knew when their first child was born (and where that child was baptized), which gave us a rough bracket. But unfortunately, since this all happened in NJ, there was some uncertainty about precisely where to get the record.

But this is not my first genealogy research. I found the probable registrar, called, learned she was out to lunch (literally), and called back a few minutes after her expected return. She was very helpful, and put me on hold while she got out the book. The book starts in 1914, which was partway into our bracket, but it turns out the marriage was in 1915, so yay! I called the relative who was doing the research and we had a nice chat, during which she said she'd called the surviving daughter of this marriage, the son of another product of this marriage, etc. and no one seemed to have any idea of the marriage date. I thought nothing of it, because I'm basically not a very suspicious person.

I sent a summary email out to interested parties with the address for the registrar, and the state vital records people in case a Super Special (Apostille) copy might be required, and then hopped onto the laptop (with interruptions, because both kids are home today, A. because she is sick, T. because he had a half day) to enter the marriage. Then I looked at the timeline and went: Oh.

_That's_ why no one was talking about precisely when that marriage happened. A month and a day before the birth of the first child.

Hmmmm. R. and I are discussing whether or not it might be possible to get that branch of the family to agree to doing the ancestry genetics dance, to figure out whether their relatedness to ours is as expected, or less.