I had a fairly crazy week - day camp for Eleanor, swim lessons for Juliet (thus lots of driving for me). Plus catching up on laundry & cleaning from last week when our AC was out for 3 days, and we thus avoided our house at all costs. (Call me a wuss, but when it's 88 inside, I'm going elsewhere!)
Anyway, at the beginning of the week, I was like, "Oh Eleanor has 15 hours of day camp this week! I'll have so much time! I'll totally undertake this living room project. It'll be a cinch." HA.
I spent almost 6 hours applying that tree to my living room wall. It looks amazingly awesome. You can't tell it's a decal, even if you're sitting right under it, it looks painted on the wall. It was pricey, and the intricacy of the leaves made it tricky to apply, but I'm super-duper happy with how it looks. And I got to listen to a LOT of Fool's Fate on audio while applying it, since Eleanor wasn't home, and Juliet can't complain about my audiobooks yet.
I'm planning to put up family pictures, like in the pic above (which is an affiliate link), to make it into a family tree. So then of course that entailed me digging into my family tree research, which I haven't really done since Juliet was born. I tend to get obsessive about genealogical research (I told Noel it's the closest I'll ever come to being a detective IRL!), so I haven't let myself pay for an Ancestry subscription since she was born.
I was thrilled to discover the Library of Congress: Chronicling America website this week, where I got to read tons of stories about my ancestors. I found my great-great-great-great grandma's obituary, and I read about visits to relatives, and honor rolls, and weddings and funerals, and learned how much my great-great-great-great uncle got paid per week for helping to build a new state highway through Michigan in 1892. SO FUN.
And then on Friday my mom and sisters and I went on an outing, for the first time ever. No brothers, no dad, no kids or in-laws. Noel thought that was crazy, but I'm six years older than one sister, and eight older than the other, and I lived several hours away when I was in college. Then recently they both spent several years living on the East Coast, so there just hasn't been a ton of overlap time. Anyway, we had a lot of fun. And decided we should get together more than once every 24 years, haha.
I got to listen to more Fool's Fate while driving to pick them up though, so between that and the tree application, I got through almost 12 hours of my 32 hour audiobook last week! (I am listening on 1.25 speed. The narrator - James Langton - does a superb job with all the voices and accents, but he speaks very slowly, and I get annoyed if I try to listen at 1.0 speed.)
Do you like genealogy?
What speed do YOU listen to audiobooks?
