oldies but goodies.

Alice Carr Pitcher (my great-grandmother) and me in the early 1990s

October 19?! How is this month already almost over? Fall has come to Nashville and the leaves are bursting with orange and red and yellow. It's beautiful, but I know this means it will soon be too cold for my liking and I will have to scrape my windows in the morning before I go to work, and it will be dark too early.

I woke up this morning after snoozing my alarm a few times. Our neighbor Kevin's dog (which is half wolf, half dog) was in our backyard barking. There is a big gap in the wire fence, but we don't mind if he runs around in our backyard. And it seemed all the dogs in the neighborhood were barking. I walked into the living room and saw blue lights flashing on the walls. The police were outside and their headlights lit up the house of our neighbor Margaret across the street. I was worried about her, but there wasn't an ambulance. They went in and out of the house and came in SUVs and black T-shirts that said POLICE on the back. They were still there when I left for work; I had a little trouble getting out of the driveway. Not sure what's going on there.

I did a little research online and found out that Margaret is 80. Her husband was an Army veteran, and he died in 1996. She has five kids and lots of grandkids, and I think she is the first and only owner of her house. She is from Nashville. It's amazing what you can find on the Internet! She is really a sweet lady; I should sit down with her and hear her story sometime. Her son lives nearby and is over there most of the time helping her out. She likes to walk her dog up and down the street, and she (I'm not making this up) mows her own yard! It's a little fenced in front yard, but she gets out there with a push mower! She must like to do it because I know Kevin or her son would do it for her.

Yesterday I was moving stuff to the attic and found a photocopy of a photo I used for a project in high school. It's a photo of me and my great-grandma Alice Carr Pitcher. We called her Granny. I was 7 when she died, so I don't remember a whole lot, but I have memories of her house in Garden City. I found the obituary for my great-grandfather, Alice's husband, Allen Guy Pitcher. It appeared in the March 14, 1960 edition of the Garden City Telegram. Again, it's amazing what you can find on the Internet!

I had a two-week free trial of ancestry.com which is probably why I haven't blogged at all. Genealogy is my new hobby and it's really hard not to do it all the time! But my trial ended and it's like $80 for 6 months of access to all the old records and census data. You can find a lot in free records and cemeteries, but those records are really helpful. So I'm trying to take a break so I can get other stuff done I need to do.

Let's see … what else is new? Nate is scheduled to have another endoscopy in December. They put him on high-dose Prilosec, but it's not helping. He still regurgitates after every meal, and now even his pills come up which he says tastes really gross. Poor guy.