Happy Thanksgiving, Don't Forget the Headshot!

So, it's Thanksgiving, and what's going through my head?

Well, it goes something like this:  If the zombie apocalypse goes down in a Walking Dead fashion, then we'll no longer play Taps at funerals.  Instead, we'll play DOUBLE TAPS!

Get it?  Instead of firing rifles into the air as a salute, we'll fire into the dearly departed's head.

Ew.  Happy Thanksgiving.

Hey, I didn't get to sleep until after 4 am last night.  Because of my rededication to genealogy/family history.  We were hugely into it back in the late 1990s, and we've really thrown ourselves back into it.  I think photographing cemeteries did it, really.  Made us want to take another look at our own dead folks.

And boy, has genealogy changed in the past 15 years!

I confess, I am a little bothered handing our family information over to the LDS Church, considering the craziness they get up to with this stuff, but then I remember my husband and my sister were both baptized into that church decades ago.  Any "baptizing for the dead" insanity they were going to indulge in?  They already have.  And they ARE an amazing source of information, and they're generous with it, too.  So score one for the Mormons.

Now, if we could just get people to stop listing dubious connections borne of wishful thinking when it comes to recording familial connections!  I swear, I scream every time I come across yet another child born three years before his parents or another woman bearing children in her 70s because, hey, close enough!

Here, here's someone we can't ID.  Gentleman was probably from the Philly area, appears to be a WWII shot?  I say Philly because this picture was in with my family's stuff, and my family is mostly from the Philly/Camden area.

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Homemade pumpkin pie this year--made from a real, live pumpkin, even!  It wasn't hard, prepping the pumpkin, and I think it's going to be the very best ever.  Hubby made one of his amazing homemade cheesecakes, too.  Here's a pic of last year's:

I expect this year's to be at least as good!

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Back to the genealogy?  I've discovered a treasure trove of truly bad names in my husband's family.  Here are a few:

Voyle
LeRay
DeLone
Arba
Pyrcle

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Not a lot else to say--busy day!  I hope everyone out there has a marvelous and wonderful and peaceful Thanksgiving!

The REAL Zombie Apocalypse

So, hubby and I were driving the other night when the subject turned to methamphetamine.  It's a personal subject with us--see, his younger sister is a "tweaker," has been screwing up her family and devastating her young children for years now.  Her (sometimes) husband (the kids' father) is also a meth addict.  At one point, they ditched their two younger boys with us for an afternoon of babysitting that panned into six months, with us having the boys Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, and hubby's older sister caring for them through the school week.  SIX MONTHS, and at no point did this creature so much as THANK us, let alone apologize for being such an irresponsible bucket of puke.  While her hapless junkie husband consented to relinquishing custody, the sister refused--see, she was selling her foodstamps for drug money, and no way she was giving up those kids. 

Oh, plus, of course, according to HER, she didn't have a problem.  It was everyone else.  Landlords who want to be paid?  Mean, unfair.  Family members who expect her to be responsible, to care for her kids?  Hateful meanies who are trying to make her look bad.  Friends who tell her to get it together and stop neglecting her kids?  Jealous, spiteful, out to get her.  And bosses who expect her to actually show up for work?  Assholes who have it out for her.

After six months of having nothing to do with her kids, she showed up, demanding them back.  Social Services was no help--see, they could only step in if she HAD the kids.  So long as the kids were with US and hubby's GOOD sister, they weren't in danger.  No danger, no intervention from Social Services.  Long story short, she got her kids back.

Immediately, she moved to the most devastatingly awful part of town.  Shared her living quarters with a number of men, with one in particular inspiring terror in her kids.  Was he abusing them?  Almost certainly, but the boys would clam up when questioned.  Understand the boys weren't the only victims here--she has a daughter, too.  A daughter who stayed with her aunt, who refused to move back in with the tweaker. 

Did Social Services finally (with a lot of prodding) step in?  Indeed, and what a mess.  The rental property (which was hammered, like every property she's ground through in the past five years or so) was so littered with drugs, so contaminated by meth use and production, that they had to throw away all the boys' toys and clothes.  The boys themselves tested positive for meth because the air was so thick with it.  A few months later?  Her husband was busted for trying to sell meth to a cop at a local hardware store.  A few months after that?  She was busted, yet again, and opted to go into rehab. 

As a result, she's had increasingly frequent visits with the kids, and I think it's a terrible idea.  These kids are so messed up already, they have totally adopted her "everything is everyone else's fault" viewpoint, to the point that they blame US (the good sister and my husband and me) for their mother's inability to take care of them.  They will hear no ill of her, they insist that she bought them all the toys and clothes they have.  It's wrenching to hear, especially from the oldest, the girl, who is torn right down the middle because, on the one hand, she knows all about her mother, even knows that her mother has traded sex for drugs.  She was witness to much of it.  But on the other hand?  On the other hand, she wants her mommy to love her, she wants the family she is never going to have.  So, while she does appreciate what her aunt has done for her, she still crawls to her mom and begs for affection.  It's devastating to watch.

The kids are still with the aunt, and they're doing okay.  The boys still have wowser speech problems--at eight and six, they're still very difficult to understand.  That had improved markedly during the six months they were with us, but the time back with their mother completely undid any progress.  The boys are also quite stunted in their growth--they're tiny for their age.  At our Christmas party year before last, the younger boy, who was five at the time, was smaller than our friend's three year old girl.  Even with these problems, they're doing okay--except that their mother will almost certainly soon be asking for them back.  And Social Services has a bad habit of handing kids back because, gosh, we need to preserve the family at all costs.  This isn't the first time their mother has "gotten clean."  It is almost definitely not going to be the last time, either.  You see, her idea of "clean" involves a lot of prescribed meds for everything from PTSD to ADHD.  Last time she ditched meth, she spent years eating prozac, xanax, zoloft, and lortabs (for chronic whatever).  So my hopes for her long-term recovery are pretty low. 

Anyway, back to the meth discussion on the drive.  I was talking about how much more dangerous I think meth is than other drugs like heroin or cocaine, because meth is so cheap.  It is so accessible.  Any idiot with 20 bucks can walk into Walmart and assemble the ingredients.  Heck, a recent news story detailed a guy walking through Walmart MAKING meth as he walked using the "shake and bake" method. Plus, the havoc this crap wreaks on dopamine receptors in the brain is permanent--you don't quit meth and things go back to normal.  No, you've fried things out forever.  This stuff makes cocaine look like candy, and it makes going clean and staying that way a Herculean effort.  The affordability, the ease of production?  Make the problem of meth a huge one that grows by leaps and bounds every day.  My husband shook his head and said, "Tweakers--maybe THAT'S the zombie apocalypse, huh?"

Maybe it is.

Oh, and real quick, I want to say that hubby's sister and her foodstamp selling?  Not a reflection on the vast majority of foodstamp recipients, and not a judgment call on folks who receive foodstamps.  If a family is struggling to put food on the table, I am all for giving them a hand.  People in America shouldn't be hungry.  Period.  And so you know, she was busted at it, and she was punished.