Jinxed by Jackie

I got home tonight and after checking in on the one tax deduction that I have left, I made my obligatory stop over to check on Nancy.  She was on the phone face timing Jackie down in St George. Jackie has just had all the carpet in her house replaced because of faulty pipes in her house. I am so envious, I would love new carpet, so Jackie said, "Well you just need a leaky pipe". Well, I came home, talked for about 10 minutes with Scott and walked into my bedroom to hear    drip    drip    drip   I  looked up and there was a bubble in my ceiling.  Sure enough the upstairs sink is leaking........yeah thanks Jackie.

Dunkirk

A few weeks ago we went to see the movie Dunkirk. It was pretty tough to watch for several reasons.

1) I just went with Erik to register for selective service and most of those boys on that beach looked like him

2) Where were the Americans during this horrible time of the war? Oh yeah...we were pretending it wasn't going to affect us and Joe Kennedy was saying Hitler was a good guy

3) I have a ton of English blood in my veins, all those people look like us.

Anyway,  it was a great movie, the whole family enjoyed it.

The Awesome Awful of a Pioneer Heritage

I come from a long line of LDS (Mormon) pioneers, now when I say that, I mean a lot from both sides!! Not only do I have a lot of ancestors that joined the saints in this life, but since I have lots of generations, those that weren't baptized in this life have no doubt been baptized by proxy at least more than once.  So I grew up with lots of family stories about these larger than life people that survived angry mobs, buffalo stampedes, famine, drought, plaque, and grasshoppers. Yes, it's a pretty impressive legacy, after all who wouldn't be impressed by an ancestor that stole the Connecticut charter from King George's governor and hid it in the Charter Oak? Or the ancestor that while settling Manti, lived in a dugout at the bottom of the temple hill - only to awake in the middle of the night to rattlesnakes dropping from the shelf above them? Or even a larger than life Grandpa that helped get Glen Canyon Dam built by testifying to Congress?

It's awesome, and it's awful.

Who can live up to that? What's left for me in my advancing years as I look at my accomplishments? After all what will my descendants say about me? "She did analysis for the EPA's Information Collection Rule" or "She was still getting bucked off horses into her latter years" In the modern era it's pretty difficult to accomplish "great" things...my life is pretty domesticated. Honestly, if the truth is known, I don't know that I have the desire to do great things.  Maybe I'm comfortable in my little corner of the world, with my animals, lab work, and family.

If the whole truth is known, maybe my ancestors would not necessarily want to be viewed as legends either.  They did what they needed to, after all, what choice did they have when faced with their options.  They were just human and they bucked up, went forward, survived and raised their children.  At the end of our lives, I think we just want to know that we made some difference in the lives of the people we love.