I've moved.

This blogger is now posting as Kristin Sue Rose. Check out her musings and homework-related posts over there.

Legacies

My great-grandmother lived in Kentucky in the late 1800s. She and her husband left, ostensibly to find a better life, winding their way through Illinois, until they settled on a farm in North Dakota. I don't know what life had been like where she came from, but my grandmother told me about how her mom had been embarrassed to tell people where she'd come from, lest they think she still lived like those people. It makes you wonder what life was like for those people.

My grandmother lived on a farm, which I know was a hard life, but it got harder when she left for town, where she worked full time in a university kitchen and lived behind her brother's place in a tiny home, without so much as hot running water until the mid 1960s.

These women in my family tree sewed clothes by hand; washed clothes by hand; cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner from scratch; used an outhouse in the dead of North Dakota winter; and raised their babies while their husbands did, or didn't, bring home the bacon.

A half century later, I live in a home that is small, by modern American standards, but it's bigger than my grandmother's cottage. I shower in hot water as often as I want to. Machines wash my dishes and my clothes for me. My husband brings in firewood for the novelty of it, and I'm proud of myself when I cook something from scratch. My kids have so many toys that we store three-quarters of them in the garage. I have so much more than I need, and I have to admonish myself for sometimes wanting more.

I'm not writing this for any other purpose than to remind myself that the women of my family worked so much harder for so much less, and they were happy. So I should remember to look around, recognize the advantages I've had, and be happy about it.

I am rich.
I am fortunate.

Thanks, Grandmas.

That sexy American accent...

What I don't get is that, to Americans, a lot of accents sound appealing. Chicks dig dudes with British accents, Spanish accents, French accents, Australian accents, German accents, Nigerian accents... We're pretty equal-opportunity around here so long as it involves an accent from somewhere else.

You never hear someone saying, "Your gringo accent is HOT. I love the way you hicks mispronounce Spanish/French/German/Nigerian words." The only people in the world who seem amused by the American accent is the British, and I think they just enjoy making fun of how frequently we say "like" and "dude" and how we charmingly misspell words by writing things like "realz." Actually, it's my friend from Spain who does that. See? We're so ghetto here we can corrupt even the emigrants from civilized first-world countries. If the queen of England moved here she's drop the royal "we" in favor of the redneck "ya'll" in just a matter of months.

I feel a little better after venting. 

I feel like a member of a lowbrow third-rate civilization with only military might to proof our worth, but better nonetheless.