Happy New Year

In nearly every way possible, 2017 was an unprecedented year at Chez Ginger. I began last year by  testing the genealogical waters in taking a 4-week online course on Genealogy Basics through Boston University, in part to determine whether or not I had sufficient interest and/or aptitude to pursue genealogy as a 2nd (3rd? 12th?) career because I wanted to be like the hosts on shows like "Who Do You Think You Are" and "Long Lost Family," etc. and help other people to find their history the way I had found mine (or at least half of it) with my birth mother Norma.  I had no idea what the year had in store for me, or what that simple class portended.

Shortly after completing the class all hell seemed to break loose, necessitating the replacement over the next several months of all three of our cars, two heating and A/C systems, one water boiler (subbed out for a more traditional water heater), as well as two trips to Indianapolis for my birth mother's death and subsequent funeral, moving my child across country to Atlanta for grad school, attending my first genealogical institute, and beginning a more intensive course of genealogical study in September, all of which caused me to hemorrhage enough money to purchase a small island somewhere in the South Pacific.  I'm thinking Guam...or maybe someplace nice in the Outer Hebrides for when Guam gets too hot. Either might come in handy given the current political climate of the country.

If all that weren't enough to make one's head explode, a mere one week into my intensive genealogy course ("20 hours a week" my ass), I learned I had a half-sister and the identity of my birth father. Five weeks later, I discovered yet another half-sister...holy mackerel!! Then a week before the end of my course, two more new siblings appeared, neatly bookending my foray into serious genealogy because apparently the genealogy gods value symmetry as much as they do yanking your chain. You can read about 2017's misadventures here, here, and here.  Now it seems my Revelations trilogy needs to become a quadrilogy soon.

If you had told me this time last year that I would finish out 2017 with a new car, a new heating system, and be orphaned all over again, never mind that I would have inherited enough half-siblings to field my own football team, I not only wouldn't have believed you, I probably would have spewed my drink in your face while laughing uproariously because honestly, how does that even happen? But apparently it has, and it now seems my life has become my own personal Jerry Springer show.

Yet in spite of last year's chaos, as I sit here writing in the quiet and the dark, comfortably ensconced in front of a crackling fireplace in the most beautiful custom-styled tuscan villa home I could ever imagine (seriously, the place should be in the pages of House Beautiful or Architectural Digest), I realize that although the revelations of this fall have completely altered my life and my reality, they have also perversely brought me home, and I feel more content and more at peace right now in front of these dancing flames than I have in a very long time. 

So how are you gonna top that, 2018?  Give me your best shot.