Things have been happening – even though I haven’t been blogging – a new baby, for instance, in the family (a girl niece for me, after all my nephews!) Happy congrats to my brother-in-law Jason and his wife Jen for his new little baby girl, Elena! So cute! And so glad to have another girl in our male-heavy family tree…
Speaking of family trees, my father, doing genealogy research of his family, found out we are related to a member of the Lost Colony of Roanoke, Virginia, where the legend of Virginia Dare originated (the first English girl born in the colonies, who mysteriously disappeared and was rumoured to have transformed into a white deer – and there are a group of white deer who run the Southeast coast all the way up to New York State – as well as rumoured to have joined the local Croatoan Indians and had children with grey eyes, with people from the Virginia area claiming even now to be descended from her. There’s even a blog, called something like the Lost Colony DNA project.) And we found some of our descendents in the local Croatoan tribe (connected to the Cherokee and maybe the Hatteras? We think?) if the government records are to be believed, who fought in the Revolutionary War on the American side, even though the American government wasn’t all that friendly to them. I’m not usually genealogy girl, but this story was pretty interesting. The internet is full of conspiracy theories about the lost colony, kind of an early 1600’s American X-File. Did they leave? Did they form a new colony with the Croatoans? Were they wiped out by disease, or hostile neighbors? Not only were no bodies found, the houses themselves (everything except the fences) disappeared, with only the word “Croatoa” carved into a fence post. They think this colony was the one referred to in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, by the way.

The tulips are finally blooming, although it’s not warm yet. The little “Eisbar” Flocke has finally gone public (http://www.nuernberg.de/internet/eisbaer/videos.html for video footage.) I’m planning a short trip out to California, trying to update my notes for the high school class at Centrum, and I’m getting ready for my first ever residency at Centrum starting next week (a place of my own for the first time since I was 21! Can I write without cats and husband around? Let’s find out!) My neck went out again (is this one of those writing-related injuries like carpal tunnel?) so I haven’t been at the computer much. Darn occupational hazards!

Quick poem in honor of the Virginia Dare/White Doe legend (there’s also a classic French fairy tale called “The White Doe” about a girl, allergic to the sun, who is turned by an evil fairy curse into a white doe by day…)

The White Doe
Poof!