well, until if and when I can post pictures to this blog, i will just have to do it the old fashioned way... typing entirely in lower case, which in theory at least, should speed up my typing speed and cause less havoc in getting into the !@#$$%%^&**(())_ keys while holding down the shift key.
the story behind melissa and my journey to maine is a simple as melissa likes to put it to strangers- that we just flipped a coin or threw a dart at a map and this was where we ended up, and also a bit more complicated. maine was never quite a conscious decision, but something that i had thought about for a few years without myself ever having known that i was thinking about it. my family, as near as i can figure, is partly of french canadian extraction and heritage. not that that ever seemed to be worth too much to 'family.' we never ate poutine or celebrated canadian thanksgiving, but it was always in the back of my head somehow as to where my family got off the boat and started in america. my dad used to tell me that his dad, my grandfather used to like to tell him that his grandparents, that is my dad's great grandparents were not even able to speak english when they got here, apparently meaning french. my dad sort of scoffed at the idea and told me that his dad used to tell him this whenever he had been drinking. well, my grandfather was a hard drinker from what i know and it didn't help the fact that later on, he had a stroke and had to give up his vices of drinking and smoking. but the logic was that since my family came from the watertown, ny area, which is no more than an hour from the quebec/us border, that we were french canadian... or maybe irish my dad wanted to claim, after all our surname is burke. an argument that my granddad countered with his belief that the family changed the name from 'burgette' or some such francophone-ish name to blend in. blending in with an irish name in the late 19th or early 20th century hardly seems like an obvious choice though. our family relations in the black river area were gills, another claim of the irish heritage that i still use today, but keeping in mind that many irish lived in quebec. for now, the waters are so murky that it is truly impossible to see too far back in time, but we are who we think we are and if we believe ourselves to be irish/french-canadian, who is to take that away from us?