Happy Valentines Day/Family Day

Happy Valentine's Day

Hard to believe it's mid February already! Weren't we just celebrating Christmas/New Years?  It's been a crazy few months here with all the renovations and mom having had her recent surgery but I'm happy to report that the electrical work we've been doing for the past 10 months is FINALLY complete! There are still some minor fixes required but all the major stuff is done.  Of course there's still a lot to do - the bathroom has been gutted to make room for a new shower and the old kitchen is gone.  The laundry room has been extended as well (yea, no more folding clothes on the dining room table!). Then new drywall on the ceilings and new flooring - I think we may actually finish this by summer.
This is one of those times I wish my dad was younger and in better health.  He was quite the handyman when he was younger.  I remember him putting in the new addition to our home  in New York in the mid 70's - 1200 sq. feet (plus the foundation which he dug himself) consisting of new bedrooms and a bathroom for us!  Growing up in an Italian family back then you learn a few things so I am looking forward to laying some new tiles and helping out with the drywall (does that sound insane???) I really just want to get things back to normal here - we're living out of totes which really helps keep the dust out of all the clothes and everything we wanted to keep but weren't using has gone into a storage unit.  20 plus years and five people mange to accumulate a lot of crap so lots of things have gone to the poor or the trash.  Even much of my paper files are gone.  I tried to digitize most of the important stuff.  Once all this is done I'll be ready to construct my built ins  - which I plan to do myself this summer. 

Gente di Mare Italian Genealogy

Looking forward to getting in more research.  Found a lot of interesting things I can't wait to share!  But for now I've been concentrating most of my efforts the last few months re designing the sites and adding info to the Facebook Pages.  The Italian Surname Database has also had a facelift.  You can search two ways keeping many of the spammers away making it easier for me to filter out much of my emails.  I've also included a widget to the Italian Surname Blog so all updates can be seen right in one place. 

Time to go extract some records and catch up on emails.  Loving the fact this is a long weekend here so I plan to take advantage of it!