Time Challenged

I apparently can't understand calendars. Lately I've been wrong every time I said something would happen on a certain date. Last week I told my night class that we had three more times to meet, but we don't. Last night was our penultimate meeting. Our last meeting is next week. And I was just noticing in the last blog (two days ago) that I had spoken of leaving for Oklahoma "next week." Nope. We don't leave until May 8, two weeks from yesterday. Okay, so what's a little confusion among friends?

At least I had sense enough to get Beloved Spouse to the airport in time today. He phoned a short while ago, reporting a pleasant, though boring flight. Tonight (or in the next day or so) he gets to tell his folks that I've accepted the tenure-track job up here. I don't envy him. His mother will be so disappointed. I hope she doesn't feel that I've sold her out. If she weren't still with us (and I'm so glad she is because I love her dearly), we would have very little reason to go to Louisiana again at all. Certainly, my sisters and brothers don't inspire me to want to visit often. I love them, but they seem to do just fine without me. I send gifts and cards. From them, I get mostly nothing. It's a pity, but unless they want to make an effort to try to keep in touch with me, instead of me being the one who does all the work, I don't see why I should continue to worry and fret. Of course, regular readers (all two of you) will recall that I've said similar things many times. The next family emergency, I'll drive myself nuts trying to be all things to all people.

Our delightful springlike weather is soon to end. A cold front is moving in on us, with storms scheduled for tonight, and then cooler weather. They're still talking about snow for Monday. The local main weather guy says there might even be an accumulation that will kill new growth. My tulip tree has blossoms all over it, and I will weep with grief if it gets harmed. I don't know if I should cover it or not. My sister Sheila got the green thumb. I'm the one who kills plastic plants.

Giving myself and any readers whiplash, on to a new topic. I received the mitochondrial DNA results. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed at the paucity of information. It shows that my maternal line is haplogroup U, one of the older hapologroups. Among my ancestors is the so-called Cheddar Man, England's oldest complete human skeletal remains. He apparently was a most tasty bit of cheese, for they believe he died from being eaten by his fellow humans. (The name comes from Cheddar Cave and has nothing to do with cheese, but I couldn't resist an awful pun.) In addition, the ancestral trail seems to lead out of the place of all origin--Africa--to Western Europe and Eastern Asia. There are a lot of people in haplogroup U in Russia and Finland. They make up less than ten percent of the Caucasian people in the U.S. Unfortunately, this haplogroup has a tendency toward renal and prostate cancer, as well as of strokes connected to the occipital lobe, also connected to migraine. (My maternal grandmother died of colon cancer, but there are several of us in the family who have had migraines.)

The main use of this information is less to trace my geneology, though that fascinates me, than it is to add to the information about how human beings evolved and migrated throughout the world. Just today in the newspaper there was an article about how human beings nearly became extinct at one point before the Stone Age, getting down to about 2000 people. I guess that does mean we're all kinfolk. I've lived in towns with about 2000 people and felt that the town was tiny. Now to learn that these 2000 people were scattered about, trying to keep from starving in a long period of drought, and yet they managed to procreate enough to repopulate the Earth. Thank goodness for sexual urges, I suppose. Of course, now that we've managed to put over 6 billion people on the planet, maybe it's time to involuntarily sterilize about half of us. Just kidding. I've had my two kids, so I guess I feel that I want the world to be safe and clean in case I ever get any grandchildren. I won't start knitting or crocheting any baby blankets any time soon, that's for sure. S.