Rants and raves

So over the years, I have occasionally shown interest in how various family members connect to one another, but generally my occasional interest was limited to an isolated conversation with my parents, or maybe, during an especially energetic phase, emailing with a few relatives who were known to know about these things, maybe writing down a few things, and hearing a story or two. I knew my family on both sides had been mapped out pretty extensively (the advantage of them mostly having roots in the same country), but I had never caught the proverbial genealogy bug. Until now. Consider this fair warning: if you are a virgo, or you have a latent hunter-gatherer / collector / lego builder / librarian-archivist / list-maker / Candy Crush or Pokemon player or some similar OCD predisposition, genealogy can become an all-consuming thing. Before you know it, you spend hours digging to find the wedding date and location of some long-dead person you had never heard of until today, or you end u...

In my family, you have a dog. Except for my sister, who has a cat, probably for the same reason I didn't have a dog before. Give her time. So I have a dog. It was only a matter of time (and yes, I was an extreme late bloomer).  My dog is not one of those modern breeds sensitive to inbreeding, I suppose. She is of unplanned origins (it's one of those "oh shit my dog is pregnant, you're getting one of the puppies" things). Nothing designer about her, and although the dog equivalent of 23andme had a field day on her littermate and came up with a long list of ingredients, there is nothing labra nor doodle in her. Pretty much everything else, though. Quite a bit of German shepherd, and something with short legs. And something black, even though neither of her parents was. My dog was born "off the grid" in the mountains, in a similarly laissez-faire way as how she was conceived: her birth was discovered one freezing December morning as "oh wow the puppies...