Town of MacGregor

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Who knew?  While doing a search for all things MacGregor I came across a little town in Canada, in the province of Manitoba to be exact, called MacGregor.  How cool!  Wouldn’t that be sweet to live in a town with your own name?  I’d feel pretty darn important!

I’ve just started to do more searches on our family and to see if I can trace it further back now that we know who came to Canada and when, but holy smokes the info out there is overwhelming.  Where do I even start?  I’ve already spent a couple of hours this morning where one thing leads to another, there must be a better way to do this.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, and otherwise I’m going to stop and think and come up with a more organized plan for all of this research!  A very big, but very interesting job to say the least…

Wish me luck!

 

C’Mon Spring

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Well, it turns out it’s the same as last year and the moment my sweetie leaves the property anytime in February then the snow hits!

And same as last year, it was looking like Spring already – stuff was melting like crazy, we could actually see the snow shrinking, it was awesome!

But then it started again (when Damian went away of course), and then I also popped away for a couple of days, three in total actually, and when we both got home we were amazed – at least a foot of snow had arrived in those three days!  Man!

So now I have a “tunnel” of sorts when I head up to the chicken house, the door to the chicken yard is getting stuck yet again and I have to squeeze past because it won’t open all the way, or close very easily for that matter.  Sheesh!  Springtime, where are you?

At least our doggie Sandor likes the snow, he loves leaning into the banks and pushing himself along, it’s so cute – here he is just a few weeks ago on March 1st…

Ancestors Are On My Mind

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I seem to have missed posting here for the entire month of February, but I have a honest excuse.

My sweetie’s Grama passed away last month – she had wanted to come to our beautiful home to die and so we brought her here and the family gathered round and gave her a beautiful sendoff.

Just last year Grama, along with my sweetie Damian, him mom, his auntie, and his uncle, all took a trip to Germany/Austria/Hungary to visit the land of their ancestors.  It sounded like a marvelous trip and everyone feels so lucky that they were able to do the trip when they did with Grama.

And so as life begins to flow normally again, as much as it can when someone passes away, I find myself wanting to know more about my own ancestors.  I’ve decided to continue the hunt that my Dad started a while back, and thank you Daddy for supplying some of the info I’ll need to get started.  He’s already gotten as far as who came to Canada and when, so now I’ll have to cross the waters to Scotland and carry on!

If anyone has any tips or suggestions on anything that would assist me in my search I’d love to hear them…

Rosetta Stone has Irish Gaelic

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In my search to try to learn Scottish Gaelic I’ve come across lots and lots of sites that have pages and pages of rules, pronunciation tips, and some even have the odd audio clip to listen to which is incredibly helpful.

But I still think it will be very hard to learn this way.  Most of the time there are only individual words on these pages, and sometimes short phrases as examples, but unless a specific phrase that I’m looking for just happens to be in their list I’m out of luck.

So we’ve been thinking about taking the Rosetta Stone Irish Gaelic course – I’ve heard so many awesome things about Rosetta Stone, and I’ve also heard once you learn Irish Gaelic you’ll be able to get the gist of Scottish Gaelic, that they’re similar but not the same.

Opinions?  Anyone out there speak Scottish Gaelic and have some ideas for me?  I live in the middle of nowhere so I’m pretty sure there are no in-person classes.  And besides, I took French in school for 7 years and always got A’s, but still could not create very many simple sentences, certainly couldn’t hold a conversation, so I want to stay away from that style of teaching/learning anyways.

Either way, I’m going to figure this out!

We Were So Close

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I never would have guessed it, but back in 1998 I came within a few minutes of my future Estate in Scotland!

Yes, I have been to Scotland once in my life already, and in my excitement after checking out the Highland Titles website and making my decision to become a Lady of Glencoe I suddenly had this niggling feeling of familiarity – had I been here before?  Not quite deja-vu, but something was ringing a bell deep in my memories.  Glencoe, hmmmm, what was it?

And then I remembered!

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My Brighid

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Speaking of my Brighid in the last post, I couldn’t resist adding a little something more about her.

Brighid was my favourite chicken, she was the most social little girl, she always said hello and ran over, she’d sit on my lap chattering away, she was everything that I had hoped that chicken-keeping would be and more.  She had such a fabulous personality and could be such a goof!

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