Super Bowl Sunday!!!!!!

Woohoooo! Who's playing?

I like Super Bowl Sunday. During the day, there are times when the stores are pretty much vacant and so are the roads. It's like you're alone on the planet and can do anything lots easier. I love Super Bowl Sunday.

I think about my brothers a lot. I wonder what they are up to today. I talk to my younger brother quite often these days. Sometimes every other week now, which is nice. We talk about the economy sometimes. He's a contractor and to save money he says he is doing more himself on jobsites. Long ago he hung up his hammer and became more of an office man. He's getting on in years too, like me, and so is more prone to injury when doing a lot of physical work. He ruptured an achilles tendon two or three years ago and that put him in a cast for six months I think and was very difficult to deal with. His wife is a wonderful person and so he had help in his recovery. She's a nurse.

We talked about the economy again last week. He's slightly concerned about the future of his two kids still in college, if they'll actually be able to find jobs once out. His son is near graduation and will have a degree in architecture. His daughter I believe is in graphic design but might try for med school, which is a long haul. She's smart and would make a great doctor I think. I told him if she can't get in anywhere else, she could apply at the brand new med school in Lebanon. He asked if it was a real med school. I said it was for osteopaths.

Our father used to poohoo osteopathic medical degrees. I don't know why. I really don't know the difference between a DO degree and an MD degree. When we were in high school, a religious boarding school, very small, he made certain it was on our school records that if something happened to any of us, they were not to take us to an osteopath but to a real doctor.

I still don't know the difference or if DO's are less qualified than MD's at most things. I think it probably is an individual thing still, some DO's are good and some MD's are good. But we still remember our father's dislike of DO's.

But my brother says his daughter wants to be an MD not a DO. But then we talked about the good opportunities for Nurse Practioners and Physicians Assistants and that with the cost of medical school and health care rising, that we both think these two professions will be in demand and pay well enough. When you pair that with the fact neither cost nearly as much in education as becoming a doctor, it's a win situation for young people looking for a recession proof career or even a backup career.

My brother is concerned there will be very few jobs opportunities in the next decade for architects. My nephew is a bright thoughtful compassionate young man. I think he'll find something or some way to make a living.

My brother's other daughter is an attorney in a SW state. The small firm she works for has recently laid off all but a couple attorneys. She is one of the two lucky ones to keep her job for now, despite being less experienced than some who were let go. She's unbelievably good at what she does. She's sharp, self-confident, always prepared, doesn't back down and should be a district attorney, is my feeling.

I don't know her that well, but the two or three times I've met her, I felt I was in the presence of an exceptional human being, someone kind of way beyond the norm. Maybe you've met people like that. We can't claim it's in the blood of our family. She was adopted. I have great admiration for her.

My other brother is the one I don't hear from much. He leads a very busy overloaded life and his own daughter, an only child, has experienced a lot of troubles in the past years with an eating disorder. This has caused my brother extreme angst and soul searching and worry. I occasionally get a short e-mail response from him, but other than that, I haven't seen him for a couple of years.

I send him e-mails asking how I can help because I wish I could. I don't even know his daughter very well, because I"ve met her, like my other nieces and nephew, only a handful of times.

My younger brother and I were talking about that. He says he wishes we knew others in our family. He says he envies these families who once a year have huge family reunions. We don't know anybody in our extended family.

My father didn't like his family, which had been composed of about 12 brothers and sisters. I'm sure we have literally dozens of cousins and extended cousins on his side, but we never knew any of them. My mother had only one brother, whom my father didn't like either. Her brother died young, in his fifties, of cancer. He had two sons, one of whom, after failing in high school, finally joined the military and made a career of it, I heard. And the other, I have no idea where he ended up.

Now I look at my brothers kids and feel bad for them. There is no big family support system in place for them. My brother's adopted daughter, the attorney, married, but the marraige lasted only a couple years, if that. My nephew is now 24, almost 25, and has yet to find a soulmate. In the meantime, I hope they have plenty of friends. My younger brothers kids have only the one cousin, my older brother's troubled daughter.

In other news, some distance cousin on my mother's side of the family is big time into geneology. He is so deep into it, that when something came into his study of my mother's family's past, that there might be African American blood deep in our ancestry, some of the male members of the family had DNA tests done that did indeed reveal black heritage.

When my younger brother told me that I said I already knew. How? From high school biology class, when we were examining our own blood under a microscope and there was a distinctly long shaped blood cell. I asked the biology teacher to look and he said "That a sickle cell and only black people have those. So you're a black girl under your whitey skin." Then he laughed and walked off. It's one of those things I never forgot.

My father's side of the family includes a whole lot of Native American blood. My aunt looks full blood but always told me she was about a quarter and that we should have gotten Indian money. I never really knew what that meant "Indian money".

She had four husbands, two of whom died in WWII, and only one son, whom I've met maybe two or three times, decades ago. He married and had two kids, a girl and a boy. The boy died in Alaska, after or during he went to a chiropractor for neck pain relief. He was a firefighter. He had a stroke during or right after the chiropractic treatment due to some congenital malformation of a major artery laying across a vertebra, that got nicked or crimped or something during the chiropractic adjustments of his neck. It was a very freakish unexpected thing to happen. I think his death was ruled accidental due to that bizarre malformation or placement of an artery. I can't remember the details to be honest, only that it was a freak thing, related to a congential defect and the chiropractic visit. I'd never met him. I've never met his sister either, nor do I know where she lives.

And the real bizzare twist of the geneological thing my brother told me last week in his reading of the distant cousins' ongoing geneological research, is that we are related to Barack Obama, through his mother who came from Kansas.

We're actually all related on this relatively small planet. I've always said we need to recruit some outside genetic materal, breed with aliens or something. We're seriously inbred here on Earth.