And The Pumpkin Decorating Contest Winner Is...

Balloon Boy Pumpkin!!!
An idea for a reality show based on this design was later squashed.

Finger Lickin' Good

Serve this gruesomely delicious Meatloaf Mummy Hand for Halloween dinner. Love the gnarly onion nails and the bloody third degree burn ketchup "skin."
Ahhh...I love Halloween!

Truly Terrifying Halloween Masks

Download your own last minute Halloween masks here. But be forewarned, these masks will strike fear and disgust in most reasonable, intelligent people and cause much eye rolling and head shaking. Very, very scary. Aaaiiiiiiii!!!!!

Zombi-fy Yourself!

For a limited time, go to Picnik.com and turn a photo into a flesh-eating ZOMBIE or other Halloween horror. I'm planning to zombify this photo of me on a normal Monday morning before coffee.

Obama vs FOX Wild Things

"...when he came to the place where the wild things are they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws till Max said "BE STILL!" and tamed them with the magic trick of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all..."
- Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are.
courtesy Life in the Nohodome

Genealogy #70: Genealogy 2.0

There are so many cool tools and toys to play with if you're researching your past. I'm not sure if all of them are helpful but they're certainly entertaining. I created an account with MyHeritage and tried out the celebrity look-alike generator. In my case, my celebrity comparisons are limited to Asian heads of state and Jackie Chan. I almost broke the thing because we all looked alike. Relax...I'm kidding. I think that if you got the whole family in on it, and assuming that most of them were computer literate, the site would be very helpful as a tool everyone could contribute to. The other gizmo was a family Look-alike meter, which uses face recognition technology to decide once and for all which parent you most resemble. Regarding my son, who he looks like is not what's most up for debate, it's which parent is most responsible for questionable behavior. But let's stick with my own lineage. Apparently, I look more like my mother by 12%. My sister looks more like my mother by 4%. I'm not sure where my dad even fits into this picture. I wonder how different the Look-alike meter would gauge an adult photo.

Member discoveries on the Footnote website were interesting, albeit morbid. I like the idea of sharing documents but using the site to create Creative Memory pages for dead folks was....icky. I just saw on the news that the only existing film image of Anne Frank has just been released. It's a mere 20 seconds of the famous Holocaust diarist leaning out of her apartment in Amsterdam to watch a happy wedding couple. The film was shot about a year before she went into hiding. Watching the video made me think of the above photo of my father in Germany during WWII. I never saw the photo until after he was gone so I didn't get a chance to ask him about where it was taken and why he's posing on top of that monument. All of these websites are wonderful tools if you have access to information from the actual participants. If you miss your chance you're left staring at photos and wondering what was left unsaid.

Genealogy #69: Database Researching

I see myself in every one of the faces in this photo (taken sometime in the 1930's) of my mother, her parents and five of her seven younger siblings. These faces are the foundation of my family and the familiarity is both comforting and unsettling. Knowing the intricate details of their past and of the future each has yet to experience seems somehow invasive. I don't know why they're all dressed up or where they're going but this photo seems full of expectation and the security that comes from being part of a large family. Around the time this photo was taken, my family owned and operated a laundry in Detroit. One of the documents my co-worker found was a 1930 census document - recently made available in 2002 - from Detroit, Michigan where my mother's family lived in a "flat," a residence built above the family laundry business. My mom confirmed the street address as "Ferry Park" but couldn't remember the name of the laundry. As stated in the module, the handwritten notes listing the head of household was interesting and could be challenging depending on the penmanship of the census-taker. I checked out many, but not all of the websites listed in the module but was largely unsuccessful. HeritageQuest did not impress me and yielded many dead ends. I'm not sure if the snafus were generated because of phonetically spelled or misspelled names but I kept running into obstacles. Also, many Chinese names are listed surname first, given name second. This was true in the case of my great-grandfather, of which little is known. As the oldest grandchild, my mother recalls meeting him once when he was ill and came to Houston to live with their family for a short time. There is mystery surrounding him, not the least of which is the enigmatic Caucasian wife (not my great-grandmother, which must be a whole other story) he brought with him. My mother only remembers her as "tight-faced and blonde," a description which cracks me up but is typical of my mother. Later, she called me to add that her name "might have been Helen." Also, she had a parrot by the name of "Rosebud." Interesting that these minute details are what are memorable of this first and last family reunion. There's one photo in existence, apparently, of my great-grandfather and that is of him holding a violin. The whereabouts of this photo are currently unknown. My mother rattles off a list of various siblings who may have pilfered the family heirloom but personally, I strongly suspect "fowl" play on the part of the parrot.

Genealogy #68: Detective Work

This is the location of the final resting place of secretasiangirl. Hopefully, I won't be moving there anytime soon, but eventually, I will be rolling through these gates feet first. Actually, since I want to be cremated, I'll be in a jar or nice box. While this visualization may seem creepy to some, it's never really bothered me. All my life, I've been coming to this place to honor my grandfather and later say goodbye to my father, grandmother, my aunt, uncles and cousin. Ironically, my favorite teacher in college is buried only steps away from my own father's grave. I found a kind of peace with that news; and sometimes go to sit between the two sites and think about all the things these two men taught me. My grandmother had the foresight to provide for her very large family long ago and purchased multiple plots when my grandfather died suddenly in 1965. Although my parents purchased their own family plots at the same time here, there are available spaces for anyone in my large family who "needs one" unexpectedly. Sadly, we've had to use a few in the past couple of years. When I asked Mom why Grandma bought so much property here, she translated and answered, "She doesn't want to be crowded." Funny, but typical for my grandmother, the toughest woman I've ever known. I'm grateful because I know that she put her family first and never wanted any of us to go through the trauma of what she went through when my grandfather died. I'm also grateful because this is a very nice cemetery and if you have to spend eternity somewhere, a $7000 plot ain't bad. Plus, I would keep company with notable Houston attorney Leon Jaworski and Young Adult author Joan Lowry Nixon. I visited the websites listed in the module. The Oral History Project is very interesting. As I stated before, I would love for my mother - the oldest living member of my family - to record her memories in some way for her own closure as well as for my son's birthright. Right now, she's not up for it but who knows. The Tejano Voices website is also fascinating. I listened to the stories of two notable Texas Hispanic women. Listening to their voices gives their words so much more weight. Find-A-Grave is a truly creepy website. Because I've been to Glenwood Cemetery, off Washington Ave. for a school project on Howard Hughes, I took a look at the oldest grave I could find there. Margaret Lair Anderson's grave had this information:

Birth:	1787 Kentucky, USA
Death:	1867 Houston Harris County Texas, USA
Daughter of John A. Lair & Sarah Custer. Wife of Carter Anderson. Died in the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1867 along with her granddaughters Mary Morris, Texas & Dora DeChaumes (all children of Susan Nash Anderson DeChaumes).

The website itself is very difficult to navigate and unless you're famous, the chances of finding a relative are slim. And I have to wonder about the kind of people who find this sort of search recreational. If it's your thing, however, Glenwood is probably one of the oldest cemeteries in Houston and is the resting place of many famous names like Hobby, Hofheinz, Hughes and even Gene Tierney. If you like old mausoleums and trees dripping with Spanish moss, this is your kind of hangout.

Genealogy #67: Genealogy Genesis

This photo is probably familiar to you if you've ever been to the Smithsonian Museum or read anything related to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The baby in the picture is my Aunt Natalie and her mom is holding her. While the backgrounds of my family and many other Japanese and Chinese families may be rich in historical significance, following the threads of their lives may not be easy. Wonder why...Oh yeah, could it be because they were forced by law to leave their homes and all their family belongings and relocate at a moment's notice? Or maybe because their names were too difficult to pronounce so they were altered or changed altogether to suit the convenience of immigration officials? If I were to begin a family tree, I'm afraid the branches would go no further back than my grandparents. On my mother's side, my sister and I are the first generation born in the U.S. since my mother and her parents traveled here on a slow boat in 1932. My grandfather had already been here, at age 15, first working as a kitchen bus boy and sending money home to his family, later going back to China to marry. Because of restrictions placed on Chinese laborers (Chinese Exclusion Act, later extended by the Geary Act), my grandfather had to return to the U.S. after a short time. It wasn't until 1932 that he was able to bring his family (my grandmother and my mother) to San Francisco. Thanks to the excellent research of a co-worker (who just so happens to have worked at the Clayton Library in the past), we were able to recover a passenger manifest of the ship that brought my family to Angel Island, the Pacific version of Ellis Island. Among the passenger list "Chinese Third Class from Hong Kong to San Francisco" aboard the U.S.S. President Hoover is clearly my grandfather's name and "wife" and "dau" (daughter). I showed this to my mother recently and she had never seen it before. So in answer to the exercise in the module, if I were to do any research on my family tree I would definitely start with my friend and co-worker. Beyond that, I would probably visit the Clayton Library and take advantage of their resources. Because of language limitations and due to the fact that beyond my grandparents, most of my relatives lived in China in pre-industrial age conditions with little or no records, the search would most likely end there. Not exactly three steps, but you use what you can. At age 80, and with two of her 7 siblings deceased, my mother is the only living source remaining for my family history. After speaking with her on the phone today, I did learn some more information regarding my Japanese father's family that I didn't know before but I'll save that for another post. I can't convince Mom to write this all down but perhaps a request from her favorite (and only) grandson will do the trick.