Royal Pain

I like to think of myself as a pretty down-to-earth, easy-going individual--at least outside the house. After twenty-four plus years of marriage, Hubby has, of course, seen the darker side and doesn't hesitate to remind me of it every chance he gets.

For example, there was the time a few years ago when, a week or so after being attacked by a demonic weiner dog while I was on a flower delivery, I received a phone call from the Health Department telling me the dog had finished its confinement and did not have rabies. When I got off the phone and said to Hubby, "I don't have rabies." He said, "Well, then, we need to figure out what is wrong with you."

His latest opportunity came courtesy of Ancestry.com. I'm still a little* lost down the rabbit hole of genealogy (and finally reliably able to spell that word correctly on the first try) and Hubby will occasionally stick his head in my computer room door--I assume to see if I have lost consciousness and am maybe drooling on the keyboard.

Over the weekend, he was standing over my shoulder when I discovered that my 19th great-grandfather (and several of his successors, apparently) was the Lord of Deursen in the Netherlands, maybe even before the Netherlands was actually the Netherlands (in the mid-1300s).

Hubby says, "Royalty?"

I say, "Minor-ish Dutch royalty--yes, it appears so."

Hubby says, "That explains the attitude."

*Little may be an understatement. I just calculated that I spent a total of nine hours over the course of the last 30 just trying to untangle the knot of Cranky Ex-Boss Lady's maternal grandmother's family. A knot, which, by the way, began with four different last names and got more complicated from there.