Another ten pounds gone!

I'm sitting here at my desk looking at my 30-pound bear.  Yup, yup, NutriSystem does work, guys!  Even with all the meals I've had off-plan for whatever reason, I've lost 30 pounds in just under five months.  Of course I would have lost more if I'd stayed on-plan the whole time, but circumstances of daily life can interfere with that, and overall, I'm very happy with the weight-loss.

As for my writing, I've just finished a short story that I'm hoping to have published soon, and I had so much fun writing it that I've decided to spend July's Camp NaNo writing short stories and poetry rather than a novel.  My beta-readers are absolutely AWESOME, and they do a wonderful job of critiquing my work.  Thank you, ladies!  This month is busy.  I'm jotting down story ideas to get ready for camp, and I'm also working on the therapy project that I was assigned a year and a half ago but never finished.  It will get done this month.

Since I can't read during NaNo months, I'm five books behind my reading schedule for the year, so I'm getting caught up on those books before camp starts again.  So far, I've read 37 books this year, which leaves 63 more to go to reach goal.

On the genealogy front, three more cousins have found me in the past couple of weeks!  Two are from the Puerto Rican side, and one from the Hawaiian side.  One of the ladies from the Puerto Rican side has so much information about siblings, and those families were huge.  It wasn't unusual for them to have 10-16 children, although in those days, some of those children died young, which must have been heartbreaking for their families.  There is still some information from Cuba that I'm having trouble obtaining, but I haven't lost hope.  

Watched an interesting show on TV about El Castillo, a cave in northern Spain with ancient paintings on the walls.  Paintings that might be far older than originally believed by thousands of years.  Paintings that could have been created by neanderthals 40,000 years ago.  It makes me wonder if my ancestors, some of whom were neanderthals, as my DNA results show, lived in that area, which lies in the Basque Country, a region that my later ancestors, the Euskaldunak (Basques), have lived in for thousands of years.  Have my ancestors lived in that area for over 30,000 years?