San Luis Obispo and some musings on family

We're just back from a weekend jaunt to San Luis Obispo, where we visited relatives and saw some of the sights of the Central Coast -- which is a very lovely part of California. Its beauty was enhanced by the heavy rain we experienced on Saturday -- on Sunday and Monday the sky and the hills and even the ocean had that freshly washed look.

The twins had a great time exploring the area. Here we are on the beach by Morro Rock with Daddy:

And here we are hiking on the hill behind our relatives' house:

Ridgecrest seems very drab and dry and dull by comparison. Not to mention the fact that last night after we got home from our trip, when Rocket Boy and I went to bed, our cat Pie Bear threw up all over our comforter and blankets, perhaps as a sort of special cat welcome. I had to spend all day today doing laundry, and the comforter had to go to the Laundromat and it cost $15.

Anyway. Can't really blame that on Ridgecrest.

An interesting aspect of our trip was the chance to get better acquainted with my second cousin Stefan, a person I had barely even met before this trip. Stefan is younger than I am, but less than 10 years younger, so he still feels like a contemporary. This is interesting to me because his mother (my father's cousin) also feels a bit like a contemporary, perhaps because she and I once took a linguistics class together.

But I was thinking about second cousins. First of all, I wonder how many second cousins I have. Second cousins are the children of one's parents' cousins. I have no idea how many cousins my parents had. They didn't keep up with most of them. Between them, my parents had roughly 26 uncles and aunts (blood relatives) and many, though not all, of those uncles and aunts were married and had children (i.e., my parents' cousins). If most of those children had children, I could have hundreds of second cousins. Well, dozens. Lots.

Not ONE of these second cousins is on my Christmas card list.

Rocket Boy's situation is quite different from mine. His father emigrated from East Germany as a child in the 1930s (before it was East Germany). We have zero knowledge of the relatives left behind, including any and all uncles, aunts, and cousins. RB's mother, on the other hand, was illegitimate, and we have no knowledge of her biological father or his family. On her mother's side she had one uncle and one aunt. The uncle emigrated to America and we don't know what happened to him. The aunt stayed in Germany and had one son, who himself had a son, who is Rocket Boy's second cousin Andreas -- his favorite relative.

So here I am with my thousands of second cousins (or whatever) and I hardly know any of them, and here is Rocket Boy with just a couple, one of whom was the best man at his wedding. Odd how things work out...

Anyway, it was nice to get better acquainted with Stefan. One tiny little connection with my vast network of unknown second cousins. Can it be a network if I don't know them? I think links can exist even if you can't see them.

I wonder how many third cousins I have.