Nagel Family Website

Our house has been a miserable place lately because we’re all sick. It started with Becca last Wednesday, when she had a fever. That lasted a couple days, so Saturday AM she went to the doctor. Turns out she has an ear infection. Typically this is OK, but Thursday Jason was complaining about his ear, and Friday mine was hurting me. So the other 2 went to the doctor, and they both had ear infections. You know what’s coming next… yep: we’re all screwed up. We’re all on antibiotics, and we’re all miserable.

I’m normally a miserable person, but make my ears hurt whenever I move, hear any noise or feel vibrations and I’m even worse. We really need some nice weather so we can just open up the windows and let some fresh air inside. This is a long winter! I want spring!!!

This entry was posted by Eric on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Laura and I are celebrating our third anniversary of being together today! Yes, that’s right - our 3rd.

See, we started dating on Leap Day: February 29, 1996. Years which are divisible by 100 are not leap years, unless they are also divisible by 400, in which case they are leap years. So 2000 was our first anniversary, 2004 our second, and today is our third.

The funny thing is that Laura asked me out on that day (I was told by a mutual friend to wait), and according to tradition,

In the English speaking a world, it is a tradition that women may propose marriage only on leap years.

Anyway, happy anniversary!

This entry was posted by Eric on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 8:48 am and is filed under Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

I’m not a big fan of my birthday. I mean, I do appreciate being alive for another year, but I don’t like being the center of attention and I really don’t like getting gifts. During Christmas, my favorite thing to do is to sit back and watch everyone else, especially the kids, open their gifts. The joy on their faces is what I look for.

Today, I turn 29. That’s a pretty depressing number for me. It seems so old. I think it’s the “9″ in there. 30 seems better than 29. Then again, I’m not turning 30, so I probably shouldn’t make that statement.

I sometimes think I haven’t accomplished much in these 29 years. That’s probably because I tend to hang out with people older than myself. Or maybe because things haven’t changed much in the past 3 years, since Morgan was born. There was so much going on from 2001 to 2005 (getting married, finishing grad. school, kids being born), but since 2005, I’ve felt like I’ve been on cruise control.

Luckily, my birthday doesn’t get dragged on, because my family loves April and we have lots of babies in January. After me on the 18th, there’s Mark & Morgan on the 20th, Kim on the 21st, Becca on the 22nd, and Laura on the 24th.

Well, here’s to another year. Hopefully I can at least get in the hot tub tonight.

This entry was posted by Eric on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 8:50 am and is filed under Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

I think our house is haunted. Well, maybe not haunted, since I relate “haunted” to mean scary and violent poltergeist stuff. But there’s something else in the house with us.

For a while now, I didn’t say anything to Laura about it, since I thought she’d think I was nuts. Then one day we brought it up, and she has seen this thing, too! She saw it in the reflection of the window while doing dishes one day. We’ve both seen it on the stairs.

One day, we (Laura, Becca and I) were watching TV and Becca quickly looked at the stairs and said, “who was that?” Laura and I looked at each other, as she obviously saw our ghost. Becca went up the stairs to look, but there was nothing there. Morgan was in bed, Jason in the bathtub.

On Christmas, I snapped this photo, from the couches looking towards the stairs:

You can see in the upper-right a strange orb. Could this be our spirit?

How do we know who this spirit is? How can we talk to it?

This entry was posted by Eric on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 10:48 am and is filed under Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

This entry was posted by Eric on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

My mom added a bunch of people to our family tree the other day, and I used Geni’s name search to find people that know more about my family. Long story short, we’ve now found my twelfth great grandfather, N Cloutier born in Mortagne-au-Perche, France (map) in 1544.

There’s a lot more research to do, and a lot of places online to find it. FamilySearch is a great place to start. There are now 223 people in my family tree.

This entry was posted by Eric on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 9:07 pm and is filed under Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.