One of my favorite castles is Raby Castle in County Durham, England. Raby is a reinforced manor house from the 13th Century. It was the ancestral home of the Neville family, to whom I have relations through my Conyers line.

I’ve been reading a book on the design and technology of castles, and I wondered if Raby had every been under siege. Naturally, the first place I looked was Google.

I found references to a siege at Raby in 1648, …

Here’s a little something I’ve been working on for the last week or two:

I’ve been trying to decide when to put this out there, but with today’s news that Johnny Manziel is under investigation for signing autographs for a fee, I realized that now was the time. It’s possible that JF won’t be an Aggie too much longer.

On the other hand, it could all blow over. Perhaps Manziel is innocent, or perhaps he’ll return the money he was …

We decided to stay in Vancouver, British Columbia a night before and a night after our Alaskan cruise. Traveling from Austin, Texas to Vancouver and rushing to get on a boat in the same day didn’t sound like much fun. Neither did doing the opposite on the home.

And a delay in a flight out could mean missing the boat.

As it happens, the airlines know which days are departures and arrivals for the cruises, so the flights were much …

As you can tell from my last few posts, the Wife, my 20-month-old daughter and I went on an Alaskan cruise with Disney last month. The seven night cruise started and ended in Vancouver, British Columbia, and included a day sailing through Tracy Arm Fjord and stops in Skagway, Juneau, and Ketchikan.

This was my second cruise, having been on a short Bahamas cruise with the Wife on Carnival. She has been on several other cruises, and it was Aubrey’s …

The next shore day on our July 2013 Alaska cruise was Juneau. This was the day I’d been waiting for, as we were going on a whale watching excursion.

For years, seeing whales in the wild had been on my bucket list. We’d gone on a whale watching excursion in St. Lucia, but did not see any whales (although we saw a huge number of dolphin).

Knowing the huge number of humpback whales that feed in the Stevens Passage, I …

The White Pass and Yukon Route railroad is a narrow gauge railroad between Skagway, Alaska and Whitehorse in the Yukon. Riding the line is a standard excursion for cruise ships porting in Skagway.

On our July 2013 Alaska cruise, we chose an excursion that took the train from Skagway to Fraser, British Columbia, Canada, and then took a tour coach back. This allowed us to differing scenery each direction.

The entire excursion took about 3.5 hours and was well worth …

In July 2013, the family and I took a cruise to Alaska. One off the days was spent sailing up Tracy Arm Fjord to see Sawyer Glacier.

We signed up for a room with a balcony so we could sit out there as the little one napped in early afternoon. As it happened, we were stuck on the balcony as we visited Tracy Arm.

I thought ahead and had my camera and lenses out there with me, so got quite …

As I’ve posted before, I am descended from the Conyers of Durham, a mid-level Norman family that settled in Country Durham some time after 1066. While they weren’t a major House on their own, they did a great job of marrying up, and my ancestral lines connect to most of the major Houses of England (Neville, Marshal, Percy, among others) and even to the Royal House of Plantagenet through Edward III.

The other day, Patrick Cracroft-Brennan posted on the …

I’m in New Orleans this week for PubCon Spring 2013. My family came along, so we had Monday to run around the French Quarter together.

We ended up at Grand Isle Restaurant for dinner, and decided to sit outside, since there was a nice breeze. Across a narrow courtyard from us was the sports bar Manning’s, which was hosting an alumni event for Ole Miss.

My father-in-law is an Ole Miss alum, so I follow their football team a …

Something about the Thursday and Friday night football broadcast with Rod Gilmore and Joe Tessitore has always seemed familiar to me. It finally hit me.

Yes, the resemblance to the two sportscasters from Bedazzled is remarkable.

I would think this was intentional, but the movie was filmed in 2000 and Tessitore didn’t even start working at ESPN until 2002. As far as I can tell, they hadn’t worked together on screen before ESPN.…