Why are there always so many things to research?!

I think I must enjoy making my self-assigned tasks as hard as possible.  Writing, for instance, is not the easiest of things to do, at least not well.  Why then do I decide to set nearly all of my stories in other time periods?  Sometimes I feel as if I hardly know anything about the time I am living in, but even that amount of knowledge is considerably more that the times in which I set my stories.  Completely ridiculous.  Not only that, but I tend to also like to set the stories in other locations, not just outside of my hometown, but in places I have never visited.  So, a time period I am unfamiliar with in a place I have never seen.  Nothing to to that... right?  Then tying in plots, characters, etc. is just a lot of work.

Granted, I enjoy learning the answers to the questions that arise through the research that becomes necessary, but it can be a bit hard.  I think it might be easier if I still had access to online journals, etc. like I had when I was in college.  They were so handy!  Google, while great, also returns ALL results.  So culling out the bad is sometimes harder than in should be.  That and the fact that we're now in a time when we question any website that does not look at least partly professional.  There are enough templates and sites out there now to make the black background with highlighter colored text suspect.  And because of that, it's hard to give any credence to a site that looks like that, never mind that the information might be dead on.

Remember these?!  Off-putting, aren't they?

Ah, well, such is life, and it's not like I'm not the one setting these tasks for myself.  It's just that I sometimes question the validity of it.  Would anyone really notice if that reference wasn't entirely grounded in fact?  I mean, it sounds believable to me...