Hi all.
Our daughter’s family was here from Monday until this morning. With our four grandkids here, and me organizing workdays and some recreation, as well as doing a lot of the cooking for our Thanksgiving dinner (on Wednesday), I didn’t get my intended post written.
I’ll be here Monday with a real post.
On Wednesday, our son and his husband fly in from Worcester, MA to give us some help. One primary project is moving my workstation from The Dungeon to someplace upstairs. This involves moving two monitors, the docking station, the wireless printer, and various supplies. I know where I want it to go. In that scenario, they will also have to move the computer desk, both top and bottom portions. They’ll also have to move a small cabinet for the printed to rest on. And, of course, a chair.
That will be done either Wednesday night or Thursday morning. That will be the start of a new era. But it will be nice to have my remote keyboard again and a surface for it to rest on.
Will it work? Maybe. Our kids are worried about me going downstairs. Other tasks, such as filing business papers, and sorting through things in the storeroom, will for some time require me to go downstairs.
Other projects are on the agenda for while Charles and Mario are here. One is for Charles to look through my stamp collection. He said he wanted to look at it before I listed it for sale. Stamp collecting was extremely important to the Todd family over the years, but those years are over and it’s time to sell it. I don’t think there’s much market for stamp collections, so I don’t expect to get much for it.
Then there’s that spare bedroom set. It’s in the basement storeroom, tucked away to form a wall that divides the storeroom into different areas. We need to pull it out into the light, take some photos, and get it listed for sale.
Moving my workstation will result in freeing up a 6-foot worktable. Hopefully we will move that into the storeroom for staging stuff.
I’m sure we’ll have a load or two of miscellaneous things to take to donation. And boxes of books to move to the garage in hopes that they will sell. Some are already advertised on FB Marketplace, but they seem to be generating little interest.
So, will I get any writing done this week? Probably not, but we’ll see.
Saturday evening, we arrived at home around 9:00 p.m., ending our second trip for the summer. This one was to Lake Jackson, Texas, about an hour south of Houston. Our daughter and her family live there. She and her husband and their two middle children went on a ten-day mission trip to Belize. Staying behind were their oldest son, Ephraim, and youngest son Elijah.
Well, also the four cats (not so affectionately nicknamed Useless, Nitwit, Diva, and Blimpie), the 70 pound lab (nicknamed Nuisance), and the bearded dragon. Useless has an infection of some kind and needed watching and medicating. The two kids staying behind were mostly up on the care of the pets. Little Elijah did very well scooping three of the five litter boxes. The twice-a-week sifting was a little beyond his abilities but he tried hard.
I got to read a lot with Elijah. He can read okay, but he wanted me to read to him. We didn’t quite finish the second book he asked me to read. He’s a good kid, though, just like his older siblings, he spends a lot of time on screens. Some of that time is actually educational. In between the silliness of certain things, he hears educational videos. And he seems to understand and retain much of the good information they try to convey.
On the other hand, Ephraim is…a teenager. What is that old saw? “When I was sixteen I was amazed at my father’s ignorance.” I have to hope that the second part of that is also true for him: “When I was twenty-one I was amazed at how much he had learned in five years.” I’ll just leave it at that. On Wednesday June 19, I drove him to Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, and saw him off on his big adventure, a European trip, courtesy of his uncle Charles.
I had been hoping to get some writing done, what with fewer kids around than normal, but, alas, that wasn’t to be. I think I was able to writing only on three days, and not a normal daily output on those days. Maybe I’ll get some done this week with Ezra here. If not, I’ll hope for a good output in the several weeks ahead.
We stayed two nights after the family returned. Took the two middles to the planetarium, our third time to go there. It’s a nice educational facility about three miles from their house. I bought a season pass for them, and hope they go a few more times to justify the expense.
Saturday, we drove back with thirteen-year-old grandson Ezra. He’ll spend a week with us. I have a number of projects lined out for him to help me with. I hope to work him about four hours a day, then he’ll have free time. We are also hoping to read in the Bible every night, and, we shall play games. He’s looking forward to not having his younger sister around, whose antics liven up the game but also makes normal play difficult.
Next Saturday, we’ll drive half-way to Lake Jackson, meeting one of his parents—or possibly both plus two other grandkids—halfway. That will end the summer trips. That is, unless we go to Branson for a week during my convalescence after surgery. But more on that later. For now, we are looking forward to a few weeks of normalcy.
The child-watching and pet sitting gig is on-going. I don’t know that I can say that I’m having fun, however. These are not the same as the previous child-watching gigs. I suppose they will never be the same again. The world moves on in not always pleasant directions.
On Friday we took our youngest grandson to the nearby planetarium. It turns out it’s a mere three or four miles away from our daughter’s house. I have good memories of school trips to the planetarium in Rhode Island. I think it was in Roger Williams Park, though that memory is sketchy. I loved how they slowly brought the lights down and stars emerged, how the stars rotated in the night sky and at dawn were in a different place than where they started. Those are good memories.
So when I discovered that we had a planetarium so close to us, I knew that would be our “field trip” for the week, even if we didn’t have to go far. We entered the room, which was more or less how I remembered it. Around 18 people filled only a fraction of the 72 seats. A speaker up in front told a little about the planetarium and had the technician darken the room to the night sky. She told about a few constellations and told about some stars. They then shifted into a movie projected onto the domed ceiling. The moved was the basics of our solar system.
Elijah liked it enough that we went back on Saturday. First was a story time in the lobby, with Elijah being the only child to show up. Then into the star room for the opening (which was identical to Friday) followed by a cartoon movie, Accidental Astronauts. It was good, though sometimes hard to understand what was said. Elijah seemed to like it.
The facility included a lot of display cases of space things. This included scaled models of the different rockets that have gone into space, including the Artemis craft that will take humans back to the moon. That was well put together. Of course, there were computer stations in the lobby where people could see various educational videos or games.
On Saturday, the woman who did the story time in the lobby, just before we went into the star room, handed me a bookmark. It turns out she’s an author. I said we would have to talk after the show. We had a good conversation after, told of our books, and determined to keep in touch. Her name is Lauri Cruver Cherian. Here’s a link to her website. I’m looking forward to exploring her items. Check out her website and books.
Some things you can’t post to your blog, no matter how much you want to. This is one of those times.
The “gig” I referred to in my last post is watching grandkids and their pets in their home. Their parents and the two middle children are on a mission trip to Belize. They have their own difficulties, dealing with a severe water shortage resulting in their camp having running water only one hour a day. The pictures sent out show them doing good work.
Us, at the home front? It’s going. A few moments of excitement:
So that’s the news about my gig. We’ll still be doing it on Monday, when no doubt I’ll have more excitement to report.
It’s watching two of our four grandkids, the four cats, one nuisance of a dog, and the house. Cook, taxi, housekeeper. Doing okay, though I keep forgetting about one step down from the entry to the living room, which is dark and dangerous. May have to put a rug down or something.
Saw our daughter, son-in-law, and two middle grandkids off this morning on a 10 day mission trip to Belize. Here’s hoping all goes well on their end, and ours.
Tried to write today but couldn’t get much done after the hubbub of this morning. Perhaps tomorrow will be better.
And hopefully my Friday post will be better as well.
Time for my Monday blog post. I recently finished reading one book, and abandoned another. But I’m not quite ready to post reviews on them, so I’ll set them aside for now. What to write about?
Recently I’ve written about two special projects I’m working on. One is scanning and e-filing poetry critiques I did at internet poetry boards. The other was transcribing letters from our years in Saudi Arabia with the intention of putting them in book form for our family’s use. The scanning project still has a lot of work. I am unlikely to finish it before the end of summer.
But the Saudi letters are well along. In fact, I finished transcribing them on May 9. I then set about transcribing the travel journal from our 1983 Asia trip. I finished that on Tuesday, I think it was. That gave me a chance to breath and concentrate on the other project. In an intense three days I finished scanning the smaller of two remaining notebooks and thumbed through the other to separate the critiques from miscellaneous writing.
But the work of the next part of the project—loading the Saudi letters into a Word document and making a book out of it—remained. While the transcription work was somewhat daunting, I knew the book organization would also be as well. But I had to get started. Saturday evening, Lynda and I were watching something on TV. I decided this was a perfect time to multi-task. I opened Word, created a document for the book, and began to copy and load the letters into it.
I discovered an easy way to do this on my laptop. During a one hour TV program, I was able to copy in all the letters from 1981, a total of 65 letters. They ranged through all twelve months, but most were from June (when I went to Saudi before the family) to December. I was pleased with the progress.
Sunday night, while watching two programs, over about an hour and a half, using this efficient copying process, I was able to copy in all the letters from 1982 and 1983. This was 159 additional letters, making for 224 for our Saudi adventure.
I felt good about this and sat back, feeling a weight off my shoulders. Then I remembered that I had transcribed three letters from 1984. That was after we were back in the States. But these were letters from friends from our years in the Kingdom, from people who recently left for their home or were still there. That will bring the number of letters to 227, close to the same number as the Kuwait years.
As the document now sits, it consists of 102,000 words. When I add in the travel diary and the last three letters, it will come to about 109,000. That compares to 112,000 words for the completed Kuwait book. But once I add an introduction, and bits of commentary along the way, I suspect the word count for the Saudi book will be closer to 115,000. Strange, perhaps, that the two books should be so close to the same length. Sure, we were in both places almost exactly the same amount of time, 2 1/2 years each. But in Kuwait we had a computer and tended to write longer letters. I expected the Saudi book would finish out shorter than the Kuwait book.
For the Saudi years, we had a lot more incoming letters in our collection, the bulk of them from our two maternal grandparents. When we were in Kuwait, both ladies were too old to write, and indeed both died while we were there, a week apart. But we also had a phone part of the time in Kuwait, which tended to reduce the number of letters by a little.
So what’s next? First, adding the three letters from 1984. Second, adding the travel journal from 1983, which must be spread out over the dates the entries were made. That will actually be a mere hour’s work, which I hope to accomplish today. Next will be writing an introduction. Probably another hour or two. After that, the commentary to be spread around the letters, giving a little context to what was going on in our lives. That’s going to take some time, and I’m not committing to a timeline for completing it.
After that will be proofreading the whole thing. I’m not looking forward to that. It’s tedious comparing the transcription in the book to the original letters. That will take a couple of weeks. Last will be adding photographs and putting the book into publishable formatting. I’m thinking of doing that in late July and August when I’m convalescing. Oops, I haven’t told you about that, but that story will have to wait.
If all goes well, I should have the book finished and published before Christmas. I’ll print off enough copies of it then unpublish it, but leave it uploaded to Amazon just in case the family wants more copies.
Thus, I see this second letter transcription project coming to an end. It was sort of a labor of love, with perhaps a little more emphasis on labor than on love. Will there be another transcription project in the future, maybe of the couple of hundred pre-Saudi letters Lynda and I sent to parents and other relatives? Almost certainly, but don’t hold your breath. I need to breathe a little first, and concentrate on my regular writing.
From May 11 until just the wee hours of May 23, Lynda and I were on a road trip back to New England. The posts you saw during this time were written ahead and scheduled to go live at my normal posting days when I knew it would be difficult to post.
The reason for the timing of the trip was my 50 year reunion of graduating from URI, which was held May 17-18. Of course, other reasons exist to go back there. Our son now works at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. While we have seen him regularly at our place, we hadn’t to where he lived for close to three years. Also, I have family in the area, friends in the area, who I hadn’t seen since 2015.
The trip took much planning. Number of days to drive outbound. Where to stay. Which reunion events to attend. When to hold a family gathering. What kind of buddies gathering we could have. Who to meet up with outside of the main gatherings. Where to stay in New England. When to head home. Many pieces to fit together. I tried to arrange for several other meet-ups, but people were unavailable.
Surprisingly, all turned out well. I booked hotels for the 3-day outbound trip. Always before we’ve taken two days for this drive. When we neared our hotel the first night, Lynda thought it was ridiculous to stop so soon. But stop we did. A traffic tie-up the last half hour made the early stop seem closer to normal. The next day, the early stop seemed more normal. And getting to Worcester the third day seemed totally normal.
We had several days of meals with our son, who had to work every day. We saw the house they’re staying in, lots of the Holy Cross campus, and his office. I wouldn’t say we learned a lot about Worcester, but what we did see we like.
On Friday it was to Rhode Island for the reunion. Part of the day included a stop at the library special collections, which I’ll tell about in a future post. It was good to be on campus. I took time to go to the Memorial Union and visit old haunts, including the student senate chambers, where I spent so much time junior and senior years. My main complaint about the reunion was it wasn’t very well attended.
Saturday was our family gathering, partially catered and partially potluck. We had twenty attend overall, including a surprise visit by my half-sister, who flew up from Florida for the occasion. She got to meet family members she didn’t know before. This was a good time for all.
Lynda and I then rushed back to R.I. for the last reunion event. Sunday was a visit to the cemetery where my family is buried and a tour of places in Providence and Cranston, Then off to Cape Cod for two days, then reverse course with a stop in Worcester on the way out. The drive home we did the old-fashioned way: freestyle, with no plan and no reservations.
The first day heading home, I routed us over the new Cuomo Bridge north of NYC, just because I wanted to see it. Big mistake. That cost us close to an hour lost to heavy traffic. We stopped for the night in central Pennsylvania. The next day we ditched the stopped we had sort of planned at the Columbus zoo and just kept driving. We made it home around 1:15 a.m. Thursday morning after 18 hours of driving.
The trip was good. Maybe this was our last long driving trip. It sure took a lot out of us. Had we flown it would have been 9 days instead of 12. But it was a good trip. Good to see the old house and schools, friends from long ago, and family.
Trip 2 is coming soon. Not near as long a drive, but maybe the same number of days.
With the after-effects of the stoke having slowed my typing, I’ve now for just under a week been back to writing. Typing is still slow, but improving. It’s good to be back in the saddle. That doesn’t mean just on writing, but also on two special projects.
One of those is continuing to scan my genealogy research papers and safe them electronically. I’ve blogged about this before. More than half of my notebooks are culled and the contents either digitized or discarded. But all the easy parts are done. Most of what’s left are for the four family lines I spent the most time on in my research. I’m having to go through them more carefully. Some of the papers, mainly original documents I obtained, I’ll still save after scanning.
I worked on this last Friday and Saturday. I found that my electronic file saving system works, but also that I had a lot more folders to add. Saturday, beginning work on a new notebook, I realized I had in it mainly ancestors for whom I had no electronic folders. Since my folders are alphabetized first on Ahnentafel number, and also indicate the generation of the ancestor, it takes some time to get the folders properly created. Most of my time Saturday was spent on folder creation and organization, but did get some papers scanned, saved, and discarded. I also managed to scoop up about a half-dozen sheets that needed filing elsewhere (i.e. not in a genealogy notebook that’s a keeper) and got them filed. It’s those stragglers that are always a hindrance to keeping my work area clean.
The other special project is transcribing the letters from our years in Saudi Arabia, 1981-1983. I did this for the Kuwait years, 1988-1990 (and some after that) and put them in a book for family members. I blogged about that several times.
Now I’m on the Saudi letters. It’s quite different. No displacement due to war; the kids were little so no letters by them; no phone so we wrote more letters; but no computer so they were all handwritten.
I collected the letters into one bin and collated them some time ago. In early January (I think it was), I began transcribing 1981 letters. They were all done except for the two Christmas letters we sent that year, and one or two more, when I had my stroke. So, before I started back on my writing work, I knuckled down and, with my right hand still typing-impaired, got them done about a week and a half ago.
The total count for the seven months in 1981 was 53 unique letters. There were other items in the bind, but mainly empty envelopes and duplicate letters, where we photocopied a letter and sent it to several people, usually with a personal note attached.
I pulled out the box of letters for 1982 in preparation for the next phase of this task. I counted 75 letters, I think it was (some of them postcards), and some possibly duplicates. A few envelopes felt like they might have been empty. The stack for 1983 looks about the same size.
I don’t have a deadline for either of these projects. The end of 2024 is sort of a loose goal, and, I think, very doable so long as I don’t get lazy. And so long as my regular writing and home upkeep doesn’t overpower my time.
Dateline: Monday, January 15, 2024, Martin Luther King Jr. Day
It’s my regular blogging day. But I woke up this morning to find we have no internet. Thus, I can’t get to the blog to type in a post. I’m writing this on my computer, and will post it whenever the internet comes back to us.
Actually, it has been a horrible weekend for technology. Friday evening our cable kept going haywire. Picture breaking up, sound breaking up, occasional total loss of signal. We suffered through and saw a few things. Wound up streaming something via Amazon Prime, which worked. Or was that Saturday? The days are running together.
Anyhow, called Cox. They said they would have a technician out between 3 and 5 yesterday, and said it might involve a $75 charge. We had internet all day yesterday, but no cable.
The Cox tech was a no-show. But it snowed yesterday, a little over 2 inches, and the temperature never got above 1°, so I kind of understand why the tech didn’t make it. A call telling us that would have been nice. Alas, service providers of every type have ceased being proactive in communicating with their customers in this age of easy communication. Will it do any good to call the office today, on the holiday?
My post today was to be about January being off to a good start. I am one or two days away from the last editing pass through A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1. Granddaughter Elise got the cover art done. So either tomorrow or Wednesday I’ll begin publishing tasks.
The first week of the year, while in Lake Jackson, I had a conversation with Elise about the next book in The Forest Throne series, and she read the prologue I wrote based on our prior conversations. She loved it, reading it aloud while our daughter was in the room and putting much drama into the reading. So a good start there on a project just a little down the road. Also, youngest grandson Elijah wanted to have a conversation about the fourth book in the series, which will be about the youngest child in the Wagner family. That book is planned for about four years from now. But we had the conversation and I got some ideas on paper. I may type them up and see what that future book will look like.
I began transcribing the letters from our Saudi Arabia years. This was one of my realistic goals. On Fri-Sat-Sun, I typed five letters each day. I’m going to limit myself to five a day so as to keep the project from overwhelming me as the letters from the Kuwait years did. I have no idea how many total letters there are. As I look at the piles, it appears to be about 300, which is close to double the number in the previous project. But as we had no typewriter (or computer in 1981-83), the letters will likely average a little shorter.
I did a little reading for research for the next book in the Documenting America series. Not much, but a little. What I read, however, makes me wonder if I’m on the right track with this volume. I’ll discuss that more in a future blog post.
I also have made a good start on an author interview for a future blog post. Possibly today I’ll be able to pull my interview questions together and send them to him.
Well, our internet just came up, so I will wrap this up and post this. I’ll have to leave The Dungeon to go upstairs to see if the cable TV is up. I’m not optimistic. But I’m still optimistic in general about 2024. I still expect to see those realistic goals met. But we will see.