Category Archives: family

family, Genealogy, stock market

Two Great Days

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I write this Thursday evening. It will be sort of a journal entry of the good things that happened the last two days. Having completed a writing project last week, I decided to take a week off from writing tasks. How to fill the time?

My work area in The Dungeon is still a mess. I have to make a concentrated effort at clean-up.

Wednesday morning I awoke feeling pretty good. After Bible reading and prayer in The Dungeon, I gave brief attention to one notebook of letters my late father-in-law left to us at his death. I’m very slowly, limiting myself to one letter a day so that the project doesn’t overwhelm me, converting the letters to digital files, either scanning or transcribing as needed. I started out working on my one letter for the day and dispatched that task quickly.

I then took time to finish my checkbook register, which I now keep as a spreadsheet due to my diminished handwriting after my last stroke. I didn’t quite finish that task, but I got it to the point that I should be able to finish it in about 30 minutes of budgeting. I had sort of planned to do that today, but decided to put it off till tomorrow.

At that point, I decided to get back into stock & options trading. I haven’t done this since my first seizure in December and thus haven’t earned any money—except for dividends on a few positions and interest. As it happened, I didn’t have too many positions when the seizure happened. Thus I didn’t participate very much in the market turmoil that has marked 2025 thus far. But Wednesday morning I put on a one day trade, and it closed at full profit. Made $102. Today I did the same thing, and made another $92. I’ll put that money aside for vacation. Hopefully today I’ll be able to make a similar low-risk trade and make it a trifecta.

That brought me to 9 a.m. and breakfast. Wednesday is our normal trash day, but on a holiday week it is usually delayed a day. But the City had nothing about the delay, nor did the trash company. Being unsure, I got the trash out right after breakfast.

Then it was back to The Dungeon, with 1 1/2 hours to kill until a writing networking time via Zoom. I decided to work on some e-file maintenance. I have over 2,900 files I’ve scanned and saved to a proper filing system, but never checked the scans to make sure they saved properly and then deleted the scan file. So I went back to doing that (I’d done a little the last couple of weeks). In that time, I was able to check around 75 files. Maybe two I couldn’t find in the place I expected to find them, so I saved or re-saved them, taking time to do a better job of choosing the right folder and a good file name. This is not high priority work—just something useful to do in odd minutes between things. But it felt good.

Then came the Zoom meeting, a time of on-line networking with other struggling writers. About 45 were on the Zoom meeting. We were divided into break-out rooms for 15 minutes, then shuffled into other break-out rooms. With some general discussion time, this fill 90 minutes of the planned two hours. At that point I dropped out. I came to realize that this kind of networking probably wasn’t the best use of my time. I’ll likely skip the next one.

Next came lunch and my reading time in the sunroom. I read a few pages in a magazine I’m trying to get through and get rid of, then almost my daily quota in an interesting literature book. I usually struggle to get all my reading done, but was able to come close in this session, though I still needed to carve out some time.

After that, since the ground was soaked from five straight days of rain, outdoor work would have been difficult so it was back to The Dungeon, monitor my stock trade, and on to the next task. I decided to do some genealogy research, spurred on to this from having dealt with some scanned genealogy files that morning. I decided to concentrate on my step-grandfather, find out little more about his first wife and his descendants with her.

Without boring you with the details, I found out a whole bunch, expanding a start to the research I had done the previous July. I created a file or two, corrected a couple of mistakes in on-line genealogy sites, and filled in a bunch of gaps. I worked on this the rest of the day, taking time off only to eat supper and watch some of the Titanic Sub documentary on the Discovery Channel.

I went to bed about 11, but my mind was so full of the productive day’s activities I knew I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. But surprisingly, I think I did after wrestling my mind to quit dwelling on the good day just finished. Alas, a small disturbance later and I was wide awake. I got up at ten minutes after midnight and read. I completed the few pages left in the daily quota of the literature book and read in a missions book that I’m trying to get through simultaneously with the literature book. That was good.

You might ask, “How was it good to lose sleep?” Not to lose sleep, but to get my reading in. Instead of going back to bed, which would just wake me up, I turned the light out and leaned back the recliner. I must have fallen asleep right away, for the next thing I knew it was three hours later. The time I went back to bed and slept another three hours.

That brought me to Thursday morning, to the same routines tackled and finished. Except, instead of organizing files, I completed my research on my step-grandfather and his first wife and did most of the work of properly documenting that research. When I say “finished,” that’s a relative term. Genealogy research into anyone is never complete. You just come to stopping points and take breaks, waiting for that time to pick up that strain of research again.

Oh, and perhaps the best part of these two good days: I identified a grandson of my step grandfather, reached out to him on social media, and he responded. He and I are step-first cousins. We had a nice exchange of messages. Connecting with a newly found family member is always good.

What does Friday hold? Probably decumulation tasks, and getting closer to going through photos from one of our four main family lines.

Decumulation, family, Genealogy, History

The Burden of Photos

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The infamous “Jacob’s Well photo”. One copy should be sufficient. The next generation will most likely toss it.

Of the many things our parents left us, or came to us in other ways, I think the most burdensome is photos.

Photos? Yes, photos. Those pesky little glossy things, or some matte finish, depicting people of long ago, houses once owned or lived in, vehicles once driven, and landscapes visited. No doubt those who left them to us thought, “What a treasure this is for our children (or grandchildren), to see great-aunt Matilda all dressed up for the derby. Oh how they will cherish them.”

No idea who these people are. Cool car, though.

Except nobody now alive ever met great-aunt Matilda. Only those who studied the family genealogy knows who she was and how she fits into the family relationships. And only those who ever will study genealogy will ever care.

This was the situation after a week’s worth of work on the 5,000.

Photos tend to add up. Just looking at the photos on Lynda’s side of the family, I estimate that we have 8,000 photos. No, I’m not exaggerating. That’s probably 3,000 from her dad’s side and 5,000 from her mom’s side. Just looking at her dad’s side, he was something of a hobbyist photographer. He inherited various family photos from his parents, who got at least some of them from their parents. He looked at those old photos, some as tiny at 2×3 inches, and had enlargements made; then multiple copies of the enlargements; then smaller copies having the developer play around with the tint and border and resolution. So one tiny old photo marked “Jacob’s Well” on the back was shown to be a photo of his grandfather’s family, showing two older men, one older woman, and seven children (the youngest not yet born)—some on horses, some standing on the rocky landscape.

Jacob’s Well is a feature in Clark County, Kansas, now incorporated into a park. Except we’ve visited the park—not every square inch of it, mind you—the landscape looks more like what you see at the family ranch in Logan Township, Meade County, Kansas. I could believe the photo is mis-labeled, except another family member in another branch that didn’t even know each other until 2015 has a copy of the exact same 2×3 photo and it is also labeled “Jacob’s Well.” What to do?

Is this photo a keeper? Surely it’s the Cheney family, but how do you identify the people? One of the older men is the father, Seth. The other is uncle Frank Best (most likely). The older woman is mother Sarah, the youngest child Rose, the older girl Cora. But which of the others are William, Clarence, James, and Walter? We can make an educated guess, based on size. But these people were all standing at least 20 yards away from the cameraman. There’s really no way of knowing who’s who.

The photo is from 1898, based on Charlie, the youngest child, being born in 1899. The question becomes: how important is it to keep this photo? And the multiple copies of the enlargement? And the multiple copies of different tints, borders, and resolutions?

This has come up now because another family member, who didn’t want the photos when Lynda’s dad died in 1996, has accused us of hoarding them because we didn’t drag them out every Thanksgiving and Christmas so that we could look at them “as a family.” Now he wants to look at them, divvy them up, and do so at a high school reunion in July. Even though we would have to impose on a relative for a venue. Even though Lynda was thinking she didn’t particularly want to go to the reunion. And actually, the demand to go through the photos included the 5,000 from the other side of the family. It is physically impossible. Reunions are times to see friends, swap stories, share meals. How will it be possible to sort through these photos and make decisions on their final resting place on a reunion weekend, even if you layover a couple of extra days? You can’t; it’s impossible. And some day, we’ll have to do the same with all the photos we took over the years.

So we are going through them. Album by album, box by box, folder by folder. After three weeks, we can see a little light at the end of the tunnel on the 3,000 (estimated) from the dad’s side, and have made some progress, at least to the point of knowing what we have, on the mom’s side. Duplicates have been identified and those we want removed from the overall collection as keepers. The albums have been checked and are currently being re-checked. Four other albums have been consolidated into two and are ready for re-checking. We are very close to boxing the non-keepers and shipping them to this family member with a note saying, “We’re so done with these; keep what you want, destroy the rest.” The other 5,000 will hopefully follow in about two more weeks.

Yes, destroy them. Our kids won’t want them. We don’t know anyone else’s kids that want them or even want to see them.

What was meant to be a blessing, and what served as a blessing to three or four generations and maybe 100 people, are now a burden. Let them die a peaceful death.

expatriate life, family, letters, self-publishing

The Saudi Years In Letters

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The work is nearly complete on this non-commercial project. My proof copy should arrive by Wednesday next week.

Family, friends, and regular readers of this blog know that we lived in Saudi Arabia once upon a time. That was in mid-1981 to 1983. Our children were 2 1/2 and 5 mo. when we first went there. The company I worked for at the time, Black & Veatch, had lots of engineering work in the Saudi Eastern Province, and I was one of those sent there for civil-environmental engineering work.

At the time, the Iran-Iraq war was in its second year. The country was still rather primitive. The road network was good, and rapidly being improved. The shops were full of the world’s goods; you could find almost everything you wanted (except when all shipments of peanut butter were held up in customs for a month). Plenty of other expatriates lived and worked nearby, and we struck up fast friendships. And we had a church to go to, meeting with permission of the Saudi government on the condition that no evangelism of Saudi natives take place.

But the one thing we didn’t have was a telephone. That infrastructure was way behind in development, and only offices, stores, government offices, and probably a few wealthy Saudis had phones. We could go to the B&V office and make calls (frightfully expensive), or, if previously arranged, receive one.  So to keep in touch with the home front, we wrote letters. That seems almost anachronistic now, but a fair amount of our time was devoted to writing letters. I wrote about this before concerning our years in Kuwait from 1988-1990.

Transcribed in 2020-2022 and published in 2022, this was my first collection of letters to publish.

Back in 2020 to 2022, I spent a lot of time transcribing letters from the Kuwait years and making a book out of them. It was just for family members. I think a total of four copies were bought (3 by me) before I removed it from sale. My second-oldest grandson read it and seemed to like it. He enjoyed reading errors in his mother’s letters. She was 6, 7, 8, 9 years-old at the time. His family’s copy of the book is on the bookshelf in his bedroom.

Having completed the Kuwait years letters, I took a break for a while, other than bringing our letters-in-hand to a better state of organization. Then, in early 2024, while recovering from my first stroke and not getting out much or doing original writing, I decided to transcribe the Saudi letters. I had almost all of them done by September when I had my second, bigger stroke and my open-heart surgery. In October, our daughter visited us and began the process of selecting photos to illustrate the book and scanning them.

The letters, along with my 1983 travel journal.

I completed the scanning last month and cropped them and loaded them into the book document over the last two weeks, taking time to arrange the photos in some logical way relative to the text of the letters. I finished the process yesterday. A quick pass through the book showed that my pagination was acceptable. So, this morning I “slapped” a cover together and uploaded the book to Amazon. One photo needed adjusting, which I got done. The Zon then said the book was acceptable. I ordered a proof copy. I’ll use the copy to doing any proof-reading needed, and will have the finished product ready in a month, maybe less.

This book is more richly illustrated than the Kuwait letters book was. I’m coming to learn a little about working with photos and how to use the tools at my disposal. I’m far from an expert, but I’m for sure better at it now than I was three years ago.

I’m scheduled to make a presentation to our letter writers group on letter collections when we meet on June 10. My voice has not fully recovered from the stroke and seizures, but I think it has enough to allow me to make myself legible. Thus, I think I will present this rather than one of the letter collections I’ve read.

family, home improvements, miscellaneous

Still Too Busy

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Yes, between decumulation and getting ready for a trip and dealing with health issues, finding time to write a meaningful blog post just isn’t there. I thought of it Thursday night, but was dealing with purposeful sleep deprivation for an EEG on Wednesday that effectively took three days out of my week. Friday found me too busy trying to wrap up several decumulation tasks. Last night I sorted through two 3-ring binders, and got rid of one and all the papers it held.

Work continues on that decumulation, but I see lots of progress. I’m hoping that this week we will take a load of miscellaneous things to the new Goodwill donation center that opened just a mile from our house. I’m hoping also this week to begin going through old family photos of Lynda’s paternal family, take electronic pictures of those we want copies of, and send the rest on to relatives. That depends, however, on Lynda being well enough to look at them.

Today I will do two main tasks. First, create electronic forms for 2025. I didn’t do this in January because I didn’t get December’s finished. So to do his, it means first finishing December, copying the files to 2025 files, making the few alterations for the new year, and entering January’s data. I’m talking about family budget, book sales, and stock trading records. This will take about two hours, I think. Second will be filing a mass of papers that have accumulated on my worktable in The Dungeon. A lot of these are health papers, and I hope they go into place fairly easily. Still, this is probably an all-day task.

Whether I get to do a little writing or not is up in the air. It would be nice to find an hour to write, but I make no promises.

family, holidays

Happy Thanksgiving

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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.

family, home improvements, Writing

Help Is Coming

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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.

Bible study, family

Trip 2 Is In The Bag

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A tender moment, as Elijah cuddled with one of the cats, I think in his sleep.

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.

One morning, I heard a ruckus, and found the gate that keeps the dog out of the upstairs down. It was almost a two-person job to get it back in place again.,

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.

family, Writing

The Planetarium and More

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A good time at the planetarium.

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.

Elijah, spaceman in training.

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.

Lauri Cruver Cherian, author

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.

Christianity, family, travel

An Eventful Week

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A fun time at the library. Elijah is the one in the gray t-shirt in the middle.

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.

75 pound dog named Nuisance tests strength of restricting gate, Details at 5.

Us, at the home front? It’s going. A few moments of excitement:

  • Yesterday, a coral snake (venomous) in the front yard. The dog found it, but fortunately I wasn’t the one walking it this year. My shoulder still hurts from last year’s snake-dog interaction.
  • Also yesterday, an altercation in the house between the dog, affectionately nicknamed Nuisance by me, and a cat or two resulted in a gate that restricts the dog’s access to the second floor. Took me a half hour to put it back in place.
  • Monday, as the mission team was leaving, a wallet went missing in the house. After an all hands search, they had to leave without it. Five minutes later we found it (a long story) and we rushed it to the rendezvous point so they could make it to the airport on time.
  • The dish I made on Monday we are still eating. The trying-not-to-be-seen teenager ate only one meal of it, then has been having cereal.
  • Found a missing library card. It was in the garage. I found it while gathering up recyclables yesterday. No idea how it got there.
  • Elijah and I went to the library Tuesday for a program, only to find I misread the schedule and it was on Wednesday. So we went back Wednesday. It was a good program and Elijah liked it.
  • Tomorrow we go to a 1:00 p.m. program at the local planetarium. If it’s good, we might go back Saturday and Tuesday for other programs.
  • Meanwhile, I’ve been unable to get much writing done. I won’t make my goals for this month.

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.

Christianity, family, travel

Got A Gig

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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.