I said on Monday this would be a busy week, and it was, even busier than I thought it would be.
Tuesday, I made my presentation to the NW Arkansas Letter Writers Society. This was a repeat of my presentation “The Universal Postal Union: The Letter Writer’s Friend”. We were eight in number at the meeting, and attenders seemed interested. At the end of the presentation, we brainstormed other things I might talk about in future meetings.
Wednesday, I went to John Tyson Elementary School in Springdale, AR, and presented copies of There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel to my beta readers, Heny and Izzy, and to their E.A.S.T. facilitator, Jennifer Bogart. It was good to meet these two students and chat with them a while. The school had the school district media people there. There was a post about it on the school district’s website, but I can’t find the link now.
Then Thursday was the semi-monthly meeting of our critique group, the Scribblers & Scribes. We had five in attendance, one who was a new member and another I hadn’t met before. All five of us had some writing to share, and we went from 6 p.m. to a little after 8:30 p.m. It was quite a variety of writing to review.
I had a good time making the last-minute presentation to the homeschool group—and I sold a few books as well.
That’s what I had on the writer/author schedule at the beginning of the week. But Thursday I received a message from a woman I’d sold some books to (both used books and some of mine), saying I should look for a text. It was already there, asking me if I would make a presentation to a homeschool group at their Constitution Day, which was the next day, Friday morning—this morning. I said yes, of course, knowing I had only 24 hours to prepare. The meeting was at a park in Bentonville. The students were from ages 5-17, including a good group of teenagers, and all had a parent or grandparent with them. I made what I think was a good presentation, though mostly at the level of the older kids there rather than the younger. The parents all seemed to like it, based on comments I received afterwards. I sold a good number of books in my Documenting America series. And I got a few orders for books that people will want around November.
So now I have an easing in my schedule. Time to take care of car maintenance and yardwork and grocery shopping. And, perhaps, squeezing in a little writing.
I hope to do some writing on the sequel to this this week.
It’s Sunday evening as I write this, multi-tasking as we watch the specials about 9/11. I’m looking ahead to tomorrow, and realize I don’t have time to write the type of post I’d hoped to have for Monday. Even Friday is a little iffy for a post that takes a lot of time.
This is a killer week. Not so Monday and Friday, but the other days have a lot of activities and appointments.
First, I have two “gigs” this week. On Tuesday, I will repeat my presentation on the Universal Postal Union to the NW Arkansas Letter Writers Society. I made this presentation in May, but almost everyone who normally attends was gone that day. So I’ll do it again. Fortunately, all I have to do is dust off my PowerPoint and run through it once or twice.
Then, Wednesday morning, I am to be at John Tyson Elementary School in Springdale (40 mile drive), where I will make a presentation of There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel to Henry and Izzy, the two students I had Zoom meetings with about a writing project they were doing, then had them be beta readers for my book. They don’t know I’ll be there and giving them the finished book. This will be at 9:00 a.m.
I have several hundred more of these WW2 newspapers to inventory.
Then, at 12:00 noon, I have an appointment with my cardiologist’s P.A. Hopefully I’ll learn how well the cardio rehab program went. Between those two appointments, I’m hoping to meet someone for coffee. We’ll see if that happens.
Then, Wednesday afternoon, Lynda and I have dental appointments. I’ll barely have time to get home after seeing the cardiologist to leave for the dentist. But, unless we head to church that night, that will end appointments on Wednesday.
At noon on Thursday, Lynda will have her MRI to find out what, exactly, caused her sciatica attach in July. That has been twice delayed, not because of us, but because of insurance and provider problems. Then, that evening, is a semi-monthly meeting of the Scribblers & Scribes critique group. I’ll have some preparation time required for that.
In addition to this, I have my normal activities, which at the moment include:
morning 2-mile walks
digitizing a minimum of 10 printed letters a day
inventorying a minimum of 30 issues of the Stars and Stripes
whatever writing I can squeeze in, most likely on The Key To TimeTravel, though I have other projects to work on as well, if I want to do so.
A little bit of yard work, although the work I got done on Saturday puts me a little ahead of where I normally am.
reading for research as well as for pleasure, including a couple of C.S. Lewis writings.
At some point, I need to begin the strength exercise program recommended in the cardio rehab program. I hope to begin that on Monday.
So yes, it will be a busy week. Hopefully I’ll be able to see progress on all my tasks.
A period of intense research is what led to this book. What will come of this new time of research?
Somewhere, in the back pages of this blog, I’ve said that I love research. I find that it motivates me. But research, I have also found, has a dark side—at least for me it does—in that it can all too easily become all consuming.
Two research opportunities came up recently, and I am trying very hard to resist the urge to dive in fully.
One has to do with genealogy. This month, one of my few book sales is of my genealogy book, Stephen Cross and Elizabeth Cheney of Ipswich. That’s the second of these books sold since I published it in July 2020. Then, a day or so after that sale, I was browsing through my Google Books library, looking for a new download, and saw a copy of a two-years volume of The Essex Antiquarian, a genealogy and history magazine. The volume I downloaded and started reading years ago was from 1898. Of course I had to open it.
But rather than read on, I decided to search the book for “Cheney”, my wife’s maiden name. The family was in Essex County, Massachusetts for a while, some in Ipswich, including Stephen and Elizabeth Cross. I found several hits for Cheney, four of which were for John Cheney of Newbury, the immigrant ancestor of the family.
I’ve done a lot of research on John Cheney, and possibly he and his wife Martha will be the subjects of my next genealogy book. That book, however, is so far down the line that I don’t have dates for writing it. But, I had this opportunity: four items related to him published in a 1898 magazine were at my fingertips on my screen. I pulled up my John Cheney research document, and learned that two of those hits were new information. I dutifully made the new entries and did comprehensive source documentation. Beautiful. A pleasant 30 minutes spent.
That wasn’t good enough. I searched for other editions of that magazine, and found several more, available for full viewing. I did the Cheney search over several volumes, and found additional information about John Cheney that was new. Repeated the entries and documentation. A pleasant 2 hours spent.
The next day I repeated and expanded this, looking for information, not only for Cheney, but for other family names, including Cross. I also found a longer article about a Newbury man that John Cheney supported in a controversy with the government. Rather than take time to read that (six pages), I made a note of where to find it again. Two more hours spent.
Within a year, these will be going to the University of Rhode Island library. While it will be sad to see them go, it will also be a joy knowing they will be well cared for and properly preserved and available for study.
The other research opportunity came with the many copies of the Stars and Stripes newspaper that I have. As noted in previous posts, these were newspapers that Dad worked on in Africa and Europe during WW2, copies of which he sent home to his parents, to be stored in an old steamer trunk to this day. As I reported earlier, I’m donating them to the University of Rhode Island. I decided to inventory them first, and began that process on Labor Day.
With every Bill Mauldin cartoon I see, I wonder if Dad modeled for that one.
Tuesday, I continued. My inventory method consists of recording the day, date, and edition—also whether the copy has any damage or not. By the end of my dedicated time on Tuesday, I had a total of 70 listed. Only 700 to go. I’m purposely not taking time to look at the newspapers. I will make a couple of exceptions to that as I get further into this.
But, on Tuesday, I saw a headline, “U.S. Woman Writer Held by Russia as Spy”. That sounded interesting, and I read the article. The writer was Anna Louise Strong (1885-1970). She was an American who became a socialist, then found sympathy with the Soviet Union and Communist China. Much of her writing was promoting the economic systems in those two countries. Why the Russians kicked her out is a mystery, but it seems some think it was her cozy relationship with China that was the problem.
Much of that I learned from the article about her at Wikipedia, not in the newspaper.
Anna Strong is a new person to me. I’ve never heard of her before. Thirty minutes of reading gave me the gist of what her views were, views very different from mine. A few quotes of hers made me think of things that need to be said about the capitalist and communist systems. I could easily write something about that, given a little more research.
When I first got Dad’s Stars and Stripes, in 1997, I had dreams of doing war research in them, thinking about the fog of war. How much of what the newspaper reported would prove to be true or untrue? How much does journalism get wrong, requiring history to set the record straight? Alas, after 25 years, the newspapers remained untouched. My research project null and void. I suppose I could pick it up again, but I can see that would require years of research and then some writing. No, I just can’t dedicate that time to that project. So off the papers go to URI. Perhaps students, faculty, or outside researchers will someday use them to good purposes.
More research? No! In the last three days I’ve spent over five hours on research and almost none on writing. That can’t be. I’ve got to find a way to pull away from it and concentrate on the tasks at hand. I have three books in the pipeline, started and unfinished. I need to choose one and get it done.
An excellent book about a man who suffered horrendously at the hands of the Soviet communists.
When you are a buyer of used books, you sometimes wonder where you got this or that book, how long you’ve had it, and why you bought it. So it is with the book Witness: An Autobiography by Josyp Terelya with Michael H. Brown. Terelya was a prisoner in the USSR in the 1960s-80s because of his Christian faith.
The reason I wonder why we bought the book is because Terelya is Ukrainian Catholic, which is attached to the Roman Catholic Church. As a Protestant, I’m not anti-Catholic, but I don’t usually read Catholic books. I suspect we bought this at a thrift store, based on the price marking.
However, it is an excellent book. Terelya was born to Communist parents in Ukraine during World War 2. In fact, they were leading communists and very much in favor of Ukraine being part of the Soviet Union. Terelya was influence by his grandparents and others, and became a devout Catholic, much to his parents’ dismay. The USSR suppressed religion, especially any religions that competed with the Russian Orthodox Church.
When Terelya became an adult, he did not hide his religious observances, and was soon put in prison for it. He escaped. He was captured and his sentence increased. Put in a more secure prison, he escaped again. He was beaten, spent much time in solitary confinement, Food rations were inadequate. He developed health problems. The guards also tried to break him psychologically, with frequent interrogations and beatings. As a consequence of his long imprisonment, he developed chronic health problems.
Through this, Terelya survived. He found ways to share his faith and prepare printed materials. Once when he was released for a couple of years, he married and fathered his first child. In later years, two more children were added to the family.
A portion of the book deals with “appearances” of Mary, the mother of Jesus, over a several week period in a small Ukranian village in 1987. Terelya was out of prison by then and took part in observing the visions. He went into considerable detail about these.
My wife and I read the book aloud in the evenings, taking about a month to complete it (with a few interruptions). I’m glad we did. It was unexpectedly timely due to the current war in Ukraine, and it told us a piece of history we had no idea of. Learning new things while being entertained is a good thing.
The book, published in 1991, is likely out of print. But it is worth the read if you can find it. I give it 4-stars, it losing one star due to what I consider an overabundance of placenames without providing a map to give at least a basic idea where places were. Alas, the book is not a keeper. We are going to give it away to a Catholic relative, and hope they, in turn, pass it on to someone who will enjoy it.
New month, time for a progress report and new goals. First, the progress report. Here are the goals I posted at the beginning of August.
Attend three writing group meetings in person. This includes making the presentation at one on Aug 9. Done. My presentation went very well, I think.
Blog twice a week, Monday and Friday. I think I missed one day, my first complete miss in a long time. With all that was going on, that wasn’t too bad.
Write at least two more chapters in The Key To Time Travel. I did not complete this. I worked on one chapter, and got it mostly done in first draft.
Write at least two more episodes of Tales Of A Vagabond. I still don’t know what I will do with this. I need to get a little more into it before I can assess if this is a viable item for Kindle Vella. I worked on TOAV, perhaps a little more than I should have. I have completed five episodes. Now to see how I can program this, how many episodes out. At the moment, I’m thinking of setting it aside and get on other projects.
Continue to program the next Bible study. The tentative title is Death Kindly Stopped For Me. I have now prepared lesson notes for three of the seven lessons in this series. I feel good enough about it that I can definitely schedule it to start in October. Now I need to make a trailer for it. Oops, that goals, not progress.
Do some marketing of There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel. Also need to close a couple of sales of this. I did a little marketing on this, but not much. Closed two sales.
So it was a so-so month. I’m not unhappy with it. I gave a lot of time to my paper files digitalization project, and likely will be doing that for a few months. That cuts into my writing time.
On to September.
Attend 3 writers group meetings, all in person, including making a presentation at the NW Arkansas Letter Writers Society on 9/13.
Blog twice a week on Monday and Friday, as always.
Concentrate my limited writing time on The Key To Time Travel. I won’t put a word or chapter goal. I’m in the middle of Chapter 2 currently.
Figure out how to make a trailer for my Bible study, Death Kindly Stopped For Me. It will be a simple trailer, but lots to study to make it happen.
Hopefully, get back to work on the two Bible studies I set aside a couple of months ago. One needs only an introduction and maybe 1,000 more words in the narrative to be finished. The other I estimate at 70 percent finished. Sure would be nice to find an hour here and there to work on them.
I think that’s it. Possibly more than I can accomplish, but it’s something to shoot for.
Hurricane season is upon us. So will be the claims that the number of hurricanes we see is evidence of climate change.
You hear it all the time. “Look at this cold snap. No way does global warming exist,” or “See how hot the summer it? That proves global warming exists,” or “Tornadoes, hurricanes, and blizzards show that climate change is really happening.”
If only it were that easy. We need to learn to differentiate weather from science. Weather is what’s happening today, what’s predicted to happen for the next 15 days, and maybe what the different almanacs suggest will happen over the next couple of seasons. Climate is the norm for the area, based on years and years of data.
How many years? Well, if I’m remembering what I learned in “Earth Sciences”, 2nd semester freshman year (1971), with professor Dr Edward Higbee, climate is figured on a 40-year basis. Average the conditions over the last 40 years, and there’s your climate. Once you have a new year of data, drop the year 41 years ago, add the new year, recalculate the average. A 40-year moving average.
I wonder if I’m remembering that correctly. Forty years seems a very short time to say this is our climate. Seems like a hundred, or several hundred, or even a thousand years would be better to define climate.
The problem is available data. A thousand years ago, no one was taking daily or hourly temperatures in 6,000 stations spaced scientifically around the world. No one was measuring upper atmospheric temperatures. That’s not to say we have no evidence of what the climate was 1000 years ago, but we don’t have much data.
Which leads me to wonder if 40 years was chosen more based on convenience than science. Sometime, maybe 80 or 100 years ago, someone decided to base climate on 40 years of data because that’s how much comprehensive data they had accumulated to that point. So they established the 40-year moving average as the basis for climate.
There may be some validity to the 40 years. I just don’t know. That seems short enough that the data can be skewed by certain events. For example, I said in a prior post that I thought the “mini-ice age” of the 1960s-70s was caused by air pollution—lots of particulate matter in the global atmosphere. It took a decade before the positive impacts of the Clean Air Act of 1969 began to have an impact. Maybe by 1990-ish, the atmosphere was cleaner, and temperatures worldwide were probably back to their norm. But, the data from 1950-1975 (call them the years of maximum pollution) still dominated the 40-year moving average, a.k.a. the climate. In fact, it wouldn’t be until 2015 that the impact of the mini-ice age was fully gone from the climate average and we had an accurate picture of the climate and if it was changing.
Now, if you say that the worst of the polluting years were 1950-1975, and I’d accept arguments that maybe it was a little different than that, then you also have years on either side of those that were also polluting years, just maybe not quite so much. So the 1940s and 1975-1985, say, were also polluting years, but perhaps less so. I’d make the argument that beginning in 1986, global average temperatures would start to go up as atmospheric pollution went down, and be noticeable in the change in the moving average over the previous five years, because you dropped off the polluting years of 1940-1945 and added the normal, non-polluting years (or call them the much less polluting years) of 1980-1985. And it appears you have global warming. Continue another 10 years and you drop more polluting years, add more normal years, and boom, you have higher temperatures.
The change was indeed manmade, but in this case man’s polluting his world in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, and reducing his pollution in the 1980s, 90s, 00s, etc.
Does this make sense? It does to me. I need to study some data to see if my suppositions are correct. No, suppositions is not the right word. It’s more musing, or all-other-causes elimination. Those who claim climate change is totally manmade need to consider whether coming out of the polluting years might have skewed the data for 20 years, because for 20 years we were killing out atmosphere with pollution.
In a later post in this series, I’m going to talk about longer-term climate and whether that’s changing as a result of mankind’s activities.
The first six after-exercising bp readings were on a machine like this. The last one, which was barely acceptable, was done manually.
I had good intentions, I really did, of getting my blog post written today. But much of yesterday was taken up with critique group issues and with seeing a cousin in the hospital. His back surgery was scheduled for 3:00 pm, but kept getting pushed back, finally to 5 pm. But around 6 the surgeon came in and said the hospital wasn’t ready and they would do the surgery today.
So we went back today. The surgery happened today from 7:30 to 10:30, and we stayed with his wife. At one point, I stood up to check the progress board. Took about 10 steps then felt woozy and my steps became plodding and irregular. Before I knew it I was on the floor. I never passed out, but couldn’t stand.
I guess, if that’s going to happen to you, it’s good for it to be at a hospital. The attendant for the waiting room called for nurses from the surgery area and three of them were by my side in less than a minute. People helped me to a chair and I felt fine. I figured it was a low blood sugar episode, and they brought me some orange juice and crackers. Actually, as soon as I got to the chair it was as if nothing had happened.
Fast forward to this afternoon and my cardio rehab session. My blood pressure before exercising was 113/60. I’m normally around 105 or 110/65. I alerted the nurse assigned to me about my morning incident so that she might watch me a little closer than normal. I did my exercises fine and felt as normal at the end. A different nurse took my bp and it was 87/48—too low to let me go. She came back in a few minutes and it was 82/42. They gave me some water and it was 78/39. More water, elevated feet. It went up to 87/48ish. I walked around and felt fine. More water, more sitting. Up to 89/60. I think they poured two more cups of water into me and some more rest, and it finally got up to 92/52, ok for me to go.
They insisted on walking me to my car, except I wasn’t going to my car. I was going to the hospital next door to see my cousin. So my nurse walked me there. I felt fine, all the time after exercising, even while they were getting low readings, and while visiting my cousin and his wife. I drove the 20 miles home with no problem.
All of which leads me to believe that this morning it might have been a low blood pressure event, not low blood sugar. I messaged my doctors about stopping the (very) low dose blood pressure med I’m on. No answer yet.
Maybe my exercise and weight loss are paying off. I’ve lost 15 pounds since June 7, about 10 of that coming in the last three weeks. I’ve been walking in the early morning, usually from 6:45 to 7:30-ish, covering 1.5 to 1.75 miles. I’ve done that almost every weekday and one Saturday. Plus the exercise at cardio rehab, and I’ve been getting a lot of steps and burning the calories. Eating better, too.
We’ll see what the doc says. Maybe I’ll be off that bp med by early next week.
Meanwhile, sorry once again that I didn’t get my post written for today. Will try again on Monday.
If there is anyone who reads this blog regularly, including on days when I don’t make mention of a post on Facebook, they will note that I missed posting last Friday. I can’t think of the last time I totally missed a post. A few times I’ve made a minimal post late in the day. A few other times I did my post a day late. But it’s been a long time since I totally missed one.
Why did I? One reason was our son was here for a week’s visit. A few weeks back, when Lynda’s sciatica came on very strong and debilitating, he was ready to hop on a plan in Chicago and come right down to help out. We advised him not to at that time, and he complied, but he scheduled to come see us at his first opportunity after this. He came last Sunday and left Saturday.
He had to work remotely much of the week—it wasn’t vacation for him. After his workday ended, he helped us in our decluttering process. The main target was the garage. This has become a catchall place for things we wanted to get rid of, but we never seemed to get around to deciding what was trash, what was for donation, and what, if anything, actually needed to go back into the house.
We already had a donation pile. Tuesday we worked around 3 hours, sorting trash from donation vs keepers. We had a full trash barrel and a large donation pile. Wednesday evening early, Charles and I loaded that in the van and took the stuff to Goodwill. Then we worked another three hours. Thursday, I had writing critique group meeting. I worked a little that afternoon on organization, and that evening drove the car into the garage. That hasn’t happened for 15 years.
Friday evening, we drove into Bentonville, took a walk on the Chrystal Bridges Trail, then walked to the square and ate at a somewhat fancy restaurant. At least it was a good restaurant. Then it was walk around a little to find a certain store, then get some ice cream. Saturday, we took Charles to the airport, dropped a few electronic items off at the Benton County recycling facility (for a cost), came home, and relaxed for the rest of the day. I could have written a post then, but I just wanted to read. I also worked on an inside the house project: converting paper files to electronic files. I did that to 10 old letters. This is a long-term project that I do a little on each day, and hope to get done in around a year.
The other reason is that our air conditioner went out. That was last Saturday. We suffered through it until Monday our HVAC guy got here and gave us the bad news: complete replacement, costing in 5 figures. But supply chain issues means we won’t get the replacement for 2 to 4 weeks. Yuck. A man at church loaned us two portable vent-through-the-window unit. On Tuesday our HVAC man loaned us a third, It’s not quite 90 in the house as it was early on Monday, but it’s hotter than normal, and that leads to not feeling like doing much, including things like blog posts.
Now it’s Sunday. I taught Life Group this morning and will head back to the church shortly for a Teams meeting.
Tomorrow, I hope to get back to writing, something I did almost none of last week. Maybe I’ll even take time to write the next couple of posts in my climate change series.
I’m going to just say a few words here, a day late from my usual posting day.
This has been a summer of major events. My cardio rehab 3x per week. Our church Centennial. Lynda’s severe sciatica. My 50 yr high school reunion—as it turned out missed due to the sciatica. And now, our air conditioner goes out.
It happened on Saturday. I noticed around 1 or 2 pm that it wasn’t cooling. By early evening it was up to 84° in the house (92° outside). Naturally, at 6 pm Saturday evening, no one is coming for two days. Our HVAC guy got here at noon Monday. He determined the unit would possibly be fixable, but our best bet was to replace it. But, lead times on new units are 2-4 weeks. By mid-afternoon Monday it was 91° in the house (95° outside).
I posted something on Facebook about it, and a friend from church, who lives fairly close to us, said he had two portable units he had bought when their AC went out a few weeks ago, and he would loan them to us and help get them set up. That happened last night. By morning the temp was down to 80° in the common space and cooler in the master bedroom and kitchen, where the two units are. We will survive the 2 to 4 weeks and, who knows, maybe the supply chain will do better than projected.
With this going on, I felt terrible yesterday and didn’t even think about this blog. I was in no condition on any of those days to pull my next climate post together, so the series is yet again delayed. Maybe I can get it done by Friday.
As an exercise, I gathered all my 2011 outgoing and incoming letters (most were via e-mail) into a correspondence book and “published” it to Amazon. Here’s a photo of it. 559 pages. Of course, it can never be truly published like this because I don’t own the copyright of the incoming letters.
It’s Friday, my normal blog posting day. I try to write my blog posts the day before and schedule them to post on Friday and Monday at 7:30 a.m. Yet here it is, 10:45 a.m., and I just realized I hadn’t yet done a blog post. This one was to have been another in the climate change series, but I’m not ready for it. So I’ll have to settle with a fill-in post.
Today, my time has been taken up by busyness. I was up around 6:30 a.m. and out working in the woodlot by 6:45. I began moving cut branches and deadfall down the hill to a brush pile closer to the back of the lot. I also did more work on breaking down the brush pile near the front of the lot and moving it to the two piles near the rear. Lynda asked me to do this since the front pile was an eyesore from the street. She is right. Working on and off on it since spring, a 7-foot pile is now down to a foot and a half. The end is in sight.
After the brush pile, I did a little trimming of blackberry bushes and removal of weeds I sprayed a couple of days ago.
Back in the house, I took coffee and computer to The Dungeon. Devotionals complete, I was ready to begin my work shortly before 8:00 a.m. Friday is my biggest day for stock trading, so I had work to do to get ready for the market open at 8:30. I made seven trades and updated my spreadsheet and charts to reflect the trades.
Then it was on to writing, except my writing is somewhat shoved aside of late. Instead, I’m scanning old letters, converting them into Word files, then discarding the originals. Perhaps I need to explain.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I got into the habit of printing off e-mails and discarding the originals. What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking ahead to the day when I would want to reduce the amount of my physical possessions, looking further ahead to the need to downsize as age took hold. Now here I am, with notebooks of printed e-mails (and a few handwritten or typed letters received in snail mail). Since I want to keep a record of my correspondence, I don’t want to throw them out.
I was transcribing some letters, mainly those in my genealogy research notebooks. I save each letter as a Word document in a nice and neat filing system with consistent document names. Then I throw away the printout.
My current goal is to get rid of 10 letters a day. I’m making progress at that rate. One more day and I’m done with 2002. Only three days more and I’ll be done with 2003. Most of what I’m doing now is with the scanner function on my printer. Scan the doc, pull it into Word, save it as a .docx file in the right place with the right name, correct formatting and scanner errors, and move on to the next one.
At this rate, I have no idea how long this will take. And I’m not sure I can sustain this rate and write too. The scanning and formatting of 10 printouts takes close to an hour. By that time, my mind is not on writing, and I’ve not been able to do much of that. Perhaps I need to reverse the order: get an hour or two of writing in then switch to scanning/transcribing. I’ll have to think about that.
I also did this with e-mails on my computer. I had emails saved going back to 2005, ever since I switched to Yahoo as my e-mail program. In the evening, while watching TV, I multi-tasked by saving the emails to Word files in the right place. At first I didn’t name them as well as I should have, and may have to go back—also as an evening, multi-tasking activity—and rename a number of files. All in good time.
Why this obsession with my correspondence? My love of reading letters has, I supposed, caused me to have the illusion that someone, someday, will want to read my correspondence. I realize the chances of that happening are pretty slim. But, if anyone ever wants to collect my correspondence and read it, they will find I’ve done most of the work for them.
How long will I do this? I don’t know. The notebook I’m currently working on covered 2001-2004. I finished 2001, and in less than a week will be done with the next two years. 2004 will take a little longer, probably to the end of August or even into September. After that, I may take a break from this work and get back to productive writing. The letter notebooks will be there for a later time.
Now, maybe I can keep track of the weekend days ahead, and have a better blog post on Monday.
