Big dragonfly and baby dove

My cold is definitely going away but nowhere near as fast as I'd like. I spent yesterday with a headache and a weird sense of nausea, probably from all the gross stuff ending up in my stomach. I was barely able to eat any lunch but thankfully managed to eat more for dinner.

Since we got both packages of toys yesterday, we couldn't resist breaking them open last night. I played with the dremel but not on anything consequential; just on a scrap piece of plastic to get familiar with the tool. Colin stayed up past his bedtime; he was having too much fun playing with his new blinking toy. It's actually a very tiny computer that is very versatile and can be made to do lots of different things. This morning, he showed me that it blinks the prime numbers - flash flash ... flash flash flash ... flash flash flash flash flash ... I don't know how he does it - I just sum it up to magic. Think about it - how is computer programming not like magic?

The early days of September are one of my favorite mini-seasons; when the leaves are still green but there's a crispness in the sunshine and breeze. This morning when I stepped out to water our container garden, I spotted a big beautiful dragonfly. I was afraid of scaring it off or it being gone when I ran back inside to get the camera, but it let me take lots of pictures and get pretty close to it, then I dared to try to get it to sit on my finger. And it did! Definitely made my day. A picture of the big beauty.

I had noticed a garage sale happening right across the street when I took the garbage out and so I went over there. Not much that I cared for, but I couldn't resist getting a sweater that just seemed to be "me." Blue stripes, hooded, no buttons or zipper but a belt, and verrrry long. Perfect for those days I just want to be extra comfy but still stylish. I usually wear my roomy dark grey sweatshirt with "KALAMAZOO COLLEGE" in big bright orange letters across the front on such days. Extra comfy days, not stylish days. Duh. I may not be a fashionista, but I am aware of how to match clothes and all that. Sometimes I just choose to purposely wear clashing colors.

On the way back, I peeked in with the mama dove who has been nesting in the tree right out front. Earlier this summer, we had a robin family there. That's another story, really, but we like to imagine that the two baby robins are enjoying the life of flying around and eating worms now. I'm not sure how long ago we noticed the dove sitting in the nest, which had been modified to fit the larger birds. I do remember seeing the papa once, bringing twigs to the mama. Colin likes to walk up and say hello to the mama before going to work and after coming home. He did so this morning, but it wasn't until I peeked in a few hours later that there was signs of another life in the nest. I tried to get good clear pictures but it's so hard to capture a mostly hidden ball of fuzz. Here's a couple of most successful shots.

Not entirely sure what the mama and the baby are doing ... seems to be that mama is holding the baby by its beak. If you look closely, you can see its little eye blearily looking back in both pictures. I would guess it had hatched sometime between 9 and 11 this morning. I didn't notice any signs of other babies. But it's very exciting.

Well, I guess that's what I get for speaking too soon; the cold managed to knock me down for the past couple of days but it seems like it's now solidly going the way of the dodo bird. One thing I am thankful for is the cooler weather; it allows me to wrap up in a blanket with a cup of hot tea. Which is more or less what I've been doing the past couple of days.

Today we're expecting two packages of, well, toys. They should be fun projects for this fall/winter and I'll be sure to blog about them along the way. Probably more "Look how cute/awesome/geeky this is!" than step-by-steps. Colin is planning to blog about the more specific aspects, since he's noticed how immensely helpful other blogs have been in learning what to get and how to make them. Who knows, I might end up doing more details, but I doubt it. Example: Last night we were in Radio Shack and Colin was reading aloud a couple of things we needed and I just stared at him blankly and said "I have no clue what those are." And I meant no clue. The names didn't give me hint of what vague category they belonged in. So he pointed me to the right drawers and I just muttered the names to myself over and over. It's rare that I feel so clueless. But all was not lost; I do have some experience with soldering so I got to ask more intelligent questions like "Are we getting a cleaner in the mail?"

Hmm, I can't really think of anything else to say. Guess I have yet to get back my creativity, not to mention the rest of my brain cells. Oh well, I'll just post this for now and not feel too bad posting a longer entry if my brain cells do decide to show up later today.

Indiana and an Introduction to LBing

I was intrigued by Kate's post about the history of Labor Day and her thoughts on it. While I don't have a job, I find this another way to be reminded of how lucky I am. I try constantly to count my blessings but the counting can always use encouragement. Speaking of which, "Thanksgiving Day" is simply too silly to me as a former undergrad history major, but that's another issue. Labor Day is more free of forced traditions. Honoring Labor Day by remembering its roots and being thankful for what we do have is especially relevant these days.

Colin is puttering around somewhere, I think upstairs. He's still looking for some electronic tool stuff that he remembers owning. I say "remembers" because he hasn't seen them since two moves ago. Not a huge surprise, since he has at least three huge tupperware boxes full of stuff and that's just what's stacked in the corner behind the bedroom door. We've been brainstorming and getting excited with a DIY project that we both can/will do together. I probably shouldn't go into details because it might not work and if it does, it's going to be a great kind of present to give to people.

He has emerged triumphant from upstairs - even brought down two things of chocolate at least two years old ... oh yay. And candles! We got a bunch of candles from Bullfrog Factory last Christmastime. We needed something for Colin's family and one of the things Charlevoix is known for are these special candles. They have a secret way of making them so that the glow is evenly distributed throughout. So of course we bought a couple for ourselves which I promptly forgot about. It's a nice and timely surprise though, especially with the weather changing.

Being in Indiana for a couple nights with Colin's family and going to the wedding was nice and we were glad we went. I even had some fun slow dancing with Colin and jamming it with his sisters. We seem to have caught something from one of the four flights we took to get there and back but it's not too debilitating. I just keep sneezing a lot, my head hurts mildly, and my throat tickles sometimes. I can tell it's not just allergies but that's about it. We even got Colin's dad and youngest sister to go letterboxing with us while the rest raided the Goodwills.

I realized I haven't yet mentioned letterboxing (LBing for short) on this blog yet, but that needs at least one blog entry all to itself. Basically, it's like geocaching without the GPS devices. You find them by anything between precise directions and a single line of code. They can be as specific as "in Illinois" to "on the west side of the base of the third bush from your right next to the John Smith headstone in Ever-Rest Cemetery."

The basic situation: You find one. It has a logbook and a stamp. You have a personal logbook and stamp with you, a pen, and some kind of stamping material such as pads and/or markers. You stamp your personal stamp into the box's logbook, sign, and date it. You stamp the box's stamp in your personal logbook, write down the name, place, date, whatever else you want in your personal logbook. Thus, there is evidence you found it for both the person who made and put out (called "planted") the box and for yourself.

That's the basic idea of letterboxes. I've found about 40 to 50 so far (depends on which ones "count"). I promise, I'll explain more soon.

Also, if you haven't yet seen the movie "Kick Ass," get it. Watch it. It's pretty good. There is a fair amount of spurting blood but even for someone as squeamish as myself it was not bad at all. It's just so ridiculous. I like the story lines and the characters are awesome, especially Hit Girl. :)

Discombobulated State

Today has been one of those days where you and everyone you encounter seems to be slightly off kilter. For example a conversation in the car on the way to the train station (Colin's driving):
*we turn before I expected us to*
Me: Why are we going to [A] stop?
Colin: You mean [B] stop.
Me: Right. *note: we usually go to [A] but it doesn't have an actual depot. I still sometimes get the two stop names mixed up. If your address is one, but you go to the other more often, it's only natural that you think your stop is the one like your address. Right?*
Colin: I need to buy a monthly pass.
Me: Oh that's right. *now remembers how he got in trouble with the conductor last night for having no cash or pass* Did you remember cash to get it?
Colin: You know they take credit card when you buy a pass in the train station.
Me: Oh, yeah.
Colin: Gee, thanks for being so helpful and remembering things for me. *cue tease session*

So then we get to the station and he buys his pass. Then realizes too late that he made a mistake. We can only go to [B] stop this month because [A] stop requires a different pass. That shouldn't be a problem, since the train gets there slightly later than at [A]. However, the drive to [A] is easier since there's no stop lights and you aren't required to cross the tracks. So we'll see how this goes. Surprisingly, I think we've only missed the train once, maybe twice, this summer. Both times we ran back to the house and I grabbed stuff to entertain myself with for a day near his office.

I came back and had some breakfast before heading over to the church library - again. The person "in charge" was running quite late - she almost forgot about coming, since the days have been changed. One of the guys completely forgot his hearing aids so we were quite noisy which is okay because there's no one else near enough to care. I nearly finished tagging and sorting the stack of books by DDC number that I'd been working on, and then I had to run to the doctor's office. Should be getting a call back this afternoon about the results of a test and whether it's a go or not to fill the prescription.

I had myself a lazy lunch of spaghettios. We're currently out of clean microwavable bowls so I used a tupperware container. What made me laugh was that I'd chosen to be colorful and pulled out an orange one; I didn't realize until after I dumped the can's contents in it that the food matched the bowl! This happens to me sometimes. I guess you could say it's "getting stuck on a color." This can prove fruitful or disastrous, depending on whether the outfit of the same color in different shades clashes or not. The biggest example is the fact that I'd spray-painted the free desk this lovely maroon (I love maroon) before I noticed that the curtains right where the desk was going are essentially the same color! Oh, and our Prius is maroon too. My high school colors were maroon and white, so my cross country sweatshirt is maroon. My purse from India is maroon. My sweatshirt from Rome is maroon. My scarf from Venice is maroon. Sheesh.

Not sure what I'll be doing the rest of the day, other than running the dishwasher. I really need to clean the bathroom. I'd like to take a hike if the weather holds. Need to read my book quota for the day. Perhaps fill the rest of the time with genealogical research. Also should think what to do with cucumbers to make a meal with salmon. Can't print the tickets for tomorrow's flight until about 6:00. Oh, we're going to southern Indiana for a family wedding. Evansville, which I've never been to before and looking at a map is making me realize just how far *north* Bloomington really is in the state. Two years of driving back and forth from Chicago disagrees with the idea, but maps don't lie. Well, that's not exactly true ... but for this instance, it is. Anyway, I should kick off before I allow myself to ramble the day away any further.

Hunting Dewey Decimals

This summer, since a couple weeks after we moved here, I've been volunteering at the church library almost every Wednesday morning. It can be quite fun and it definitely is Good For Me. I get to use my sad, lonely MLS on something other than my own little projects.

There is a lot of work that needs to be done to it. First, it wasn't very well kept for most of the last 20 years so books are way out of date - my favorite is "Christianity and Communism Today". Written in 1960, it was probably of interest and relevance then, but now? Not so much. An excellent book for an archival library to hold onto, perhaps, but not for a small church library catering to those more interested in current Christianity than outdated ideas.

Second, there is a whole mound of donated books that aren't yet catalogued. And a lot of books have apparently sprouted legs and run off. And we're trying to get the card catalog straightened out - some books don't have cards and some cards don't have books, and it's not limited to just the two types I mentioned above. It's everywhere.

Oh, and you heard me correctly: it is an actual card catalog. There is no need to computerize the records and then require church-goers to check in and out books on a dedicated computer. We haven't even gotten to the stage of how we're setting up the borrowing system. The goal now is to get the books in order.

Since I'm the youngest of the volunteer crew by at least four decades, I've been using computer and internet to help look up the DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification system) numbers for books not yet assigned. Previously, the library was set up in a weird half-self-tailored and half-dewey classification system, with books in large groups such as "Faith in Life" and split between hard-cover and paperback. This has taken about a month of typing up ISBNs, titles, and authors while at the library, then looking them up for preferred DDC numbers. For most of them, I've been using a whole artillery of sites, none of which could do the task alone: ISBNdb.com, LC catalog, WorldCat, and librarything.com - even sometimes having to plain Google it. There were still a few searches that would prove unfruitful.

However, today I happened across an amazing tool - http://classify.oclc.org/classify2/
I started throwing all the books at it without even needing to consult the other sites for most of them. The ones I didn't find, I fiddled with on Google and determined what typos I'd made. I went back to try the ones that I'd been unsuccessful with earlier and found eight of them. I also made use of the tool linked to the classify site, http://deweyresearch.oclc.org/ddcbrowser2/ to determine better which one was most appropriate for the church library when the classify site showed an equal balance between one or two DDC numbers. For the total of about 250 books I've looked up, only three remained unfound.  THREE. That is pretty awesome.

So, in case you didn't get my drift, I'm in love with http://classify.oclc.org/classify2/ It has so many awesome things about it that just make the librarian in me salivate. It doesn't stop at giving you the MARC record which contains merely, and only sometimes, the classification number assigned by a particular library. Oh no. It gleans information of how many libraries in the OCLC network have the book and how many assigned what DDC number to it. I wish you do or could understand just how amazing this is, but it would help to trudge through 200 books without the Classify site first.

It wasn't for lack of researching that I only just discovered this tool; I'd looked a lot of places trying to determine what was best to use, including a focus on how to use my phone's camera (Google Nexus One) and a barcode scanner to try to speed up the process. I tried out a handful of programs but after one of them crashed on me when I had 40 scanned in, and the fact that not many books actually had a barcode that I had to deal with (if they have one, they most likely also have the DDC number on the back of their title page also - none of the older books have those listed). But for future reference, and perhaps helping anyone who happens to need the information and comes across this blogpost, aNobiit works okay - when it doesn't crash. It says it has the ISBNs but when I try to export them the email text body is devoid of ISBNs. aNobii scanner, which is  a different program but looks the same, *might* actually work but I just don't care to try it. However, today I accidentally discovered that Clipbot would work just fine. I haven't tested it but there's very little chance for it to crash and lose the ISBNs since there's no need to connect to internet at all; it simply reads and makes a lists of the numbers, then you can copy it to the phone clipboard and paste them into a text document (assuming you've got a text editor installed). This is exactly what I was looking for in the first place. *sigh*

Oh, and I forgot to mention that I don't have a data plan on my phone and there's no wifi at the church, hence ignoring those that queue up the web browser and search for the book as soon as you scan the barcode. I did get to play with these types a bit on our own home library, and it could be a fun project to catalog or at least record all the books in the house. Someday, someday.

Recently, Colin has been giving me presents. He'd gotten a bunch of stuff from thinkgeek.com, and being the cute boy he is, he couldn't help but also order things not only geeky but cute to give me. The first one was what is supposed to be a grasshopper but I much prefer to think of it as a cricket. I made and uploaded a video of it in action, because words don't quite do it justice. You can find it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDLEKNTCIek

A few days later, he gave me something quite different. It consisted of a cup, dome-top, saucer bottom, weird dirt pod thing, and two lima beans. The cup was covered in pink and purple hearts and said "I love you." Then Colin pointed out that the beans have "I love you" stamped on themselves also. He wouldn't let me see the back of the instructions, so I suspected there was more to the surprise. It was really cool to watch the really hard dirt pod soak up the water and expand into mushy diggable dirt. Then we buried the beans, put the dome cover on top, and set it on the windowsill in the kitchen. A couple days ago we got some sprouts and it's been fun watching them grow. Here's what they look like now:

You're probably thinking, "Okay, great ... that's cute, I guess, in a third grade science experiment sort of way. Why are you blogging about it?" Well, behold the little surprise:

Both plants have "I love you" on the leaves. Told you I had a cute geek. :)

A bit of a general genealogical research guide slash update

This past weekend was a strange mixture of wearing out and recuperating. We went to Navy Pier on Saturday with a bunch of Colin's coworkers who are here on 3 month work visas from India. I thought it might be somewhat fun given that I've never actually gone there before. People gazing and limited boat watching was about all that I found fun. Oh, and sitting inside the convention center on the floor in some little corner or sitting in the greenhouse. The crowds were massive, it was hot, and everything was ridiculously expensive or not something I really wanted to do. End result: crankiness despite valiant efforts. The evening proved more enjoyable, as Shaheli cooked for us at her apartment. Earlier, the apartment had weird power outage issues but they were gone by dinnertime. Some of us had some wine and all of us had laughter. The train north only leaves every two hours on the weekends so we took one that should have gotten us home about midnight but some train problems caused an hour's delay. We spent it sitting on the train where it got increasingly over-air conditioned.

Yesterday it was too hot to do anything but Colin and I had a good day in relaxing. Got some reading and genealogical research done, and Colin did a lot of dreaming up mini-computer projects. Example: being able to access thermostat via internet. Example: being able to print without being physically connected to printer. There's a lot of ideas ... and the technical details are slightly out of my depth. I think it's a great idea but it needs more thinking and planning and a designated workspace. I do feel kind of bad that it seems like a lot of the house is more my space, even though that could be justified by two facts: 1) I am here a lot more. 2) Most of his stuff is storage boxes.

Today I've been playing with our new multi functional printer. I'm very happy with it. Both the scanning and printing abilities work well with my linux machine. It takes a couple extra steps to set them up than most Brother printers; most drivers are available immediately through the CUPS system but not for the DCP-7040 (ours), so they need to be downloaded and installed directly from the Brother website. I haven't printed much but I've been going all out with the scanner, creating pdfs of genealogical research paper stuff. It's soooo much easier to use a automatic feeder than a flatbed!

The past week or so I've been focusing on the family branch we have the least amount of information for: my mother's father's side. Well, it may not be the most paltry branch based on how far it goes back - that would be my father's father's side - but it has had the least amount of research time devoted to and/or successful results for it by me and the relatives I'm aware of. It's kind of deceptive; they all go back to mid-1800s in Michigan and then *poof* a wealth of conflicting leads - New York or Canada? Massachusetts or New York? Scotland or Ireland? Was it the person we know the name of that immigrated, or is it just that supposedly the family at sometime is said to have originated from wherever? It also doesn't help that the surnames are very common British ones.

I've decided to attempt a new way of organizing research findings. I'll obtain primary information, preferably a pdf of the original document. Then, I chose to use the lineage approach, in this case working from the earliest known ancestor of that branch downward - this helps eliminate guesswork where to put whose information while still keeping each group narrow enough for comprehension - also very conducive to extending family trees horizontally. For each lineage that I've been actively working on, I have a text document ordered by dates. For instance, let's say there's a birth registry showing that Ann Thorgun was born in Decatur, Iowa on November 23, 1834 (if there really was, it's pure coincide). I'll obtain the primary information as is in a separate text document (Thorguns in Iowa) or pdf (Ann Thorgun 1834 birth). Next, I'll type into the lineage document:

1834
Ann Thorgun is born 23 November 1834 in Decatur, Iowa.

This allows for extra information to be included (such as how her parents' names are spelled in the registry) and for any researcher notes. If there is any other events that occur for the Thorgun lineage in 1834, it will be found immediately under Ann's birth information. However, I don't follow timeline organization past year - I put information about the most direct relative before, say, their brother's.

I'm not sure if I'll do this for all of my family, but it works well for trying to determine what happened when and where, with  a focus for migrations. I can easily see when a date doesn't make sense, or when one generation moves to another place while the previous one remains behind.

On top of that, I'm finally adding info to geni.com, which is like facebook for genealogy, but much more secure. Hopefully this will allow relatives to enjoy what I've put together and for certain ones to add their own info.  I've already noticed how much it helps to gain a mental grasp on what I've got and what next research step would feel the most fulfilling.

As for what else I'll do today ... probably make myself take a break, water the plants again, and read some more "Pride and Prejudice." But mostly, I see no need to vary from genealogical research, since I have managed two loads of laundry as my housekeeping for the day ;)