grande351

Happy New Year, grande351!

I think that it is not anything, Grande351. But I am always careful.

At times Little Red Riding Hood wins on the wolf. One wisecrack of mine to laugh.

Thanks of the friendship to Me, Friend Grande351. Happy New year 2009 next.

Merry Christmas to you too. And I am having a great time!

I'm actually going to be completely erasing everything from my computer, then reloading the original Windows program. By doing that it should take off any viruses or spyware.

I treat genealogy as something of a 3-D jigsaw puzzle. My old handwritten tables had all these lines and arrows and whatnot crisscrossing them, with noted like "continued on chart 300". Thank goodness they came up with genealogy programs, but then I spent the better part of about 2 years just entering data from my tables into the forms. I'm not entirely sure how much it helped me with history, but it was interesting and fun. As for work, I've been disabled since 2000 (word to the wise, if you're having really-really bad headaches regularly, i.e., virtually all the time, get it checked out, and don;t try to just "walk it off"). I finished school with an MA in history, and spent the following 3 years looking for a teaching job (I did get into the LA Community College adjunct pool, but never taught a class so while "entitled" to use the title, I don't). Before I took ill I was in line for a nice government job with Sonoma County, Calif. which would have easily translated into a career, and I'd spent a lot of time debating with myself whether to take the LSATs and go to law school, or use my GRE scores and go to Berkeley Theological College (I'd finally opted on BTU and have my app ready to send off)--the again, I'm living real-world experience now and getting a whole different take on things than I would have had I spent my time in the lecture rooms or just reading the Dhammapada or Thomas or Ecclesiastes (3 of my 4 favourite texts--the other being the Tao Te Ching). I'd like to have gone back to school to take photography courses (I took photo in h.s. and almost lived in the darkroom), which is something that I picked up again after having my brain short circuit like it did, and which has brought me a lot of happiness the past couple years (and got me out of the house--I had a bit of agoraphobia after blacking out, made even more serious when I did go out once and blacked out downtown, and not a single person stopped). But getting back to genealogy, it can be fun, if you don't let it inflate your ego too much (i.e., I'm descended from King Whatshisname, or I'm a 14th cousin six time removed of so-and-so, so there--read those with a toffee-nosed accent, something like Thurston Howell III from Gilligan's Island--just for laughs, of course!). Cheers!

Back when I was in school, I started jotting down diagrams of British noble families, looking for reasons why so-and-so had a grudge against some other dude. I came into history after having studied behavioral science & anthropology first, so brought with me techniques and an outlook not entirely suited to "just the facts"--I'm always looking for what's laying just below the surface, hidden motives, biases, prejudices and so on, including in myself. Anyway, what started off confined first to the British upper classes branched out to the rest of Europe and, as the trickle-down effect ran its course (A Princess marries a duke; their daughter marries a lesser noble; their granddaughter marries a knight; their great-granddaughter marries a member of the landed gentry; the younger children there, sons and daughters, go out to seek their own fortune which brings them to colonial America where they founded Brahmin families in Massachusetts, the Southern aristocracy, &c.). Anyway, long story short in and amongst all that chasing down of families to various ends, I found that one ended with James Douglas Morrison, and while I knew a bit about him, being a Doors fan, too, I also found his father and maternal grandfather very interesting, too--one a fairly conservative career naval officer, the other a well-to-do attorney who was a strong supporter of collective bargaining and unions.

That's unfortunate because she would make perfect FTV material.

BTW...Meredith is smoking hot!

Actually it has been fixed. Rob's handy man was able to glue it together somehow. I'm waiting for it to dry through the weekend, so hopefully when I pick it up it doesn't fall apart on me.