Hurricane! Well, Tropical Storm, Anyway. Spending the Day With Nasty Irene

One of the few nice things about terribly nasty weather is that you get to use terms like “hunker down” and “battening down the hatches”, even though few of us over a “certain age”can hunker comfortably and even fewer still have any hatches left to batten.

So, after battening and securing those things that could become projectiles in the heavy wind, we hunkered down and waited for the worst.   

We had several Thermoses of hot, hot water, in case we needed to make some tea and last night we filled up some empty plastic food storage containers and stuck ‘em in the freezer, all in anticipation of the power going out and that little light in the fridge going dark.

So far, so good.  It’s nearly 8 P.M. Things are wet and wild, but the power’s still with us, even as darkness descends on Upstate.

Today was spent (a.) cleaning off the top of the desk; (b.) making piles of ”desk - paper” to be filed; and (c.) lamenting that I had not yet transcribed all those documents I collected on my last trip to the Virginia State Library.  Nor those images of documents from my trip to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City last year.  

And then there are all the things needing transcription that I picked up on my visit to …oh, never mind...%$#@!!!

Since – so far -  the electric power has stayed on (mirabile dictu!) in spite of the torrential rains and nasty winds, I took the opportunity to look over my “Digital Ahnenforscher” talk.  I’ll be presenting this talk on Thursday evening, September 1^st at the German Genealogy Group’s September meeting in Hicksville, NY.  

For those of you in the Long Island area – the talk is free (can’t beat the price) and it will take place at the Hicksville VFW Hall – Post 3211, 320 South Broadway (Route 107), Hicksville, NY 11801.  Here’s the link to the GGG website with all the specifics.

Doors open seven-ish, and Jonathan Sheppard Books will be there with a large selection of in-print genealogical reference books.

The full title of the talk is:

 

Searching For Those German Ancestors Online…Without Knowing Much German!  Tips on Becoming a “Digital Ahnenforscher”. 

You can read the description by following the link above.

As any speaker worth his or her salt knows, it’s imperative to check the slides before each and every lecture, especially if the slides reference websites that are subject to the whimsical change of web designers. 

Good thing I did, since I needed to completely redo more than a dozen slides because the referenced websites had changed completely.

I won’t make any predictions about what’s coming upon on the blog in the next week or two since the storm’s not over yet, and there’s still a lot of prep work to do for Thursday night’s talk. Then, after Thursday, it’ll be time to prep for the NARA- Pittsfield all – day event in Williamstown, MA on September 17^th and the Maine Genealogical Society’s annual conference in Bangor at the end of September, on the 24th.  There will be more specific detail about both of those events soon.

Nonetheless, stay tuned.  There are all kinds of things in the hopper, including a long-ish post on memory and forgetting and the Civil War, all rolled up kinda neatly together.  And possibly something on sculpture as a point of focus for selective family history.  And whatever else flashes across Mnemosyne’s mirror in the meantime.

This blog will be a year old by the end of the week – and I haven’t run out of stuff to say!