Elizabeth’s Journal

Musings

I am finding Meredith O’Reilly’s blog very thought-provoking to read. When we started the karlhub.com site a couple of years ago and I agreed to start a blog, I fully expected to post entries that consisted of more than what I (or more often, my child/children) had done that day. Yet that is pretty much exactly what I have come to. So why is that? Am I more reserved than I thought I was? Do I wish to avoid confrontation with family members, since I have many years of experience in how that turns out (no one’s mind ever changes)? Do I feel that what I’d write simply requires more editing, and I’m unwilling to show anything like that? Or am I just more boring than I think I am?

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been helping the music teacher at the elementary school set up her parent volunteers. I had returned a sheet saying that I could do things at home (can’t commit to classroom volunteering because of Kayleigh), and one day Jonathan came home with things to color for me. Not really my kind of thing, so I sent her an e-mail and said I was a little intimidated by the samples and wanted to make sure that using just one shade of green, for instance, would be okay. She responded by asking if I’d prefer to help her with organizing the volunteers (she’d asked the principal if she knew anyone, and for some reason Shelly suggested me—now how did she know I live for this stuff?). I have actually been having a good time figuring out how to approach it and set it up to run itself. It even made me long for my relational database designing days at Applied Materials.

Now that it’s done, though, I can go back to my family history research. A friend of mine is allowing me to “practice” on her and see what I can find out for her about her own family; my long-term thought is that perhaps one day I’ll be able to make some money out of this obsession. After all, frankly, most of it’s all about organization! I’ve been finding that setting up her family information is helping me understand how I can better organize my own family data and be more efficient with my research, so I’m getting loads of benefits. And today I spoke to a lady (probably a relative of hers) who gave me my friend’s great-grandfather’s name! A nice result.

I miss Mom & Dad, who are off gallivanting around in the home country (Germany) right now. I get so used to picking up the phone to share the latest clever thing that one of their grandchildren has done, or just to have a chat, and I can’t do that for a while. Boo! I’m looking forward to Mom’s visit right before Thanksgiving; she’s fitting in a weekend after visiting her Dallas site.

Since Kayleigh’s been born I haven’t been reading much, and I am starting to miss it. It’s such a wonderful escape to another reality, which is nice when one is spending most of one’s time on one’s butt on the couch or in a chair. As mentioned on Meredith’s blog, I have been watching a lot of television—reading and nursing a small child puts stress on both my neck and my wrist (holding the book). But she’s not “in arms” nearly so much now, so hopefully I’ll get back in the reading thing soon. I still don’t have that much time available in big chunks, though—and what I do get I spend here at the computer. But I’ll have to read over the weekend since bookgroup is next week; we’re reading The Dogs of Babel.

Posted by elizabeth at October 21, 2004 10:49 PM