No time to write everything I'd intended . . . we're off, along with our friend Andy, to Utah tomorrow morning for a quick little ski vacation. (Carol, I didn't let you know b/c on Saturday I won't be there--am planning to go into Salt Lake City to the Family History Library for research, and I probably won't be back until late.) Jonathan is looking forward to it greatly and will be in the ski school/play program for 4-yr-olds on Saturday and Sunday. I, of course, will not be skiing, but hopefully it will be a nice holiday for me too.
Had my 28-wk appointment with the midwife today--everything looks great, including my blood pressure (thank you Mom for your good genes!), which was 102/58. I also got a shot of Rhogam (boo Dale for being a different Rhesus factor than I am) in my glutes and had to fast all morning and then drink a sugary drink for the glucosamine test (gestational diabetes, I believe). The last couple of weeks I have slowed down a LOT. (Once Jonathan's in bed, I come sit down in front of my computer to get some research done, and my brain just chugs to a stop in revolt. About all I have brainpower for any more in the evenings is solitaire.) The only real issue I'm having is with backache; I may have to give in and get one of those maternity belts to support my uterus, because it's definitely out in front of me, and it's pulling on my lower back something awful.
We hired a doula last week to be a labor companion for us, and next week (on the day we return from Utah) our hypnobirthing classes start. We have only one more four-week appointment at the birthing center and then it's down to every two weeks. Eeeek!
I am reading up on image management in preparation for producing a web site with basic genealogy data before the baby comes; Joy & Brian gave me Second Site as part of my birthday present, which produces a nice-looking site from my TMG database. I really want to get this up before May as that's one of the best ways to get contacted by people researching related lines and often gets you past roadblocks you haven't been able to overcome on your own (like when I got in touch with the kenefick.com site last week). I'd love it if someone researching Gertrude (my great-grandmother) Ford's family found me and shared information!
Anyway, I am a well-educated, reasonably intelligent woman who's not afraid of technical terms, but this is driving me crazy. Learning the difference between rescaling and resampling (and accomplishing it--Word seems to ignore whatever I think I've just done, and I can't tell if it's b/c I didn't really do what I think I did or Word is screwed up), dpi vs ppi, getting LZW compression out of my *.tif files, figuring out which size of image (and type--jpg, tif, gif, etc.) is better for a printed report versus a web page versus archiving purposes--aagh! This is not fun.
Jonathan is absolutely over the moon with the snowfall at our house last night. (So was Dale, for that matter--we discovered it when we got up this morning.) He sat on the loveseat and looked out the window to the back garden and nattered on non-stop about all the snow he saw. Even though it was only about 2 inches, it covered everything and looked absolutely beautiful. Now it's 11 a.m. and he and Dale have made a little snowman out by the bird feeders and are having snowball fights. Unfortunately Jonathan has very little conception of how to throw a snowball (I bet he could kick one great, but I guess we haven't been doing many throwing sports . . .) and gets within a foot of Dale, throws the snowball straight up in the air, and it falls on the ground between them. Occasionally it gets the tip of Dale's boots. Then Jonathan runs down the back yard to the oak tree and hides behind it so that Dale can't hit him with a snowball. He's got his snow boots on, and his ski jacket, and his blue woolly hat, and with his rosy cheeks he just looks like a little snow bunny. What fun!
Many thanks to all who helped make my birthday special. I had a relaxing morning while Jonathan was at CAPS, except . . . as I was pulling into the driveway from dropping him off, Mom and Dad called on my cell phone. So I sat in the car in the garage and chatted for about 20 minutes, then after we hung up I went to pick up my purse and go inside, and can you guess what was sitting on the seat next to my purse? Jonathan's lunchbox. D#%! So I had to drive back and take it in for him. I must have gotten thrown off since I did take something in for him--his bag of Valentines for the Valentine exchange they did at CAPS today. Forgot he also needed his lunch. I guess I'm entitled to be a little ditzy on my birthday.
Anyway, it was a nice snuggly day today--rained until noon and then was just gray. A good day to have the aromatherapy burner going and drinking cups of green tea. In the evening Dale, Jonathan, and I went to our favorite Mexican restaurant for dinner (Antonio's), and now I may be about to get my feet rubbed. Who could beat that?
Ever since the Florida debacle of 2000 and the subsequent drive for improved voting methods, I have been highly suspicious of the push for electronic voting. I may not be a fully qualified computer geek, but I have enough experience around the inner workings of getting systems up and running to be quite skeptical of the claims being made by companies selling such systems. In the January issue of Wired magazine, Paul O'Donnell has an article called "Broken Machine Politics" that has an interesting paragraph in it (p. 147 of the print issue). I quote (note--DREs are the devices used to record electronic votes): "In Southern California's Riverside County in 2000--the state's first use of touchscreen DREs--a Sequoia server unaccountably froze, then began counting backward. In the central coast community of San Luis Obispo in 2002, a machine spontaneously began reporting totals with five hours left in the election. In Louisiana, humidity and overheating caused constant crashes. Last November, in Indiana, DREs reported more than 144,000 votes cast in Boone County, which has fewer than 19,000 registered voters."
It's not that there are bugs and crashes--frankly, that's to be expected, and anyone who doesn't expect that is a fool. There needs to be a backup system in place, and the idea I hear most often is that when a voter has completed her voting, a hard copy is printed out that she then visually verifies. Once she's confirmed it, she slips it into a lockbox, where it's held in case of problems and hand counts of actual ballots are required. For heaven's sakes, what if there's a big storm and a power stations goes down, or a surge of electricity shorts out the computers? I am astonished that some people don't think there's a need for built-in redundancy with something as important as this.
One of the things I have been looking forward to most with this pregnancy is feeling the baby move inside of me--that is such a special and miraculous feeling--and it has finally happened enough that Dale can feel it too. I've been able to sense movement since about Thanksgiving, but it's been only in the last week that I (and anybody else) could feel it by touching my stomach. At the ultrasound in December, the tech mentioned that I had an anterior placenta (refers to where it's positioned in the uterus), and that consequently it might be a few weeks later than normal before we could feel the baby because it would have to kick hard enough to be felt through it. And they certainly are strong kicks! This evening I could see my shirt move while sitting here at the computer.
My last appointment at the birthing center was Wednesday of last week. By now I'm already 26 weeks along! Time is going by so fast with this one. Hard to believe there are only 14 weeks to go.
Unfortunately, I already have the pregnant woman's bellybutton (and still 14 weeks to go!), and I can't help but notice it all the time since I'm forever bumping the counters with my stomach (I keep forgetting and it gets in the way). Hopefully I'll get used to it soon. It is also getting harder to bend over to tie my shoes, so the warm weather had better come around quickly so I can start wearing slip-ons again. If not, my toes are going to start getting awfully cold . . .
Kathleen came in town to go apartment-hunting with Matthew, and afterwards she planned to spend the night here (although she will miss her morning cuddle with Jonathan as she leaves at 6 a.m. to make a bike ride in Chappell Hill Sunday morning with John, Tim, Felicia, and a few others). So Jen & Stepan came over about 4:30, which thrilled Jonathan to pieces of course, and Kathleen turned up a little over an hour later, and a pleasant relaxing evening was had by all. No one was around to goad me into cooking (you know who you are!
In the morning I am looking forward to having some of the dill bread that I made fresh this afternoon. Mom, this time I even put a few dill seeds in the bread itself as well as brushing them on the top--I'll report on the outcome.
This evening was the second of seven meetings for the Plan II Perspectives seminar (I know I never did put up thoughts from the first one--they're all getting lumped in together here). the topic of which this time is Elements of the Good Life. For some reason on the way home, I got all riled up thinking about what I consider to be the evil influence of chains (as in restaurants, not ones that go clank-clank on ghosts in the attic). I think the way that local character is being slowly eliminated in the world today is truly awful. I hate it that I can go to Dallas, Houston, or Kansas City and walk into a Chili's and not be able to know where I am. Even hotels pop up everywhere--Marriotts, Holiday Inns, Radissons, etc. While it is nice sometimes to find some comfort food when on a trip, frankly all those people that want nothing but familiar things around them should save their money and stay at home.
Why I starting thinking about that, I have no idea--can't quite see how it was connected to the discussions this evening. Which I tremendously enjoyed! I nearly didn't go as I had a headache most of the day as well as last evening (foolishly had a lunch yesterday that had approximately 1 whole gram of protein in it, and I paid the price--pregnant women need their protein, I have discovered in this pregnancy), but I'm so glad I did drag myself out. This is the 3rd of these seminars I've attended, and so far I think I'm enjoying this one the most. Unfortunately I'll miss next week b/c of my birthday, but I shouldn't have to miss any others.
The two members of the panel who "spoke" this evening were Larry Speck (you have to scroll nearly all the way to the bottom to read his bio), an architect, and Nancy Schiesari, a film professor. I put "spoke" in quotes because Nancy didn't actually speak, per se--she presented different film clips and let them do the speaking for her. It's the first time she's been on a panel for these seminars, and she's very interesting. She was certainly much more comfortable speaking through her clips! One interesting snippet she showed was from a documentary that Martin Scorsese did about his parents; another was from an astonishingly agonizing film called Family Life, made by British director Ken Loach in 1971. (She also had clips from The Ice Storm and Meet the Parents.)
Some interesting points raised:
--Larry discussed how one's home--environment--in modern society is inextricably linked to one's notion of well-being (not all societies were like this--the Greeks, for one, put more focus on their public spaces than we do). He dealt with the question of how a home helps us actualize our lives in the fullest way, how it helps us have a dialog with ourselves about who we are and how we communicate that to our friends and family, those people that we invite into our home. He offered two very different examples of homes--Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and Henry David Thoreau's Walden--the point being that what you have to determine for yourself is what is the physical environment that will enable you to have a fuller life, not that there is one specific type of home everyone should be going for. Even in the smallest spaces that aren't even ours, we alter it to make a difference. He said when he was in college and living in dorm rooms, he always got ones with big windows and he always took the curtains down because he needed to have as much natural light as he could get. Most college students decorate their living space in some way, whether it's with posters on the walls, rugs on the floors, etc. Recently in our own house I took off nearly all the window screens in the back of the house, and what a difference it has made to my feeling of well-being and relaxation when I walk out into the kitchen/den area! Now I can clearly see the different shades of green in the leaves, the red of the berries on the yaupon holly, the colors on the birds' feathers at the bird feeders. I no longer feel I'm living in a cave or that I'm looking out through a veil.
--The astronomer on the panel, Neal Evans, commented that he has some ambivalence towards the idea of needing a home in the traditional sense. As a child he moved every couple of years, and he learned to make wherever he was into home. That's turned out useful in his career too, as he often visits telescope sites for a week or more at a time, and he says when he gets there he makes a point of putting all this clothes away in whatever closet is serving for a room (he actually said they're usually more like monks' cells), and then that's it--that's his home until he leaves. Even for his vacations, he and his wife like to get away from their domicile and backpack, and he loves the feeling that everything he needs he is carrying on his back. He (as well as the mathematician on the panel, Mike Starbird) finds that for him, home is more of a spiritual concept, something that travels with you wherever you go. Mike & his wife recently remodeled their home, and he said it was the first time it had ever occurred to him that his home might enable his interests and reflect his life (it wouldn't have occurred to him without the help of the architects that Larry Speck had sent his way either).
--To close, an interesting story that Nancy shared was visiting her childhood home as an adult. It was in an area that was being gentrified, and the house was in the process of being remodeled--the carpets had been taken up and the hardwood floors were being refinished and polished. She said she was peeking in through the front door, which was standing open (no one was living there at the time), and it just hit her with great force that a home is like a theatre stage--it had served its purpose as a backdrop for her family, and now it was having the set changed to play another role for a different family. I thought that was kind of a neat concept.
I am most pleased to report that it seems I have finally traced our John Kenefick back to somewhere more specific that County Cork, Ireland. This morning I called the man who runs the kenefick.com site and spoke with him about our line; he offered to check the parish records that he had in his possession for Keneficks in County Cork. So I sent an e-mail with all pertinent information, and within half an hour he had e-mailed me back with a summary transcription of baptismal records for John and his four siblings. Yippee! (By the way, we do not know of any connection at this time between the Keneficks on the site referenced above and our Keneficks; if one exists, it will be back in Ireland rather than in America.)
We already knew, from John Kenefick's obituary, that his parents were named Thomas Kenefick and Bridget Toomey. The baptismal records indicate that John was the 3rd of five children: oldest was Patrick (Grama has always said that John Kenefick had a brother named Patrick who settled in Boston, Massachusetts), then Honora, John, Thomas, and Andy (probably Andrew). They lived in Rathanker, which appears to be a townland in the parish of Passage West, although I need to look into it a bit further (it may be Monkstown--I'm not up on Irish stuff).
It is very satisfying to finally have an Irish record that pinpoints where John Kenefick's family came from and provides proof that they really did come from where it was said that he did (many families said they came from Cork when in reality they were from a different part of Ireland and simply sailed out of Cork Harbor).