Dec 1, 2023 — Holiday Card Bankruptcy
Greetings everyone. What’s up?
Last week I mentioned I was going to go to the Vancouver Art Gallery to see a particular show. I did that, and here are my three favourite paintings. I think you can click to expand them if you want:
They are all part of a retrospective of work by Denyse Thomasos, a Trinidadian-Canadian artist who died young (1964–2012). Her work varied a bit, with her earliest stuff obviously coming from an art school where she tried a bunch of different things. Then she got into abstract painting in a style that didn’t really resonate with me. (See this for example.) But over time that morphed into the paintings you see above, which I definitely do like. Later in her career things started getting a bit more organic. Still abstract, but more curvy, if you will. They might have worked, but the examples in this show weren’t as interesting in my opinion.
The ones I like feel architectural in nature, at least in my mind. I see buildings under construction, or the bones of a cityscape. In addition to the overall composition, I like her linework and her use of colour. There are things I can learn from looking at these.
Note that the paintings above are larger than the photos make them appear. The first and third are huge: eight or ten feet tall and correspondingly wide. The second is only three or four feet tall, so small in comparison, but still pretty large on a regular living room wall.
In other news, last week I did walkies with my friend Ducky in Vancouver. We walked along the seawall and got partway up into Stanley Park in the process. She’s taken up bike riding in a big way in the last few months, which I simply do not understand. Willingly riding a bike in Vancouver is a clear indication of a serious death wish. You couldn’t pay me enough to ride a bike up here, and that ignores the fact that bicycle seats are the least comfortable things ever invented that are (supposedly) designed to interact with the human body. There are significantly less painful medieval torture devices. So just in case anyone was wondering, I won’t be joining Ducky on her bike rides.
What else happened? Well, Cruzer is now on pain meds. Yesterday was his first dose, and it is possible they are helping. We’re not sure yet, but we will figure it out. Once we see if they help we might also look into a doggy Prozac. He’s more than a bit too nervous for his own good.
Next, the December community email went out very early this morning. That comes with a bunch of updates to the website that happen at the same time (or at least not too long after it gets sent). So I was busy this morning dealing with those. Mind you, the upgrade path for the website is still completely unclear. The staging version of the site is currently a train wreck, and I have no clue what I am going to do about it. I need to keep digging into options but it’s a real nightmare.
I also spent a bit more time working in Ancestry.com, poking at some distant relations. I have clarified a couple of things, and I think I have pretty completely confirmed something mildly interesting. It turns out that a great (x3) grandfather and his brother both served in the US Civil War. They enlisted in the 140th Illinois Volunteer Infantry on the same day and served for 100 days. My mother has a “Certificate of Honorable Service” for one of them, signed by Abraham Lincoln. (Note that he signed rather a lot of these documents, so while it is interesting, it’s not all that valuable.) The problem turns out to be that it’s the certificate for the wrong brother, not the one I am actually descended from. Someone in the past mixed up Henry MacPherson and his brother Charles. I’m descended from Charles, not Henry, and the certificate is for Henry.
A side note: There were 85 men in their company and there were ten companies, each of about the same size. That means the 140th Illinois Volunteer Infantry had about 850 men in total, plus officers. The regiment’s records say five enlisted men were killed in action and 24 died of disease. Clearly you didn’t want to get sick: nearly three percent of the regiment died of disease. Yikes!
Second side note: You might recall a previous discussion about two brothers that served in the US Civil War on opposite sides — Union and Confederacy. Two things about that:
- First, the MacPherson brothers are from a different branch of the family.
- Second, it turns out I can’t find the brothers who served on opposite sides in the war. I have the name of one of them — Darius Stacey — who served for the Union and who is a relative. But none of the records I have found indicate he had a brother who served for the Confederacy. That brother was supposedly named David Stacey, but while Darius’ father had a lot of children — nine by two different wives — none of them are named David. At least not based on the records I have found so far.
I probably need to dig into all of Darius’ brothers to see if any of them also served in the Civil War, on either side. Maybe there was some mix-up in the past about this. Genealogy is full of craziness like this. Everyone uses the same names (over and over and over) and records are spotty at best once you get back even a few generations.
Finally, I have to explain this week’s title. Every year for the past several years I have wanted to send out holiday cards, but I haven’t managed to do it. This year is going to be the same, I am sorry to say. Instead it will once again be a holiday email, and I apologize for that in advance. How it is possible for Christmas to sneak up on me like this, I really don’t know.
The plan was to create cards myself, using some sort of printing process. But yet again I have completely failed to make that happen. And it’s already too late to go with pre-fab cards. The combination of the Canadian and US postal services means they wouldn’t arrive until after the holidays, at the earliest.
I wanted to be better about this, but I keep failing. Sorry!
In any case, that’s life this week. I hope you are all doing well and that you are far ahead of me on the holiday preparations thing. Cheers!