Sept 29, 2023 — Hoary Claver
That’s your author on a hike last Sunday, trying to be seen by the mountain bikers before they attempt a physics experiment involving putting two or more solid objects into the same physical space at exactly the same moment. (We all know the results of such experiments, but people keep repeating them.)
The trail behind me goes uphill at quite an angle. It’s called Powerline Trail reasons that become obvious in this next photo:
That’s looking the other direction. West, in fact. Off in the distance you can see a couple of ships (top left) waiting to come into port. And just left of them is the northern part of Stanley Park. The Lions Gate bridge is below them, crossing from the park to the North Shore. All the buildings you see are in North Vancouver. Well, there might be a few from West Vancouver way off in the distance.
In other places on that same walk I saw these impressive fungi:
That was a lovely day. Pretty much the last lovely day until today, in fact. It’s been rainy and misty otherwise, and I have not walked. I’m feeling it, and so are the dogs. Being cooped up doesn’t agree with them, even if neither can go all that far, for different reasons.
Oh, speaking of the dogs. I’ve heard that one of my readers (hi Kim!) thought Cruzer had left us. I have no idea where that came from, though. Cruzer is still here, and he’s just as dumb and weird as he’s been all of his life. Well, weirder, in truth. Age continues to bring out more neuroses and “enhance” the ones he’s had forever. But I’m off topic. The point is that if something I wrote caused anyone to think Cruzer had left us, I apologize. That is not the case. He’s still doing his level best to drive me crazy at every possible turn.
There was one other thing on that walk:
Yes, that is a terrible photo. It’s a (blurry) barred owl sitting on a tree in the neighbourhood, just a few blocks from our home. I would have missed it entirely but a neighbour stopped me and pointed. He had a huge camera, and his photos are much better than my own, but this is the best I got using my phone. Apparently these owls call “who cooks, who cooks for you?”
In other news, there isn’t much news. Well, no. Or rather, sort of.
It turns out I’ve become something of a news junkie. At the moment American politics — being a gigantic train wreck — is astonishing to watch. Add in all of the goings on around the previous president, and I could spend all day, every day, tracking it. It’s not healthy, but I wasn’t going to be walking in the rain anyway. And I know Canadian politics is also weird, but I liken it to the kids’ table at a family gathering. (I apologize if that offends my Canadian readers, but up here we don’t give deranged 70+ year old, fascist, nitwits the keys to enough nuclear weapons to wipe out humanity. You can line up all the scandals in Canadian politics you want and they will pale in comparison to what goes on south of the border. Let’s not follow their lead. Please!)
I wasn’t totally idle, though. The past week saw a lot of work on the next issue of the monthly community email, which gets sent out on the morning of October 1st. When I wasn’t tracking stupidity in the USA I was working on that, and I have the minor back pain to prove it. (Every month the time spent at the computer goes up as the next issue comes together and my back pain gets worse in proportion. I’ll be fine in a day or three, but walking upright clearly has certain drawbacks. And I need a better office chair.)
On the genealogy project, I got confirmation of who my missing great (x3) grandparents were, and added them to the tree. It turns out there is a distant cousin (among others) who has been researching that side of the family, and their data is already in Ancestry. Notes from my mother and grandmother confirmed what she’s found, so the tree got one layer deeper in that area, and Ancestry says it knows about the next layer as well. However, this branch of the family is Swedish, and I have yet to fully understand how many of them came to the US or when. Things get harder to research when you leave the boarders of the USA. Or at least Ancestry wants to charge more money for the privilege, but I will keep poking at it.
I need to find some way to share all of this data with my mother, who probably doesn’t want to understand how ancestry.com works. Does anyone have any good ideas about how to do that? What is the right way to organize this data that is not in a database? I keep trying to figure something out — in my head — and so far I have failed to find anything that looks like it would work. I can make something work that goes back three or four generations, but double or triple that and things get really messy. I would love suggestions on how to make this data accessible to people without an ancestry login.
That’s all I have this week. Peace!