Seven Walks

Hello everyone. I trust you had a pleasant week. And if you live on Maui, what are you doing reading this? You clearly have more important things to worry about!

I haven’t been hugely productive, but it’s been an interesting time nonetheless.

First, we had rain. It amounted to a full inch at our house. That’s a lot for August, even here in Vancouver. That delayed some exterior work, and there’s not much to tell about interior projects. I finally hung the art in the bathroom, and touched up the paint around the skylight where it needed a second coat. There’s a couple of nits remaining to get done in there. I have no clue how to tackle them, but I’ll figure something out.

The exterior project I really want to get done is this:

That’s over the entryway. It’s stained some dark colour, but the stain is giving up, so I am sanding it lightly and it will get painted black soon. Hopefully the same day this post goes out.

Note the lower right area of the wood in the photo isn’t sanded yet. I forgot to take a “before” photo and was almost done sanding when I remembered, so this is all you get. As of this writing it’s fully sanded and I have the paint. I just need to spend an hour or two with a brush to get it done.

Flash update:

There’s a problem, but it’s hard to see.

I’ve already painted the other half of this wood (around the corner, not visible above) and that went just fine, but it was in the shade. This section was in the sun. Not good.

I could apply paint in an area, move on a bit, and all was well. But when I inevitably had to brush over the paint I’d put down only a minute or two before, it had a skin over the top that would peel up and make a mess. I’ve stopped painting there for a few hours to let it dry more fully, and so the sun can get behind the maple tree. Once it’s shaded I will sand off the mess and start over on that surface.

I’ve never had paint dry that quickly before. It’s no fun to work with.

In other news, I spent a fair bit of time working on website stuff for the community association. I photographed the last folder of documents I had on loan from a local history group and returned them, and updated the website multiple times. Some of those were software updates while others were for content. This is one of those volunteer gigs that I suspect I will own forever.

Another thing that happened — and is now consuming some of my time — is that I have started playing with Ancestry.com. My mom and I have talked about our family tree on several occasions and it’s been of mild interest, but I have never done anything about it. One of my grandmothers did some history research, and I think my mom did as well. I’ve got copies of family tree data going back to the early 1800s in some cases, but it’s all on paper (or scanned) and nothing is centralized.

Last time I was visiting my mom we looked at the 1950 US census data — which was relatively recently released — and gathered some items from it, but that only scratches the surface.

For my birthday, mom gave me a subscription to ancestry.com, so I have started poking around at that website and figuring it out. I started by entering what I personally know, and was surprised at how quickly it started pointing me at relatives a generation or two farther back. I am now starting to enter the information I have from my grandmother and others, and in most cases what I was pointed at by the website has been correct.

This sort of thing is interesting as a data organization/management problem. These kinds of records can only be described as a huge mess. You can’t really trust anything unless you know it personally. Everything can be wrong for all kinds of reasons: incorrect entry, someone misread something, typos, poor scanning, poor OCR, poor AI assisted OCR, and so on. And that’s the accidental stuff. Deliberate changes are possible as well.

The challenge is in finding your way through the data to see if you can get it organized intelligently. Where differences crop up, you need to keep them in mind and see if you can find multiple sources that agree. Even then you might not learn the truth.

There is nothing particularly useful about this project, and so far I have found nothing hugely exciting in our past. We have one (Methodist?) minister (who I think I have heard described as being of the “fire and brimstone” sort) who left his wife for another woman — and left the church in the process — and wound up selling burial plots in California. I’ve found a few Swedes and a few Germans, but mostly I am still dealing with relatives in the USA.

In any case, it’s amusing to spend an hour or two a day at this, just to see where it goes, and how far out I can push the tree. Should I encounter any interesting relatives, I will see about sharing what I learn.

And then there’s this week’s title: Seven Walks. I’ve been trying to get out for a serious walk every day. The Google Fit app suggests 150 heart points a week — minimum — and I’m happy to report I am well beyond that. I typically get well over 40 points per day, even with the recent rain restricting my walking a bit. (The rain was heavy enough to make me avoid the trails for a while — I don’t need that much mud — but I’ll get back to them soon.)

Sadly, Fit is not a great app. The maps it creates of your walks are useless, but the heart point count, overall distance, and step count seem fairly accurate when compared with other sources. (Anne has a fitness watch of some kind, which is better in a lot of ways.)

Occasionally I am accompanied by Anne. Here’s where we wound up on one of our shared walks:

We’re on the Seymour River Suspension Bridge.

Next week the paint around the front entryway will be done, I’ll know a bit more about my distant relations, I’ll have walked a few more kilometres, and I might have made some progress on other projects. Time will tell.

Cheers!