genealogy

Where To Start…?

I’ve never done online research solely on Ancestry.com before. I’ve never had the run of the place. I’ve always assumed I’d have access to my U.S. Census Records Collection, a few free databases, and that’s it. Now, though, the whole place is my playground, and I don’t know where to start.

It’s a good thing I made notes online earlier.

I still need to work on finding all the pertinent info for Grandpa Cook’s aunts and uncles, because my “brick wall” is only one generation past them. I also need to find a marriage record for Grandpa’s grandparents. After that… I have census records going from 1870 back to 1840 for what I believe is my Cook family, but I need definite evidence linking my William Henry Cook to the Thomas Cook I think is his father. I know that William Henry had a brother named Harry and a half-brother named Samuel, but this information hasn’t helped me at all. I haven’t found a Harry or a Samuel anywhere that William has been.

To make things even more confusing and difficult to trace, William Henry’s mother is listed as a Nancy on his birth record. No maiden name. But, the only William I’ve been able to find with a Thomas for a father has had a Rachel listed on the census as his mother. WTF? I still haven’t puzzled this one out. I’m hoping that I’ll locate some marriage record someday that will make sense of this whole thing.

Well, I guess I’ll try to hunt down some more death records, maybe some marriage records, and maybe even some land records online. I’m going to have to put that off till tomorrow, though; I need to do some dishes before I go to bed.

genealogy

Dueling Hobbies

I haven’t been doing much work on my genealogy lately, so when I got an e-mail from Ancestry.com, I was only vaguely interested. Until I read the subject: “Class Action Settlement Benefit Notice.”

Seems that there was a class-action lawsuit against Ancestry, resulting in Ancestry giving one month of free access to all subscribers. I’m only subscribed to the U.S. Census Collection, but they have several other collections, including newspapers, records in general, and god knows what else.

And, for the entire month of May, I get FREE ACCESS.

So… despite prime gardening season approaching, I’m going to be going gangbusters with my genealogy during the next month, to take full advantage of $30 worth of records access for FREE.

I love class-action lawsuits.

weight loss 1 Comment

Diet & Fitness Update, Week #15

Not much to report. I forgot to weigh myself before the weekend hit again, so today’s weigh-in was after a cheat day of Chinese for lunch and Mexican for dinner. I’m up to 209, but I’m going to weigh myself in another couple of days, after the extra calories have averaged themselves out.

I didn’t do my PUSH workouts this week. It was a challenge to try to get back into the groove after skipping my workouts from being sick, unfortunately. This week, I’m going to get back on that. I’m paying money for this program, after all. I have been continuing my daily walks, though. I’d feel like I missed out on a big part of my day if I didn’t walk during my lunch.

Not eating enough protein. I need to work on that, too. Been continuing to eat too many carbs too late in the day, just because it’s easier than cooking meat. I also have been skipping snackies during the day, because I’m finally doing work I enjoy and get caught up in. By the time I realize I didn’t eat my morning snack, it’s almost time for lunch.

So, I guess the overall gist of this week is that I’ve been coasting. I need to start getting back on this weight-loss thing hardcore. I’m tired of feeling unsexy and frumpy… although I *am* feeling much better than I was even a few months ago.

gardening 1 Comment

More Plants?

You guys are going to get sick of me continually blogging about the plants I haven’t killed yet.

You might recall that I got several plants from the resident Plant Guru at work last year. This year, she included her plants in the White Elephant Sale to benefit the American Cancer Society’s Relay For Life, rather than just giving them away. Everyone who placed a “bid” on her plants was guaranteed at least one plant, since she brought in about 30. It ended up that I donated $7.50 (not including what I gave for the dress-down day and the potluck) and got six plants. Not a bad deal.

Thankfully, Melissa labels her plants, and labels them well, so I knew what I was getting myself into before I selected which plants I wanted to take home. I tried to get plants that would tolerate partial shade, but I *had* to get the lamb’s ear.

Yes, lamb’s ear. It’s pale green and fuzzy.

Today’s haul consisted of:

  • (2) Lamb’s Ear – Stachys byzantia
    6-12″ tall, full sun to part shade, perennial, fuzzy pale green leaves with purple flowers
  • (2) Veronica “Georgia Blue” – Veronica umbrosa
    6″ tall, full sun to part shade, perennial, creeping ground cover with small blue flowers
  • (1) Purple Coneflower – Echinacea purpurea (?)
    2-3′ tall, full sun, perennial, magenta flowers
  • (1) Black-Eyed Susan “Goldsturm” – Rudbeckia fulgida
    1-2′ tall, full sun to part shade, perennial, yellow-gold petals and brown/black centers

As always, getting plants from other people as opposed to making a planned purchase makes my garden planning a little more interesting. I don’t have much full-sun space, and what I do have is in the front yard (where everyone can witness my neglect).

I hesitate to plant anything of value to me by the mailbox, as I don’t have much faith in the permanence of our inexpensive cheap mailbox post. I’d hate to have to try to move established plants so we can install a new post someday in the future.

I also hesitate to plant anything along the driveway, as our driveway isn’t terribly wide, and I end up walking on the grass when I get in the car (on the passenger’s side, anyway), especially in the wintertime. There are also moles galore (OK, maybe it’s only one, but he’s a busy one) on the other side of the driveway, so I don’t think I’d be keen on planting anything there, really. Although it probably means that we have good soil there, and grubs, and nummy things for moles to feast upon.

My sunny choices are on either side of the sidewalk leading from the driveway to the front door. Either I bite into our front lawn proper (where the best sun is), or I take the foot or so in front of the bushes (which wouldn’t exactly be full sun, since our house faces north; the plants would sometimes be in the shade of the bushes).

The plants I picked seem to have good reviews on Dave’s Garden, though: the lamb’s ear is hardy and potentially invasive, the purple coneflower grows tall and doesn’t need staking, the veronica is evergreen, and the black-eyed susans are also evergreen and seem to be fairly low-maintenance.

I need to sit down and make a battle plan. The time is coming soon when I’ll need to put all these plants in the ground, and I’ll need to have an idea of what this little arrangement should look like when I’m done. I’m not averse to filling in any empty spots with some annuals (impatiens was my friend a couple years ago), but I don’t want my flower bed to look stupid. Y’know?

We’ll see how this goes…

geekspeak, the ongoing saga of my job

Geekery, Continued

Everything just seemed to fall into place.

We had talked to our department’s trainer, and asked him if he thought we should train everyone on what we had of the database so far, or whether we should wait until the database is complete — god only knows when that will be. The trainer agreed that we should train our department ASAP, and fill them in on any additional updates as necessary.

We worked on borrowing a projector and a laptop, and making sure one of the nearby conference rooms had network access. Then, a supervisor from an IT-based department upstairs said that we could just use their training room, already equipped with a projector and laptop and room for eight people — exactly big enough to train half of our department at a crack. We booked the room for a week and a half in the future.

We continued to work on getting reports and statistics-gathering forms functional in the development copy (aka the test database). We met with our supervisor after he returned from vacation earlier this week, and got his reactions to the database and the reports we’d created for him. He gave us some suggestions for tweaking the reports, but said that we could go ahead with implementing the statistics-gathering from team members. Month-end is tomorrow, so the new method of gathering stats in the database would be implemented effective Monday. Just in time for training.

Everything was ready to import into the live database yesterday afternoon, and we did our update at 4:30pm yesterday. The import had only one minor glitch in one report, due to some previously-entered data that invalidated the referential integrity we’d set up between tables. We came in early this morning to fix the problem, rather than staying late yesterday. After correcting the data in the main log table, everything was fine. The database was essentially complete. Again, just in time for training.

Our first training session was at 9:30am today. I stood at the front and did the public speaking, while James sat at the laptop and did the demonstrating. Other supervisors in the loan area were invited to attend one of the two sessions, so that they might be able to see whether an Access database might benefit their department. One supervisor was in attendance for the first training session, and our own supervisor popped in for the first half of that session, making a full house.

The first session took just over an hour, including questions. That was a little longer than we’d counted on, as we’d scheduled the second session to start at 10:30am.

The second session actually ended up starting at 10:45am, and one more supervisor was in attendance, in addition to the supervisor of all Loan Servicing departments. (No pressure.) Our supervisor came in for the second part of the session this time. This session took almost exactly an hour.

Overall, we did well on our two scheduled training sessions… but we weren’t done yet. Two team members who process payoff checks had asked if they could wait until 3:30pm to train, since the end of the month is a busy time for them. We agreed, and ended up having four people in an afternoon session: the two payoff ladies, one supervisor from yet another department, and one team member who had gotten caught in a 45-minute phone call during the 10:30 session and hadn’t been able to attend. That session was a little awkward, being that there was such a small but diverse audience, but it seemed to be well-received nonetheless.

We didn’t get much actual work done on the database today — combined a couple reports into one (thank jebus for union queries) and started working on calculations for another report — but, overall, considering all the training we did, I think we had a productive day.

The next potentially stressful issue? How to tell our supervisor that we want a change in job description before we work on databases for other departments. Neither myself nor James are terribly good at standing up for ourselves… but we need to stand firm. It would be easy for The Man to take advantage of our apparently rare and valuable skills. If they had to hire new people to replace us, though, any self-respecting Access database programmer or administrator would scoff at our current wage.

I hate being a self-serving jerk. Our boss is cool, though, so I think we should be able to get our point across in a non-threatening and un-jerk-like manner. We’ll see.

Even if I do remain a mere Operations Associate… I love being able to do what I enjoy at work. This is why I went to college. I’m glad I wasn’t just chasing rainbows.