Thank you!

Just say NO!

No, this isn't another Public Service Announcement (but Hey! Say no to Drugs!). I'm talking about the fact that no one seems to know how to say NO anymore. I sit through endless meetings where people hem and haw (yeah, I guess I AM that old), about this or that, and we'll look into this or think about that, but what they're really saying in their mind is NO. If they drag their feet long enough they know we'll have to take what they give us. Because no one wants to tell "upper management" NO - we can't deliver on that tight timeline.

Or the uneducated management types that have no idea the herculean effort necessary to recreate manually week by week the presentation you had to do for them months ago as a one time effort.

Or the... Or the... And the...

If you mean NO, say NO. Deal with the consequences, and spend the four hours of meetings that you just avoided coming up with something better than what you said NO to.

Long roots

I'm been slightly, OK, REALLY distracted lately trying to get my Family Tree cleaned up. I've got over 11,000 people in there from both my side and my wife's side, including all known siblings or every relative I can find (they'll help me find even more later). I'm having fun and learning a lot, but it's kinda tedious.

I've build my tree by merging and inputting data from many sources, electronic and otherwise. There've been many people who've helped me get the tree to where it is today... but too many hands in the pot means that not everyone did things the same way, let alone how I did. Some people and sources were REALLY meticulous about sourcing the data, others, including me at times, have not been so careful.

I'm working right now on cleaning up the places associated with events in my tree -- births, marriages, deaths, burials, etc. Family Tree Maker has a location repository of some 300,000+ places that helps standardize the locations so that it can then display them on a map or report. For most of the 3000+ places referenced in my tree it found the appropriate place. For several hundred others it had a harder time. Interpreting "Grove, near Indy - of cancer" is kinda hard even for me. So, for those I have to break the location apart ("cancer" to Cause of Death, and Grove, IN to the location field where I can safely infer that's what they meant). It's a slow process since I can't necessarily interpret "Battle Creek" the same way for all occurrence. There are six cities named Battle Creek in two countries, so I have to look at each occurrence and see if I can tell which state they are referring to (did all of their other life places occur in one state?) and attack them one by one.

In the end, I think it'll make for a much more accurate and maintainable Tree that anyone else can keep up generations from now (or help me with now). It's worth the work, but reeeeealy ssssssssssssllllllloooooooooow.

Then I have to go back and review all of the alternate facts (different marriage dates, locations, birth locations, etc) for people and find documents to support one or the other. Don't get me wrong, this is really fun, but I can't wait until I get it clean enough that I can focus on finding more new information and people -- copies of immigration papers, wedding pics, obits, occupations, stories, etc... THAT'S when the REAL fun begins!

Happy Mommy's Day!

:-)

Falling asleep...

Obviously not at this very moment, though I would love to...

I think that I'm severely lacking in the sleep department. Not sure exactly why. I know that I wake up several times a night for one reason or another -- the cat jumping on me, the cat jumping off me, bathroom trips, too hot, too cold, one of the kids needs something, thunder claps, an annoying itch on my nose, a "guttural breathing sound" coming from beside me :-)

Staying asleep once I get there is one issue. Getting to sleep in the first place is another. My mind has a lot more stamina than my body. Must be because I'm getting old. My mind is always racing with things that I need to remember to do tomorrow. Things I need to put on a list. Reasons for events of the day. Things to research. Things to blog about. Things that I wish would happen. Things that hopefully will never happen. Financial concerns. Things I'm really happy for. Better ways to do things that I failed at. It just never stops. So I find that I need to trick it a bit. I kinda need to distract it and let my body sneak up on it and flip the switch to off.

My wife uses reading sometimes to accomplish this, but that's not enough for me. I usually rely on TV to supply the distraction. It can't be anything that's interesting though or that just sets me up for failure. My mind kicks in to overdrive to process the information being beamed at it instead of being caught off guard. It can't be a science show, or a series I watch regularly. News sometimes works, especially if it's getting close to twenty minutes after when the sports stuff starts :-) Even with the news, if I go to bed at the wrong time, too many minutes before it starts, I find myself forcing myself to stay awake until it starts so I can use it to lull me to sleep. Kind of a wacky thing.

I've tried warm milk. I've tried exercise. I've tried just turning it all off and closing my eyes -- actually that one works if I'm really tired, but if I'm not quite over the edge, my mind takes over and then I'm right back to square one.

We have a vacation coming up this summer in North Carolina where my wife and I will actually be staying alone in a different building completely from where the kids will be staying. I'm interested to see if the absolute dead quiet and pitch black sky of the NC mountains will enable me to sleep any better. It usually takes me a couple of nights before I grow accustomed to the new bed, the unusual wilderness sounds, and the like. Here's to hoping...