Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Okay. Why?

Honey, I think I am going to start up my blog again.

Okay. Why?

Because…uh….well, I’ll get back to you on that.




Well, we had a flood. I live in Houston, and that is what Houston does – make a nuisance of itself. So I didn’t go to work, not that I had to anyway. I am retired. I only show up for work a couple of days a week out of extraordinary kindness and generosity to my previous co-workers. And the fact that my ex-employer pays me a bonus to come in every now and then.

Then I had a gout attack in my left foot Sunday that I am recovering from. Gout is a painful form of arthritis when uric acid crystals build up in my foot joints. I am not talking about wimpy pain like a toe amputation or a broken bone…but a level five pain that leaves me whimpering. Okay…maybe a level three pain. This happens rarely and there is medication for it, and it takes a few days to recover from. So I am robbed of the ability to handle customary strenuous and vigorous activity.

Honey, the dishwasher needs unloading.

Oh my foot….ow, ow…it hurts.

It’s your turn to feed the dogs.

Oh man….I wonder if I should get some crutches?

So what am I to do? I used to have a pretty lousy blog here. Maybe I could start it back up…something to occupy me during my painful recovery. Then I thought….actually I could start a blog anywhere. So I went to something called ‘Weebly’….and boy did I get confused. I figure it was the medication fogging my brain. So I went to ‘WordPress’….and well, it just seemed like a lot of work to set up another lousy blog site. So as much as I dislike Google, why not?

Actually, I can’t remember how I used to do this. It’s that medication thing again. So to start off with I am typing this into Word, then I think copy it into NotePad, and then copy it into a post. I am not typing directly into the Blog because this way I get to change my mind if I wanna’. Then I have to study the mechanics of everything….comments and people to monitor and….I can’t remember what.

Then I have to change my header somehow…update it. Hopefully I can figure that out.


Have you ever tried to do genealogical research? It is confusing.

I have been trying to trace my lineage…looking for a castle or two…or some royalty somewhere. It would be neat to have a Coat of Arms. After weeks of digging into Ancestry.com I have traced, I think, my father’s side back to the year 1074. I have a couple of generations of ‘Sirs’ in my family, which I think means they were knights. So perhaps it would not be inappropriate if you called me Sir Jerry. My family traces back to the Norman/Anglo-Saxon thing and my oldest relative was mentioned in the Doomsday Book. If you don’t know, that is pretty significant.

 It was William the Conqueror (at least I think it was) who ordered his royal staff to….’Forsooth…goest out and enumeratith all the folks of the land and their holdings and their spouses and urchins and count every acre and every pig and every chicken and what property belongs to whatest family and…’ Well, he said something like that. All of this census and property information was compiled in a Big Book of the Kingdom. Because this book became the final arbiter of all court cases…..the final say, it became known as the Doomsday Book. It is now in the National Archives in Great Britain. I will show a picture of the book if I can remember how to do that.

Maybe Sir Doomsday Jerry would work.

But the problem with Ancestry.com is that it costs money to use. Okay….I’ll pay my $20 a month. But then to do any research into Great Britain and Europe, I would have to pay a bunch more. I put my foot down at that! I mean, my right foot, not my left gouty foot. So I have to start digging elsewhere online to get more information. And that sucks. I have Great Britain on my father’s side, and Germany on my mother’s side.

And to add to my frustration, my great grandfather on my mother’s side wasn’t born! The genealogical record stops with him with no record of his parents….in Ancestry or anyplace else I can find. That sucks too.

I tell you this so you will know that my mind has not been idle. People think that retirement is idyllic, but retirees encounter frustration too. And gout.

Okay, will this do for a return blog post?

17 comments:

  1. www.familysearch.org is where I have gotten a lot of my family information I refuse to pay Amazon for information that should be, and used to be, free. usgenweb.org is a good site, used to be great but I have a sneaking suspicion that Amazon has gotten to them as well as to rootsweb.com It sounds as if you have already found out a lot about your ancestors though.

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    1. Thanks for the suggested alternate genealogical sites, and I will use them as an additional resource. In my particular instance, I came up empty trying to locate my great, great grandparents on my mother's side. Aaaargh! Jerry

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  2. Sir Jerry! Oh excuse me, Sir Doomsday Jerry!! Am SO happy that you've come back! I've always loved your posts and you have been missed. And yes, this is the perfect return blog post.

    Have heard all about the crazy weather going on down there. Stay safe.

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  3. Welcome back! Looking forward to reading your adventures!
    a/b

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  4. Glad you are back! I keep threatening to come back but then I get distracted again.Hope that darn foot feels better soon.

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  5. Hey, it's just like falling off a bike, isn't it? Welcome back! You owe us six hundred posts. Now go find out if your great grandfather was assembled from a Heath kit.

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  6. Glad you're back, old pal. Sorry to hear about your troubles, but hey---you're using the Stephen King approach to painful recoveries, and that's to convalesce in front of a keyboard. Bravo.

    WEEBLY! Gosh darn it. Thanks a million. I got an account with them years ago, but was so confused that I let it lapse and forgot all about it. I intended to employ their services as I built a brand-new, totally-customized TSV from the ground up. Thanks for the reminder.

    Your quoting of William the Conqueror was worth the price of admission. Every penny...

    I managed to dig a fair way into Ancestry.com (back to the mid-1500s) without paying a penny, but the problem was that I had no way of verifying the information I found. I went far enough back that my tree began linking up with other people's, but I had no way of knowing whether their information was sound. I found a Revolutionary War minuteman, an excommunicated Dutch noble, and a couple of great-grandfathers named "Leonidas" in my family tree...not the King Olaf of Norway or George Washington or Wiley Post I was hoping for. Ah well.

    Keep writing, Sir Jerry. I eagerly await the next entry.

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    (1) If you want your ex back.
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  8. Jerry, I encourage you to attend to the message above. Dr. Uduka can make you pregnancy! You don't want to miss this opportunity, I feel sure. And welcome back. Oo ee oo ahh ahh, ting tang walla walla bing bang!

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  9. Welcome, never enough old dudes blogging. Based on your linage, I'm pretty sure we're cousins.

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  10. JERRY! I've missed you!

    I don't check in on blogger as much as I used to, but I'm so happy to see you here. I use Myheritage.com, which is free up until a certain point, but to use the resources on it, you'd have to pay. I wrote a blog post about my findings a while back, which you might enjoy: http://terilynnbrown.blogspot.com/2014/04/right-back-where-i-started.html

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  11. So many giggles - first to your "thouest sayest thy pigs and chickens are owneth..ed...eth" portion and then to the spellcasting comment...bwahahahaha! Ok Sir Doomsday Jerry, I must stop procrastinating now and finish my homework :) Thanks for the giggles!

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  12. How great to see you back. I don't think the ancestry thing is very reliable unless you go to actual town halls etc to get facts from old records.
    Keep stuff coming Sir Jerry with gout and may the floods dry fast.

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  13. HEY JERRY!! So glad to see you back! I was hoping you would. I've really fallen off the blogging wagon with really no viable excuses. I have been contemplating returning to the blog-shere ....not sure if I will re-invent one of my two blogs, or begin a new....I too have experienced some challenges as I find myself "older".....ringing in my ears and cataracts. Both have really rocked my world and quality of living...I can't see and can't enjoy the sound of silence because without background noise my world sounds like a magnetic field or a high pitched broken toilet in need of repair. Hugs to you my friend...please say HI to the wife and pet the dogs for me.

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  14. HEY JERRY!! So glad to see you back! I was hoping you would. I've really fallen off the blogging wagon with really no viable excuses. I have been contemplating returning to the blog-shere ....not sure if I will re-invent one of my two blogs, or begin a new....I too have experienced some challenges as I find myself "older".....ringing in my ears and cataracts. Both have really rocked my world and quality of living...I can't see and can't enjoy the sound of silence because without background noise my world sounds like a magnetic field or a high pitched broken toilet in need of repair. Hugs to you my friend...please say HI to the wife and pet the dogs for me.

    ReplyDelete
  15. HEY JERRY!! So glad to see you back! I was hoping you would. I've really fallen off the blogging wagon with really no viable excuses. I have been contemplating returning to the blog-shere ....not sure if I will re-invent one of my two blogs, or begin a new....I too have experienced some challenges as I find myself "older".....ringing in my ears and cataracts. Both have really rocked my world and quality of living...I can't see and can't enjoy the sound of silence because without background noise my world sounds like a magnetic field or a high pitched broken toilet in need of repair. Hugs to you my friend...please say HI to the wife and pet the dogs for me.

    ReplyDelete
  16. I was off the grid for a while
    Glad to see you will write again

    ReplyDelete