What’s Been Happening

You may have noticed lite posting the past week. Things have been hectic. As you know, last weekend was Memorial Day, and we stayed on the run the whole weekend. Work was a bit busy this week, and then I had some other website work to do over the week.

Friday night, Gary, a friend of Jeff Elliot’s, bought tickets to take Jeff and I to see Emmy Lou Harris at the Tampa Theater. It was a pleasant evening, but it would have been easy to take a nap. It was a very laid back concert. But the music was good. She has a really pretty voice.

Saturday all day was a lot of yard work. Sunday afternoon and early evening we went to the Suncoast Resort in St. Pete for their Sunday afternoon tea dance. Being a holiday weekend, it was, as usual, packed. We saw a few people we hadn’t seen in a while, and a few people we expected to see, we missed.

Monday afternoon we had a small group over for a cookout. That came off nicely, but a couple of our friends just don’t know when to leave. Lay kept mentioning that he had to be up at 5am for work, but most everyone still stayed until 10pm. We talked about it, and are glad that people feel comfortable staying, and we did have a lot of fun and some great laughs…but we were both glad when everyone left.

I finally got around to building out a blog for my Mom. You can see it here. Part of what I wanted to do was integrate one of the Gedcom to Web products with it. For those of your that don’t know, Gedcom files are a standard file for genealogy files from the various family tree programs. Mom is very big into research our ancestry. I found some instructions for integrating one of the programs, but it turned out to be a lot more complex than I expected. Now I’m testing three programs, and will just have the final one in its own sub domain with a link from her site.

I remember some years ago it was Christmas, and I was just getting back to a job after several hard months of unemployment. I didn’t have a lot of money that Christmas, and was out wondering through a Sam’s Club looking for presents I could afford. Every time I went home, Mom would drag one of about three briefcases full of papers and folders with some piece of information she wanted to show me about an ancestor she’d located.

I saw the computer program Familytree Maker. I think it was like $69 dollars, which was a stretch that year, but I got it for her anyway. I think it was the best present I ever got her. We spent most of Christmas Day entering the information she had collected so far, and now I can’t imagine how many people she has recorded in that software, but she used it to create a family history book. I’m trying to get her to write her own personal history. Maybe the blog will encourage that.

This weekend we are driving to North Carolina. We didn’t leave Tampa until around 4pm, as Lay worked, so we won’t get to Kings Mountain until 3am. Tomorrow is my nephew’s birthday. Since they are moving to Orlando in the next couple of months, I won’t have many more reasons to come to Kings Mountain, and besides, I haven’t been home since Christmas. I needed to get up We’ll drive home Sunday, so its a very short trip.

Next weekend, my friend Glenda and her husband will be down for the weekend. A relative of Glenda’s husband died, and there’s a memorial service for him next weekend. They’ll have a short visit with us. As much fun as it will be to see that family, and see Scott and Glenda, I plan to try to do absolutely nothing the following weekend. The weeks and the weekends have been really busy for quite a few weeks in a row.

Anyway, that about catches me up with you all. I may try to do some more blogging while Lay is driving.