The Bog of Lost Scholars

28 September 2004

All I Want for Christmas is an Ancestry Census Subscription

Filed under: Genealogy — Castiron @ 17:30

My ex, in the process of straightening out some AOL stuff, got a one-month trial subscription to Ancestry.com and is letting me use it, since I’m the genealogy freak.

Ancestry.com’s census search, with images of the census pages?

It’s crack for genealogy freaks.

I’ve already found my paternal grandfather and great-grandmother on 1930 (neither of whom were in the cities I expected) and picked up enough data from earlier censuses to merge several people in my database. I’ve got more information on my Cronise and Lamar great-great-aunts and uncles. While I was at it, I found my boyfriend’s parents on 1930.

It’s a damn good thing that I’m broke, because otherwise I’d be shelling out the $100/year. My Frederick census crawl project would go so much faster if I could actually get at the censi at times besides Saturday afternoons when my ex can take the boy. (Hmm, I wonder if any of the local libraries subscribe?)

23 September 2004

Burglary

Filed under: Random Ramblings — Castiron @ 17:35

(Why do I keep wanting to spell that word “burglarly”?)

A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged;
a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.

Last week, my house was broken into while I was at work. Fortunately, all the folks took was my CD player, DVD player, and VCR, plus one DVD and one CD that were in the respective machines at the time. Presumably the television was too heavy, and they clearly never looked in any other room of the house (otherwise the folk dance group’s iBook would have been toast).

I’m pretty ticked off, nonetheless; there are a lot of things I’d rather be spending money on than repairing the side door and replacing the stolen stuff. (No, I haven’t made an insurance claim; total loss & damage is less than my insurance deductible, and I’d be stupid to give my insurance company any excuse to raise my rates.) And the CD turns out to be out of print, sadly. On the bright side, my boyfriend loaned me his VCR, and I found a cheapo boom box that fulfils the basic purpose of playing CDs; it’ll still be a couple months before I can afford the DVD player, but as long as I have a new one by time Extended Edition Return of the King comes out, I’ll be happy.

Yes, it was unnerving. I wasn’t worried about being in the house, but the day after the burglarly, it took me half the day to get the nerve to leave it — as if as long as I was there, it wouldn’t be broken into again.

No, I don’t necessarily want the perps thrown in jail (assuming they even get caught); I’m not convinced that short-term jail sentences are anything more than grad school for criminals, and I’d rather save the cell space for folks who actually physically harm others. But I’d sure like them to do several hundred hours of supervised community service, starting with about fifty hours of grunt labor around my place.

22 September 2004

Now It All Makes Sense….

Filed under: Publishing and Writing — Castiron @ 16:26

Now that I’m a few weeks into my Greek class, I strangely get why the Queen of Faery manifested as a classics professor in Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin…..

14 September 2004

Decluttering Update

Filed under: Dejunking and Organizing — Castiron @ 18:59

The one good side to my occasional “life sucks, I’m not getting anywhere, I’ll never be financially secure, my son’s never going to get any better” moods is that they make it blatantly clear what possessions are worth keeping and what aren’t. After a bout of one such mood on Sunday, I cleared off two feet of bookshelf, mostly a bunch of neopagan books that were interesting to me in the early 90s but aren’t relevant to my religious practice now. I’ve also ditched an old pet water dish (the cat never cared for it, and I’ve got a little ceramic bowl on the counter that works better all around) and a basket (freebie, great decoration for a couple months, but its time has passed), and I gave some baby things to a pregnant co-worker.

13 September 2004

Another Unillustrated Craft Update, with a Superstition

Filed under: Crafts — Castiron @ 19:46

Knitting: The sweater is on its last sleeve. I’d like to finish it by the end of the month, but we’ll see.

Crochet: A few more bits of squares on the sampler afghan. None finished to the point of attaching them to existing squares yet, but they’re coming along.

Sewing: All my ex’s shirts are done. I’ve started cutting out a dress for him (don’t ask); once it’s cut out, it’ll be pretty fast to sew, but I haven’t had the oomph to cut out the last two pieces when I’ve had free time. I really need another big cutting weekend so I can turn some more USOs into UFOs and reduce the pile of fabric.

Digression: I’m rather amused that I’ve made several items for my ex over the last six months but haven’t made anything for my boyfriend yet. Granted, my boyfriend hasn’t requested any item yet (he’s actually perfectly handy at sewing himself — he’s made an adorable pterodactyl for small relatives — and the weather down here isn’t conducive to knitted garments). Also, for a long time I had a superstition about making crafts for boyfriends; inevitably, it seemed, as soon as I made something for a boyfriend, the relationship would go south. In retrospect, it’s more that those relationships weren’t going to last long anyway, so by time I’d finished a big project, the romance was already doomed. I made lots of things for my ex…and yeah, he’s my ex, but things didn’t collapse the first time I cross-stitched a bookmark for him.

Quilting: I’ve figured out where the box is that has the quilt pieces, but that’s about it. I really should work on it, though; it’d be nice to finish it before it’s a year old.

Counted work: For my birthday, I started a new project, the Little Owl kit from Thea Gouvernour. It’s small, so it’s chugging along quickly; I’ve finished most of the head, part of the wing, and a segment of sky. The needlepoint crane is also coming along well; I’m hoping to finish that by the end of the year. I did a few stitches on the pentacle but nothing serious; that one’s slated to be my church project after I finish the sweater, though. I haven’t touched Mucha’s Ruby, the blue jay, the Just Nan sampler, the sunflowers needlepoint, or the harbor needlepoint (and am tempted to just ditch that last one, but we’ll see).

9 September 2004

Qu’ran Slog Continued

Filed under: Religion — Castiron @ 17:45

My slow slog through the Qu’ran continues; I’m up to Surah 26, The Poets. This Surah has the story of Moses demonstrating to Pharaoh that he’s been sent by God when Moses’s staff eats those of Pharaoh’s magicians (in this translation, there’s no explicit mention of the staves turning into serpents). One element follows that isn’t in the Exodus version: the magicians immediately believe that God is God and declare their faith; Pharaoh threatens to execute them, and the magicans reply, basically, “Go right ahead; we know where we’re going after death.” A very neat little passage.

So far, the biggest challenge for me in reading this interpretation is that the language is so unlike what I’m used to — not just the “translation”, as far as I can tell, but the text itself. Old and New Testament, no problem; I’ve been reading those texts since I was seven years old (as a child, I got through boring sermons by reading the Bible, on the grounds that Mom and Dad couldn’t chew me out for reading it in church). I know which sections are narratives and which are more poetic, where the writer’s talking to the audience and where they blend into the narration.

The Qu’ran’s different. You always have the narrator’s voice — God’s voice — right there in front of you. There’s frequent references to stories that the narrator assumes the reader already knows; some of them I do know from the Old Testament, but others I don’t quite get. It’s much more challenging for me to read it. I can read the Bible without a concordance handy, but for the Qu’ran I’m really wishing for one.

2 September 2004

It’s Greek to Me

Filed under: Publishing and Writing — Castiron @ 17:45

This semester I’m finally getting to take ancient Greek, a language I’ve wanted to learn for quite some time. So far it’s fun, if a bit challenging — I still have to go back and check every word to make sure I’m adding the accents and breathings, and I don’t quite have the first declension ingrained yet.

But at least I know enough to say useful phrases like “we will pursue the army into the sea” and “do they sacrifice to the goddess in the marketplace?”….

Seriously, I’m looking forward to learning enough Greek that I can read some of the classical authors and New Testament writings in the original. If there’s any one language that can be pointed to as useful for reading the foundational texts of all western civilization, Greek is it.

1 September 2004

Choir Update

Filed under: Music — Castiron @ 18:32

Choir’s started up again for fall. We’re doing three pieces for our fall concert. Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms is one I’ve done before (hard to believe it’s been over ten years ago! but I still remember a lot!) Brahms’s Begräbnisgesang and Bruckner’s Mass in E Minor are unfamiliar to me but seem interesting. The Brahms is utterly lovely. The Bruckner is probably very nifty, but the bozo who typeset the music should be shot — the choir’s music is in such small print that I have trouble reading it, and I don’t have middle-age vision yet.

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