Miscellany

Have you ever noticed how much life is made up of miscellany? (I had to look up the word to see the noun form is actually in the dictionary; it is.) Occasionally a major event like a wedding takes center stage, and for a time it get most of our focus. But most days aren’t like that. Most days are sprinkled with miscellany.

Today was like that. The thermometer outside our house reached 99 before finally slipping. I’ve already started praying that the week after next won’t be like this. My daughter’s family will be with us for their annual visit, adding two young teen boys to the two already here in our son’s family. Not too many years ago, all it took to make them happy was a collection of Thomas trains and a rug one which to play with them. Or take them with their toy boats and cars to the river. No longer. It would be so nice to have weather a bit cooler that week.

For my morning walks recently I’ve been staying in my own neighborhood rather than going to the development next door like I used (I admitted to liking it because it was a tad more “up scale” than ours). But that neighborhood got hit by the flood, and walking there is now a sad adventure. Most of the piles of trash (soaked furniture, dry wall, insulation, appliances, duct work) are picked up by the city and gone, but traces still remain. A few sidewalks are still white with residue. One driveway has broken glass. A port-a-potty sits on one corner, and dumpsters and storage pods adorn a few driveways. Even a little patch of flowers by a mailbox has given up. Monday morning will find me back walking in Lexington Pointe.

This morning was our monthly writers’ meeting, and we had a record attendance of twenty-one, at least a third of them visitors scouting us out. Word is getting around about our group. We’re going to have to find a larger place than the Panera where we meet. It was a good meeting as we learned from an experienced writer some concrete things about revising our work. A couple of nuggets? Always just write your first draft without doing a lot of editing and rehashing as you go. When you get to revision, do it on a fresh copy so you always still have an original. And of course always back up your work—in three or four places if you can.

In other miscellany, I’ve been getting back to my genealogy work and spending time browsing in my database. It is getting close to three thousand people. No, they’re not all ancestors; relatives and other descendants of ancestors count too. I got to puttering, counting generations, and I found I have two lines (Zug and Diefenbach) that go back to eleventh great-grandfathers and two others (Stauffer and Wilder) that go back to thirteenth great-grandfathers. But the granddaddy of them all (pardon my pun) is Peter Bauman, my seventeenth great-grandfather. The oldest date we have is for him—he was born in 1420.

Meanwhile, I can’t find a file I started on the computer last week. Every so often this happens to computer people. We create a file, then don’t get back to it right away. The consequence? We can’t remember what we named it nor where we might have saved it. I know I created and worked on that file because I clearly remember yellow highlighting the spots where I made changes. But where did I put. Grrrr.

So what kind of miscellany has been happening in your life these days?