one monkey typing

It was an extremely laid-back weekend. On Saturday, the kids and I went out mainly laptop-shopping for L, but also browsed around Borders, looked at cameras and MP3 players, etc. Went to the mall for lunch at Olgas. If all the people at the mall are actually spending money, the economy must not be that bad; it was like trying to find a spot on Dec 20; we finally found a group of empty spots way in a corner. Also, we went into a few random shops; L decided since I was wearing jeans and my beat up black leather, she'd be seen in Hot Topic with me.

Sunday, I did some cleaning and moved some furniture, bringing some from other floors to form a more cozy area in the living room with one more seat and another table. The opinion seems to be positive. The cats and dog like it too.

I did a little playing around with a video, trying to get The Two Towers into a reasonably-sized AVI with the RiffTrax folded in, the audio part went OK but for some reason the XviD codec insists on making the video part > 4GB.

I found some references to another couple of genealogy books, one printed in 1862, and Google Books had PDFs of them available. I'm really lucking out on this stuff. Everything I have gotten from them so far bears the bookplate of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, so thanks to them for making their stuff available to Google. The latest book has a relatively complete descendant list from the guy who crossed over from England in 1631 until 1872 when it was printed. My records are already pretty good back to the early 1800s, so there's a decent overlap there. The preface to the book goes into some pedigree work that goes back as far as 1250 or so.

I can see why (lj user=rmeidaking) some people both enjoy genealogy and are good at accounting. Today I was going through some scans of 150 year old documents, deciphering spidery handwriting, calculating date offsets, and in the end confirming data I already had and sorting out family members that died > 100 years ago. Same sort of feeling as when you finally get that last number to drop into place on the books.

Added individual # 400 this evening. I'm still in solid "known territory" - people who are no more than two generations removed from people I knew growing up, or are direct ancestors/cousins/siblings. I did at one point get into crazyland with data that was cited on my other dataset as coming from FTM. IMO, data from FTM is for hints only, it's NOT reliable. I saw some just stupid stuff. Obviously I didn't put it in to my new data set.

I just have to put it away at some point, but it's hard not to just keep going. Heck, I should have been in bed more than an hour ago, this stuff is just compelling.