I've had about enough of this.....................

The calendar says spring but we're having more snow today. Just a few inches, and it's not very cold out but the wind is blowing like crazy. It was very unpleasant outside this morning when I went to the Post Office but as someone else picking up his mail said, "At least we're not sandbaggin'." And I know it's much worse north of here in SD & ND.

I'm glad it didn't really get started until this morning so we could go to Wayne yesterday for my niece's senior art show. It was just her and another girl but they had some beautiful pieces. I would have loved to take a couple of those paintings home with me. Sorry, no pictures, I went off and left my camera at home. That's what happens when you come home from work & hurry off somewhere else.

Family history

For the last six years or so I have been working on family genealogy and that's what I've been back to working on this past week. My ancestors came from Germany, several of them from the island of Fehmarn, off the Baltic coast. Until the bridge from the mainland was built in the 1960's Fehmarn was rather isolated and the families tended to stay there. Or the ones who moved to the mainland stayed fairly close in that part of Schleswig-Holstein. That makes research both harder and easier. Many church records are available in the church archives in Neustadt but some are only at the churches on the island and haven't even been microfilmed by the LDS Family History Center.

I always considered family research back further than my parents & grandparents to be futile because I didn't know where to start researching the old Germans, didn't speak or read German, didn't have the money to go to Germany for research or the money to pay someone over there to do it. Then six years ago I stumbled upon the web site of John Kostick and he sent me 174 pages of my family history on both sides, dating back to the 1300's. That got me started and now I try to add a little bit more to it from time to time.

Lately a gentleman on the island of Fehmarn has been researching the church records from the 1900's and more recent information is coming to light. I'm sure some of it would be controversial in my family because I've never heard anything about it before. Do I ask my aunt if she knew her aunt had a child in Germany before she immigrated to America? Do I ask the woman's son if he knows anything about this older half brother? See what I mean? And is my great-great-grandfather Fritz the same man as Johann Friedrich? And if he is, what happened to him after 1860?

My mother's side has been a little more straightforward. I got quite a bit of information about one of her grandfathers from a gentleman in Heiligenhafen, Germany through Mr. Kostick who had met him on one of his trips over there. I got information on one of my mother's grandmother's from another gentleman in Germany who had seen one of my queries on a genealogy message board.

I don't spend all that much time on the project anymore but every once in a while the bug bites and I start running searches on ancestry.com, rootsweb, usgenweb and the Fehmarn site to see what I can find and add. I DO have piles of paper with stuff I need to enter into my database so maybe I'll have to start spending a little more time at it.The pile on this chair is the paperwork I've accumulated on my family and my husband's mother's family. Do ya think I need a file cabinet? And then there's the box of old family photos under my bed. They really should be scanned & added to my database. They should also be copied and shared with my brother & cousins...whether they care or not.

Just in case anybody's interested, the names I'm interested in are: Reiss, Vadersen, Blunck or Blunk, Pruess, Sienknecht,Suckstorf or Suchsdorf, Veenker, Bailey, Stolp.

Happy St. Paddy's

It just occurred to me that I should be working on something green today but the picture below shows what's on my machine now.This is one I pieced back in Feb. of 2008. I'm quilting it in the "Plumage" pattern with a Superior varigated thread called "Choco Cherry." Doesn't that sound yummy?

Something finished...

Here you can see the Double Delight blocks all laid out on my living room floor. It's the only place in the house big enough to lay out a quilt. I knew I liked this quilt but once it was laid out I decided I LOVED it!! The combination of colors just works for me.




And here it is all sewed together with borders and all. I don't think I've ever done this much sewing on any one quilt. The color scheme is the same as the original instructions since I was trying to come up with a quilt to make using blue/brown/pink anyway. The browns are all different prints since I didn't have enough of any one to do the whole thing. I did the outside border corners the same as one of the pictures of someone else's finished top that I saw. Best of all, it's all made from stash. Not sure how I'll quilt it yet but I have another top I need to quilt first so there's time to think about it.

It's really good this top is done. I was appliqueing some hearts on blocks for a group quilt and my Pfaff suddenly decided it was going out of time. Didn't hit a pin or anything, stopped stitching to turn the block a little & when it started back up it made a bird's nest on the bottom & the timing was suddenly way off. Guess it will have to go see the sewing machine doctor. I finished the block on my little Brother machine. It's a nice enough machine but IT JUST ISN'T MY PFAFF.

Not much going on.................

I haven't fallen off the face of the earth. There just isn't much going on lately. I've been sewing but there aren't any pictures to share...maybe by the end of the weekend.

At work I've been getting things together to submit the annual state report. The reporting program's been changed this year so who knows how that will go.....I had just mastered the old version. Another form went in to the Universal Service Fund for our E-rate rebate......so glad all that can be done online now. I got pretty sick of filling out all those multi-page forms.

I've also been trying to update the software on the two Gates grant computers the library received almost six years ago. The Centurion Guard hardware wasn't working correctly on one of them & I was pretty frustrated by the time I got it all figured out. It had been a while since anything had been done to them & it's taking forever. XP sp2 had never been installed & had to be before the new version of AVG anti-virus would work. Thurs. night when I shut down the 1st of 52 Windows updates started installing on one & sp2 was still installing on the other one. They are both getting Office 2007.

By the way, the library got a letter stating we are not eligible for the new Gates grant. Even though our four main patron computers are almost 6 and 8 yrs old, we have one in the meeting room that is about 4 yrs old & is used with the microfilm reader. They say for our size & poverty level we only need one computer that is 4 yrs. old or less. Technically that computer is public use, but since it is in the meeting room & attached to the microfilm reader is is only used for overflow when all the others are in use. Guess it's a good thing I'm really good at repairs & bug clean-up so these can be kept running for who knows how long. It's becoming a personal challenge.