They say “Eat a live frog in the morning and nothing worse
will happen the rest of the day” (I think that’s a bastardization of a Mark
Twain quote). I’m rather hoping the same principle applies to years. January
has been very difficult, and I would like to think that the rest of the year
will be much better.
There’s been a few things that happened in regard to my
research and my blog that normally would see me catastrophizing them for days, if not weeks, but for
the life perspective provided by the deaths of three good friends of 15 or more
years in this month; two at the beginning (I hate cancer!) and one towards the
end (a shock). All three were true bright spots in this world. My heart
hurts and I miss them very much.
In my last post of last year I said that I would be using
this past month off blogging to: finish some research I owe someone who helped me, update my
blog’s resource page(s), update ‘favorite blogs’ page, and try to fix whatever
went wrong with my genea-software. Yeah,
well, there’s another quote about the “the best–laid plans of mice and men gang
aft agley” (bastardized Robert Burns, I believe - “agley” being Scottish for “awry”
or “totally-off-the-rails”. [I’d have another phrase for it if my Mom didn’t
read this blog.]).
I’ve finished the research; but didn’t get it written up and
sent off yet. I’m sorry, Ms. Clark; you will get it.
I wanted to have the newly refurbished blog good to go on
February 1, 2015, but I accidentally and irretrievably killed a week’s worth of
work (user error – too many windows open, I lost track of which window I was in
and overrode the safety “are you sure?” messages). I have to re-do one of my
new resource pages - one of the longest ones (sigh). Thank God, I didn’t erase the source material yet. I hadn’t
yet gotten to updating the favorite blog page yet. I will get there. It’s frustrating and I
felt rather stupid that night, and in other years, I’d have been upset with
myself and catastrophized the whole situation for days. But it is what is. I
will fix it and it will go up whenever it’s finished.
And speaking of catastrophizing…I really haven’t got the
energy, but the next problem would definitely deserve it in a normal year.
“Trying to fix whatever went wrong with my Genea-software”, well, that problem
was far worse than I’d realized. I’d had some other problems with my Family
Tree software in the past year, but between customer service and me, I’d always
gotten it sorted. After the last update was downloaded, it stopped working, and
this past month I found out that not only did it no longer sync with Ancestry.com,
it had erased 60% +/- of my tree on my computer! And we can’t get it back!! And
trying to create a new tree to then sync with the online one didn’t go well
either. And then, the worst is that I’d been lax in my backups since my move
this summer as I tried to catch up on the “52 Ancestors” posts and I had no recent backup. I wanted to cry
and I was sick (metaphorically and literally – missed nearly a week of work
with a bad cold). But given what had happened in the month already, it just
didn’t rate.
At least the online version of the tree at Ancestry is still
intact. But I want my own copy on my own computer, too, as that makes it much
easier to keep track of the information I’ve found that didn’t come from
Ancestry.com, helps me paint a broader picture, and helps me in other ways. I’m
really tired of the repeated bugs with the Family Tree Maker program. In my blog
reading last year, I’d seen that many of the people whose work and blogs I
respected used a genealogy program called Legacy. So I just bought the new
Legacy 8 software. I installed it this weekend but the hardcopy manual is back-ordered.
(Figures.) I think there’s a .pdf version I can download. I’ll look. I need to
read it to figure out how (& how best) to use this. [I’ve also programmed an alarm
for monthly backups in my phone!]
I hadn’t really planned on doing the full “do over” that a
lot of the genea-bloggers are doing this year, since I’d only been at this a
year and was certain that I had documented every fact I’d claimed (except for
the folks with the “? in a puzzle piece”
pictures on the Ancestry tree) but had planned on going back over the tree as I’d been very
hurried last year, and I needed to create “to do” lists for each person, among
other things. Well, now I have to re-do/re-copy everything by hand to get the
information from my online tree to the new computer tree (no sync). This is going to take a lot of time, but this
way I can organize my computer files (the downloads need to be sorted &
saved per family – I didn’t have time last year), and make “to do” lists for
each person, and double check the cites, and explore new hints/ideas….I guess
it’s a “do over” by default. I also want to learn to how to better use Evernote
for my research. The overall problem is damn discouraging, but ultimately not a
totally bad thing. It will, in the long run, be better as I will know what I have
and be more certain of the connections made, which will provide a better
foundation for expanding up. This year is unlikely to be as exciting (or fast)
as last year; but doing things well, and in an organized fashion, will have
long term rewards. I hope.
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| photo credit: hgjohn via photopin cc |
I’m not certain now what that means for the blog. I want to
try to keep it going. I have also realized in this month off that I also want
to keep it fun for me. As I’m still working a high stress day job, that will
mean that my dream of daily posts had best remain a dream for the time being. I don’t want to add stress to my life as my
body nearly always reacts to too much stress by getting sick. At this point, I’m
thinking about doing two regular posts weekly, with occasional additions. One would a
genea-diary type entry just talking about whatever I’m doing relating to my genealogy
or blog work that week like this one, or at least, some hopefully interesting
aspect of whatever I’m doing. The other regular one a week would be a list
of articles/blogs I found interesting or helpful that week (so I don’t overload
my bookmarks again). It’s not going to be a “best of” post because I don’t have
the knowledge to make that determination. I don’t even promise that the
articles & blogposts will be written that week – just that I found them
that week. I’m stealing the post title from my boss at work; that post will be
“Noteworthy Reads”. I also still hope to do a 52-Ancestors-style Ancestor
write-up once or twice a month, and I expect there will be occasional other
things meriting extra posts because I when get excited, I want to share with
someone.
So what are my lessons from January? 1) Appreciate the good
people in my life while I’ve got them and try to make sure they know they are
appreciated. 2) Many problems aren’t worth the energy to catastrophize. Just
fix it and/or look for alternatives. 3) And back up, back up, back up!
How was your January? What were your lessons?
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| (I just thought he was cute. I found him when looking for "computer error" pics in the public domain. ) |
