"You blog, don't you?"

Last week at a party, in the course of a conversation about the urge to write creatively, someone asked me if I had felt that urge, and then said, "Oh. but you blog, don't you?" I had to reply that I was blogging very sporadically these days. According to that great fount of knowledge, Wikipedia, blogging began ove ten years ago as a kiond of online journaling, and my blog(s) and those I link to keep up that tradition at least to some extent. So, what's up, then?

Yesterday, I went to Diocesan Convention as a voting delegate. I wasn't looking forward to it, for reasons I'll go into a little later, but in fact I enjoyed it, even though I know very few of the people there. I did have a very brief conversation with Tobias Haller, but I didn't even say "hi" to anyone else except those from St. Mary's -- Earl Kooperkamp, Chlore Breyer, and Sarah Kooperkamp. I spotted Jamie Callaway and Diane Pollard ideep n conversation, but didn't break in on them.

The convention ended at 4 PM and I walked home (about a twenty minute walk.) Then Liz and I walked back up the hill to Broadway Presbyterian Church for a concert at 5PM by our friends The Orfeo Duo. That concert ended just before 7 PM and we went home and had a quick supper. Then we went to another concert, this one at 8 PM in Christ Chapel of Riverside Church, that concluded the Tree of Life conference on peace between Israel and Palestine. All in all, it was a full and rich day.

As we were driving home after closing up the cottage just over two weeks ago, Liz and I agreed that writing up family history for my cousins would be my major project in the coming weeks and months. In order to write up even a small portion of the family history that I have collected over the past 28 years I need first to make sure that my database is in order. When I began collecting genealogical data, I kept it in a word processing format. I laboriously converted the word processing data into a gedcom file by hand and imported it into Brother's Keeper. I then moved to Family Origins and finally to The Master Genealogist (TMG). Along the way, a good deal of the data was put in without sources, because the earlier programs did not allow sources. So now I am going back over all of my original notes and entering sources and in some case additional data. It's a long process, but I sm committed to it. The last time I began to update my data in serious way, I was interrupted by a crisis at Morningside Gardens and I ran for the Board of Directors. That was six and a half years ago. This time I not going to allow myself to be interrupted.

As soon as I can, I am giving up as much Morningside Gardens work as I can. I will remain treasurer at St. Mary's at least until our finances are in order and a qualified replacement is found.

More later.