Sunshine go away today...

... I really don't feel like dancing. We switched from rain to sun and, just like always, I've got a migraine. This one's extra bad, so I don't expect to be around much until Saturday.

I vant to bite ...

I realized recently that there are a lot of really classic books that I feel I know inside and out, but have never read. Bad Deni! So I'm working on remedying that. However, I have a problem with reading these days. I probably need new glasses, but until I get them I find it difficult to focus on a page. Also, my mind tends to wander a lot. Old age, I guess.

I have found that audio books are very good for me. I can knit while I listen to them and I can maintain focus much better. The quality of the reader is always a factor, but when I've got a good one, it's great.

I have signed up for an audible.com membership, but silly me I forgot that the county library system has audio books online to check out. You download the file and it's good for three weeks. I guess if you aren't done with it by then, you have to check it out again and re-download it.

Right now I'm listening to Dracula. I know the story inside and out, of course, but I didn't realize the way the story was told -- in the writings of different characters. There are multiple voices in the reading, all of which are excellent. The only trouble I ran into was when one of the women readers was reciting a speech by Van Helsing (Mina had transcribed the speech into her journal) and it just was tedious. Van Helsing is a bit tedious anyway, though.

One of the things that I found interesting, aside from just the way the story is told, were the little details that have been left out of all the movies. There is much more texture to the characters than i had thought before.

I've got about three hours left to go.

BTW, Steph, I've finished your tea cozy. I just need to find a button for it.

A lesson in restraint

I have this character flaw. I am compelled to correct anything that I see as being patently factually incorrect, especially when it comes to history and even more so when it comes to genealogy. It causes almost a physical discomfort and preys on my mind.

At the same time, there is the concept of asking oneself "Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?" before saying, well, just about anything. One person I found said that it's okay to speak if at least two of those criteria are present.

In an online community to which I belong, there is a place to discuss genealogy. A person posted yesterday that her 27th great grandfather was Julius Caesar and she is also a descendant of James Polk, the 11th president of the US.

I thought back to things I've seen about Rome -- I, Claudius and Rome -- and I couldn't remember Julius Caesar having had grandchildren. So I looked it up. Julius Caesar had a daughter Julia by his first wife. Julia had one child who died, unnamed, after only a few days. Caesar also had a son Caesarion by Cleopatra, but Octavian (later Augustus) had the boy killed at the same time that Mark Antony had to fall on his sword and Cleo made an asp of herself. There seems to be a suggestion that Brutus (you know, the "honorable man" who killed Caesar) was actually Caesar's son from a dalliance with Brutus's mother, but Brutus only had one child, too, who died in infancy. Therefore, there are no progeny of Julius Caesar. It possibly could be that the descent is through an adopted child (those Romans adopted people left and right, even when the adoptee still had parents), but even so, the idea that any line could actually be traced back to 44 BC stretches credulity.

Since I was already Googling, I thought I'd take a look at James Polk. That's only going back 200 years or so, and we do have records from then, so there's a possibility this could be true. One visit to Wikipedia was enough to tell me that Polk never had children and was believed to have been sterile because of an operation he had as a teenager.

So.... I can post this on the message board or not. Using the criteria above, yes, it is true. Necessary? Probably only to ease my own discomfort about having unchallenged wrong genealogical information on the 'net. Kind? Probably not, no.

The devil's advocate (or maybe just the devil) in me suggests that, maybe this was intentional, to see if anyone would challenge her. For her to have picked two people that have no progeny seems to be quite a coincidence. Her claim for a source is "a relative who pretty much makes her living by genealogy" and maybe she's saying that professional genealogists are not worth paying for. But overall, I think this argument is just me trying to make up a justification.

I'll get over it, but it will likely bother me for a while. I have to keep telling myself that not giving in to my compulsions will make me a better person.

Genealogy stuff: the Irish

Sorry. This is really rambly. I started to write one thing and ended up in a completely different place. A well. It's my blog. :-)

I've been going back and filling in some of the data I was missing on some folks. In particular, I was focusing on Jim's Irish ancestors who were in Boston from the mid 1850s. I'm used to having grown up in your basic middle-class household and it's odd for me to be looking into families where the norm was abject poverty. I have a great deal of respect for these people and admire the fact that they just managed to get from day to day.

One was Jim's great-grandfather, John McLaughlin. He was in the first generation of American-born children, his parents, Jeremiah and Catherine (McKeon) McLaughlin, having come from Ireland sometime before 1853. Neither of John's parents could read or write, although Jeremiah may have learned later on in life. At the age of 14, John was finished with school and working as an errand boy. He must have learned his way around the city in that job, because the next time he appears on a census, he was 24 and listed as a "hack driver." I have a very Dickensian sort of image, transplanted to America, of a man in a tall black hat with a frock coat. He first was listed as having that occupation in 1880 and was still driving a carriage forty years later.

John McLaughlin must have done pretty well at his job. He managed to raise eleven children and at one point there were seventeen people living in the house that he owned. There was John, eight unmarried adult children, one married child, her husband and six of John's grandchildren. It must have been a large house, although it would have been incredibly crowded.

The other one that has touched me recently was John's mother-in-law, Ann McKee Vass. I don't know a whole lot about her, except that she came from Newfoundland with her husband William and at least one child Catherine. I stumbled onto a bit of information just by chance the other day. I was trying to find the Vass family in the census, but they just weren't there for some reason. There was a listing for Ann Vass, though. I investigated and found that, when the census was taken in 1870 she was in the "House of Industry" (a prison) on Deer Island in Boston. I contacted the office of the city archives in Boston -- spoke to a very nice young man -- who found the record for poor Ann. She was there from May through August of 1870. She was charged with being a "common drunkard."

Poor Annie. I really feel for her and can imagine how she would try to escape the squalor around her by drinking. I wonder what the precipitating event was that landed her at the "House of Industry." Maybe she refused the advances of the cop on the beat or was involved in some sort of brawl.

She lived for eight more years after she got out of jail, dying in 1878 of "apoplexy." That was the term used for any sudden death that began with a loss of consciousness. It's likely that she had a sudden fatal heart attack or a stroke.

It just occurred to me that there is a real connection between Ann and my brother-in-law, Michael. Of the four boys, Michael was the one who was an alcoholic. He went through a very difficult time. But he came through it. He went to AA and worked the program better than anyone I've ever known. He was the one person who truly had that "serenity to accept the things I cannot change" that is in the AA prayer. I would have long conversations with him on the phone, complaining about all sorts of things. He would understand and never make me feel small for my petty complaints, but yet he managed to pass on just a bit of that serenity to me. And then one day, as he was getting ready to start work (he was a chef at a big hotel in Boston), he suddenly collapsed and died. He was 38 years old. They called the paramedics immediately, but he was just gone. Apoplexy. They said it was a heard defect and there was murmuring that it was caused by all his hard living before he went into AA. It never seemed right, though.

I wonder if there was a genetic connection between the alcoholism and whatever the specific heart problem was. Could there be a linked gene? If there is, then this particular condition would likely been seen in other alcoholics and passed off as being caused by the alcoholism. (Which could lead me into one of my stock tirades about people attributing causality to correlation, but that's a whole 'nother subject.) It makes logical sense. I wonder if there's any way to ever find out.

Nicki Story: Christians and Lions and Cookies

I said a while back that I thought I'd share Nicki stories from time to time. Many of the stories I have are from when Nicki was little, but the one I thought about this evening was from her last few months.

I was involved in the theater department at the local community college. For the fall semester I had the position of assistant director for a production of Shaw's Androcles and the Lion. For those who are unfamiliar with the play, it's the old Aesop's fable about a slave removing a thorn from a lion's foot, only to later be saved by the grateful lion. In Shaw's version, Androcles is a Christian in early Rome and he finds himself in the Coloseum facing the lions, one of which is, of course, the one he had helped.

Nicki went with me to rehearsal several times, really enjoying the whole process. She got along great with the actors and the director, fitting in immediately with the whole group. It was nice for me, too, to have an assistant of my own.

We opened on a Friday night and I went to the opening night cast party for a while, mening that I slept late on Saturday morning. I woke up to hear rummaging through something. It took quite a while to identify the sound as being Nicki looking through a box of cookie cutters I had collected over the years. Just as I was about to get up to see what was going on, she appeared at the bedroom door.

"Mom?"

"Yes?"

(Holding out a little cookie cutter.) "Is this the only lion cookie cutter you have?"

I laughed. "Yeah. I didn't think I'd need any more than one."

She disappeared back down the hall and I decided to stay in bed for a while. She sometimes got nervous doing cooking when I was around. Finally, after I heard the mixer stop for a bit, I got up. There was Nicki, rolling out sugar cookie dough and using the little lion cookie cutter. She had lions all over the place, some on cookie sheets, ready to go into the oven; some on cooling racks, nicely browned; some already cool and stacked neatly.

She saw my puzzled look and said, "These are for you to take to the cast of the play. This way you can throw the lions to the Christians."

The reason I don't program for pay

I write a lot of little programs for people on a support website. It's all volunteer. People try to pay me -- people have even told me that I'm stupid for not taking money -- but I don't want them to give me anything. I'll never make enough money doing it that Jim would be able to stop working and we have enough to live on at the moment, so it's not necessary. Also, I like the idea of "paying it forward" which is what my dad taught me to do before anyone ever knew of the phrase. When I help someone, the thing that I ask is that they help someone else. Most people still can't manage to think beyond their wallets, though, so I also suggest donating to a children's charity or Habitat for Humanity. A number of them have said something like "I already do that" with no indication that they would do anything in response to my helping. That's up to them, though.

But there is a more selfish reason that I don't program for pay. I hate clients. I truly hate them with a flaming hot passion. If they are paying me, I can't just dump them. This way, when the flaming hot passion becomes too much, can turn my back on them, ignore them, pretend that they are not part of my world.

Why, you might ask, would I hate clients? Case in point. A couple of weeks ago, someone said that they wanted a page for their website which would allow users to sign up for time slots during some sort of competition thing. Not a clue what the competition is about, because it doesn't matter. I laid out what I thought would be a good structure for what had asked for. He thought it was just kewl! I went to work on it. Then he added a little request for an administrator to be able to sign up people as well as the individuals signing up for themselves. That took me a bit of time to conceptualize, but I finally got it.

I tested the code, got it working and posted it to the message board for the guy to copy and paste into his web page. He posted that he would try it and get back to me. (I find that rather annoying. It would be better if he would just do it and post when it's done. But that's my own thing.) That was a week ago. There are other biggish projects that others have asked me for, but I don't want to start on a new one until I have the last of the tweaks done on this one. So I posted a question about it. He posted back. Hadn't even looked at it, didn't know what to do with it.

I wrote out a long explanation of how to create a new page on his site with the portal that we're using. By the time I got it done, he posted that he'd figured it out, but then had another question. Which I answered. Finally he got it in the page and got back to me. The next sentence was the one I am so used to and why I hate clients. "That's really great, but..."

He wanted me to add the ability to put in a lunch time for the judges when no one could sign up. I had a choice. I could rewrite about a third of the code and have it be clunky, or I could make it elegant and rewrite the whole thing. I chose clunky. I posted the new code. The response "Oh, this is wonderful. You're getting really close. Now, what I need you to add is..."

What he needs me to do, actually, is completely rewrite the entire code. Oh, I can use bits and pieces, but the concept has changed and definitely the method of entering data has to be different. Oh, yeah, and I can't use the database table I was using and will likely have to create a new table. On top of it all, he said he needed this one thing "or" another thing. I hate that! Do you want something or don't you? This or that? Do I choose? What if you're not happy with my choice? Will you demand that I rewrite it again? Actually, what I find is that when people write "or" they mean "and" -- they want them both.

I told him that I would rewrite the code once more and that, before I did it, he needed to decide what features he wanted. Once I get it done, that's it.

People don't understand that most of the time adding just one thing that seems really minor can be a major change to the code. And sometimes it's difficult for me to conceptualize what needs to be done in order to accomplish the change. I have a structure in my head and it can be really hard to create a new one.

I guess the thing I need to do is expect it and not even try to start out with a finished product because I know that they'll want it different no matter what I give them at the beginning. Also, I suppose it's part of my ego. It's almost as if they're saying that I did it wrong and I don't like to make mistakes. I do all the time, actually, but I'd really rather it not be pointed out in a public forum.