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Random thoughts from a happily retired American living in Germany
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Reconnecting
Hello again. I called this post “Reconnecting” for two reasons. One, I am reconnecting (I hope) with my readers, and two, I want to talk about what I have been doing to reconnect with some family members.
But first, I need to know if my kick-ass new hat passes muster. Whaddya think? There’s nothing like a new snap-brim German fedora to make a guy feel like Indiana Jones. That’s me sitting in a chair on my balcony. The picture was taken with my iPhone at arm’s length, so you don’t see the glass of wine on the table next to me. The hat was purchased two weeks ago at a bazaar in Ansbach, the community where I worked for the previous two years. We also bought wine there at that time….and again this past weekend in Schweinfurt. Our favorite vintner, Friedrich Daudistel, was there at both bazaars to make us happy. We have been buying his wine for years and are always satisfied. This last purchase was a case of Blauer Burgunder and a case of trocken (dry) Riesling.
I have been away from blogging for a while, and I have missed it…and you! When I was hospitalized, the docs told me that I needed to get exercise, so that’s what I have been doing. I’m enjoying it, but it keeps me from some of my other activities. I have hooked a pedometer to my belt and try to get 10,000 steps every day. Lately, I have been doing that in half-a-day. I also took my bike over to the bike repair shop to get in shape for spring, and I now have it back, so look out pedestrians! I’m ready to hit the bike trails as well.
Another activity has been to get started (again!) with the genealogy hobby. This time, I have invested money and a lot of time. I have purchased the Family Tree Maker program to serve as my database. With that, I got started on ancestry.com, and that allows me to connect with other researchers who are following the same families. One fun side benefit to ancestry.com is the link to find famous relatives. Now, there is a definite caveat to this. The information is only as good as what people submit in their own family trees. Let me tell you, there is a lot of crap out there on the internet. A lot of misinformation that keeps getting passed on. I’m guilty of it too. I don’t always document what I find in other people’s trees. Bad practice! Anyway, I have gone to the link and learned about famous relatives.
First, let me repeat the caveat, this is only as good as the information that people submit. A quick story before I tell you about my famous relatives. I offered to do this for a friend and look up some of her famous relatives. She gave me her father’s name and her grandfather’s name. I think she also had her mother’s name. From that, I could trace her family back several generations. Then I made the fateful click on the “find famous relatives’ button. I gasped when I saw what came up. I quickly phoned her and said, “Debbie, you are related to Queen Elizabeth!” That little bit of euphoria for her lasted about a day until I checked to see just HOW she was related. Supposedly, she is related to the Queen through the Queen Mother. But that only works if their common ancestor was over 200 years old when she had a daughter. I don’t think so! As I said, you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet.
With that in mind, here are some of the people that I am supposedly related to: Francis Lightfoot Lee (signer of the Declaration of Independence), Harriet Lane (niece of the bachelor President James Buchanan, and who acted as his First Lady), author Robert Penn Warren, George Herbert Walker Bush, George W. Bush, William Ellery (the only representative from Rhode Island to sign the Declaration), George Wythe (another signer of the Declaration and later mayor of Williamsburg, VA), First Lady Bess Truman, First Lady Margaret Mackall Smith Taylor (wife of Zachary Taylor), First Lady Angelica Van Buren (wife of Martin Van Buren), Samuel Adams (an organizer of the real Tea Party), John F. Kennedy, First Lady Laura Bush, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, (of course this would include JFK, Jr., and Caroline Kennedy), Sam Walton (founder of Wal-Mart), Jimmy Hoffa, actor William Holden, L.M. Montgomery (the lady who wrote Anne of Green Gables), Robert Peel (founder of the modern concept of the police force….and he is a direct ancestor…my 21st great grandfather), Charles Carroll of Carrollton (another signer of the Declaration), Lyndon Baines Johnson, author Margaret Mitchell of Gone with the Wind fame, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Lady Nancy Astor, Ty Cobb (famous baseball player of yore), actress Lillian Gish, English author George Eliot, actor Cary Grant, and my most favorite: Butch Cassidy. My relatives also include Booker T.Washington, Langston Hughes, P.B.S. Pinchback and Oscar Stanton De Priest. All of them are famous African Americans. In case you aren’t aware, I’m white! In going back through my tree, I have found that some of my relatives found comfort with the slaves.
On my mother’s side, I have no famous relatives….yet. They all came from Germany, and I haven’t yet subscribed to the world-wide access on ancestry.com. I may find that I have some famous German relatives as well. I did find one g-g-g-g grandfather who fought in the Revolutionary War. If I could document all of that, I suppose my daughters could become members of the DAR, but knowing my kids, they’d rather spend the night locked in a Taco Bell with no rest room. Ha Ha.
So that’s what I’ve been up to part of the time. I will tell you a bit later about my recent volksmarching experiences. Stay tuned.
Retired-Ed9 Comments
An Author to Check Out
I like to read. My daughters even gave me a Kindle for Father’s Day, so now I can take my books with me in a smaller container! There is an author that I like and I’d like for you to check out her writing. She writes under the name of T. Lynn Ocean, and the T. stands for Tracy, which happens to be her real name. I learned of her through her sister who used to be a colleague of mine.
Tracy writes in the same vein as Sue Grafton or Janet Evanovich in that she has a recurring female protagonist. In this case, the heroine is Jersey Barnes, a former Marine who now works in security. Jersey gets herself right in the middle of the action. A new book in the series came out last month. I invite you to read Southern Peril by T. Lynn Ocean. You even have a chance to win a free copy.
With Tracy’s permission, I am reprinting her most recent newsletter below. It has the information about winning a free signed copy. Please check it out. I like her work. Maybe you will too. Here is the the link to the newsletter if you can’t read the copy below for some reason:
Find it here. I had to modify her header somewhat to make space. Sorry, Tracy.
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KOMANDO
Let’s face it. Not everyone, including me, is a geek. I’m far from it. When I started writing this blog, I didn’t even know what php was. If you don’t know either, you’re not alone. I’m still learning. The closest that I have come to geekitude is when I would walk down the hall and ask our IT people for help on my office computer. But what to do when I’m at home and want information? There is help out there for us non-geeks. I get a lot of my information from Kim Komando, the self-styled “America’s Digital Goddess”. She’s everywhere! She produces a weekly three-hour radio show (although the American Forces Network only airs one hour) every weekend. She has a daily “digital minute” on selected radio stations. There are three daily emailed items: the Cool Site of the Day, the Daily News, and the Tip of the Day. I believe that she also has a syndicated column in a national newspaper. And that’s not all. She also produces a weekly newsletter. All of these items are free.
You can get a wealth of information on her website.While there, you can check out the tips, cool sites, and the various forums (as a former Latin student in high school, I still think that the plural ought to be “fora”, but I digress). You can also join Kim’s Club, for which there is a fee. The lady knows her stuff, and her staff must work 24/7 to come up with all of the information that is available there. If you listen to her show or read her columns, you’ll also get the sense that she is a devoted wife and mother. In short, she really seems like a real person. Maybe someone you’d like to have coffee with.
Right now, she has a give-away going on. She calls it her spring stimulus give-away, and more than $40,000 are up for grabs. All you have to do is enter. I am including a banner below for you to click in order for you to get in on the opportunity to win a great prize. Unfortunately, I haven’t won anything yet, but I keep hoping.
Enter Kim Komando's Spring Stimulus Giveaway
If you have a question about anything digital, I suggest that you take a look at her site and do a search. Chances are that someone else has already asked the question and received an answer. Good luck
Retired-Ed2 Comments
Having fun with your GPS
I love gadgets. Boy, do I love gadgets. If my parents were still alive (and Mom would have turned 100 next week), they would tell you that as a boy, I pestered them all the time to take me to Gorham’s Gifts and Gadgets back in my home town of Springfield, Ill. Well, the only difference between a boy and a man is the price of his toys. When the first personal computers came out, I had to have one. But I was at least a little smart. I was the principal of a small school in Korea at the time and I bought the computer for the school. It was a Radio Shack TRS-80 which had,believe it or not, 4K of memory. That’s right, 4K, and it was almost cutting edge technology at the time. Thank you, taxpayers, for allowing our students to get proficient ahead of the rush. It was the same thing with digital cameras. Had to have one. GPS, check. And that is the subject of this post.
I had a GPS several years ago when the Queen and I visited London. I had a friend who was a military reservist and had been mobilized to serve at Navy Headquarters there. Yes, folks, I’m sure that was very difficult duty, but somebody had to do it! He joined us for breakfast one morning, and as we said good-bye, I pulled out my GPS to make a track to our next location which was probably to have tea with the other queen, but I have forgotten that part of the day. My friend noticed the GPS and suggested that I would enjoy his new hobby of Geocaching. Wow, did I ever. This hobby is a great way to get outdoors and test your mettle against the competition. The idea is that people will hide “caches”, which are often just Tupperware containers hidden in a specific location. The coordinates of the cache are uploaded to the Geocaching website and then you go look for it and log your results. There are almost 800,000 caches worldwide, and the number increases daily.
I have found caches in the woods, in a tree, attached to a sign, and I even found one in an old boot in Austin, Texas. It’s a challenge to find some of these, and I have not been 100% successful, but I have always had fun. If you enjoy the outdoors or even the urban scene in a big city, you might enjoy geocaching.
Check out the site to get the straight scoop on how to proceed or email me at retired1@retired-ed.com.
Oh, and by the way, if anyone knows how to get this Google Analytics counter to read something other than zero, I’d love to hear from you. The reports work fine, but the visible counter never advances.
Retired-Ed
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