GUNG HAY FAT CHOW, HEALDSBURG

Here on the West Coast we are probably more in tune with the Chinese New Year than the farther East parts of the country. And if you do not already know it, it is the year of the snake . . .  so if you know someone who was born under that sign you can look up their horoscope and celebrate:

You have to admit the  displays from the parades are very colorful. When we lived in San Francisco we felt the celebration even more and heard it too . . . we do miss going to China Town especially to purchase pork buns from our favorite shop.

The Next Stage of the Remodel

Well as I roll around my "three room apartment" next to the boarded off kitchen area, I can hear various remodel noises going on, but I don't know for sure what is taking place:

Actually though this took place while I was in the hospital. The ceiling is being raised and these photos (taken by Gail -- thanks a lot) show just how the new ceiling will be shaped -- bottom right. The kitchen itself will not really be any larger, but hopefully it will seem larger. And we will have more storage some up high.

Our Make-Do Kitchen and Lounge . . .

The "hub" of our "apartment" is Gail's sitting room where she normally relaxes and needle-points. Now it is full of activity for mostly our eating breakfast, lunch and dinner. We have a toaster, a microwave, a counter-top oven, a griller and the Ninja -- so we can fix just about anything. One of the problems is though that our two large refrigerators are both in the garage which is a very cumbersome trip to get to . . . I can not navigate it, only Gail.

You can click on the above and see some of the not-so-orderly chaos we have for our temporary kitchen, TV lounge and reading/relaxing room. And of  course the sink for doing dishes. We often use paper plates to cut down on the difficult washing/drying.

And we have been lucky with receiving MEALS ready to eat AND usually with leftovers as well. Also Gail has been hitting the steam-table items at a local grocery -- Big John's, right next to her office -- handy!

State of Genealogy Work

I did listen to a great webinar at Legacy. This one was on Pre-1850 searching. For me it has always been a time period that I delay looking into because of the way the National Censuses are -- that is, before 1850 the census only reports the head of the family and the has columns for "tick" marks to indicate other members:

Above you can click to see some of the reports I viewed this week at FamilySearch.org. That site is such a value -- there is no cost to use everything they offer and they are offering more and more daily.

You can see how difficult it is to see the families of -- in this case HILES -- of a person listed as head of household and then figure out if that is your "HILES" or maybe not. So the webinar gave suggestions on other factors that could be used in addition to the census data to prove a particular family's whereabouts.

Also in the above are examples of some of the John Hiles' that show up in different geographic areas in the early 1800s -- and they have not been proven to be in our line, as yet . . .

Lastly, Baseball in February?

Outback of us I watched part of a baseball drill yesterday and it was like the middle of a summer day. Today as well -- it is in the 70s here -- sorry about those of you in the snow. But today there was no baseball practice, but another activity that might mean we will get more over-the-fence baseballs . . .

In the top left pic you can see that the field is being enlarged. The fences (I indicated the moved fenceline) have been moved out by around twenty feet or so -- new fencing has replaced the previous fences and they are much closer to our back fence. We are going to put in a new fence anyway but we may have to consider a bit higher . . .

The field behind is always being worked on and enhanced and we do enjoy seeing and hearing the sound of the ball hitting the bat (I would prefer hearing wood) and the cheers of the crowds.

And so that was a peek at out week. Gail is wrapping up "peak" at her office, now it will be more dribs and drabs as clients gather their income documents and show up spread out over the 50 some days left to file.

And today is Dino's last full day with us (for awhile maybe) as tomorrow he reports in "for duty" . . . more on that in my next post.

Tonight's dinner will be a surprise -- I'm already hungry! See you all "in a few".