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Saturday, February 8, 2014

It's All About Sochi, Rootstech & RAIN . . .

Sometimes we have weeks that are all-consuming -- and this was one of those weeks. It started out with the Superbowl game on last Sunday -- we were looking forward to a "good" game, and I know that is a relative term -- but for us a good game is one where there is back and forth scoring, and maybe the outcome is decided in the last few seconds . . . in this case the outcome was pretty much decided in the FIRST few seconds of the game.

We are happy for the folks in Seattle (and I was one of them for ten years) and can only say "we will look forward to next season".

We went about our daily chores until Thursday when the new agenda of events began. On Thursday, it marked the beginning of Rootstech in Salt Lake City (the biggest genealogical conference) which is winding down as I write this post. It also marked the passing of the "Tonight Show" hosted by Jay Leno after 22 or more years AND it was the beginning of the 22nd Winter Games in Sochi, Russia:


We needed a "big" athletic event to cleanse our brains, and the Winter Games are big. We started watching the pre-opening events (figure skating and snowboarding slopestyle) on Thursday evening. The site looked beautiful.

On Friday we started watching the "Opening Ceremonies" -- I say started because they ran for four hours, and we split that over into Saturday morning. They of course were spectacular and amazing to view and realize that it took seven years to accomplish the plan.

Team USA has 220 or so athletes attending, and it was fun to see them march into the arena just as it was impressive to see some countries with one athlete attending,  march in as well.

We look forward to the next couple of weeks as the events take place. We record the middle-of-the-night sessions and then watch them at our leisure -- even if we have heard the outcome on the news.

Genealogy Related

The other "big" event for me is "Rootstech". It is the fourth annual event, and it is held in Salt Lake City and rightfully so.  It is fortunate for those of us who can not attend to be able to "live stream" about fifteen of the numerous events.

I have watched about ten of those so far and will catch up later by watching recorded versions of the ones that I am interested in. So far I have been really impressed with the ones that I have seen -- and being live it does almost feel as though I have a special seat for each one.


In the large auditorium there is apparently seating for a very large audience as seen above, and it makes the streaming just that much better in that if I was in attendance I would probably be somewhere in the middle.

The opening remarks set the tone of the conference and the individual presentations focused on what we can expect to come in the near future as well as currently. "Family Search.Org" was impressive with their achievements and with their goals.

Ancestry.com as well was impressive and gave good insight into how best to utilize the huge database and amazing features of their site.

I have enjoyed "being a part of" the attendees. I recognized many of the folks that I "see" on the web as I do my research. The emphasis was on sharing our research with others and being of assistance wherever we could.

I will look forward to viewing the remaining videos in the coming week or so.

From Our Tree

Shown below are next week's birth dates for folks in our tree. Gail has two of significance:  "Jim Bouldron" (her father) in what would have been his 100th and her father's father, Walter Bouldron born 128 years ago.


And as for anniversaries (I thought that there would be more weddings on Valentines Day . . .)


I see just two weddings on that day -- there probably are many more we just don't have those dates.

Rain and Playing Indoors

We in Northern California are so lucky this week in that it has rained a lot. Our town had already put strict water usage laws in place when it was apparent that a drought was happening. We were beginning to be resigned to the fact of "brown" lawns, unfilled pools and lost vegetation -- hopefully the current rain will ease up on some of those restrictions.

We also heard that maybe there would be some relief coming next year as well.  In the meantime the rainy days are actually fine for just staying inside and working on projects around the house.



On the top left you can see the current rainfall as it hits our pool --  and it has almost topped it out and there is more reportedly on-the-way. Unfortunately in the next photo is our cleaned and empty fish tank. On Monday of this week after performing maintenance which included replacing maybe 20% of the water -- 100% of the fish died (all three of them). Obviously that maintenance was the factor . . .

We will start again being ever so cautious this time -- we had the other fish about four weeks . . . On the top right shows a bird working at emptying one of our feeders -- the rain has increased their attention to the available seed.

In the middle -- Dino seems to be not bothered by the rain -- except when we "ask" him to step outside for a few moments, then he is a bit reluctant.

In the bottom photos, Gail is making huge strides on the toughest puzzle that she has ever worked on and is about a quarter of the way complete -- she felt like giving up many times, but came back and eventually "found" another piece . . . the bottom right photo shows the screen for "Words with Friends" which is a daily routine and involves more than 30 games going on . . .(I play the other side of the game . . .).


And Lastly

Besides the above activities I am working at perfecting the use of Heritage Collector software. For some reason the software is at times very challenging. But fortunately the developer has several webinars and training videos that are available to assist.


This week I listened in on part three of "Getting Started with HC" and I viewed a couple of training videos that little-by-little I am making some progress.

The overall objective with this program is to be able to "get my arms around" the huge database of photos that I have on the computer. I would love to be able to have every photo labeled and organized in such a way that I could easily find and use them.

So, that was a bit about our week -- we will be watching more Olympics and having burgers tonight!

See you all, in a few . . .







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