I just read this blog post by Jessica Oswalt on the Jessica’s GeneJournal blog and it got me thinking:

My husband asks me every so often why I do genealogy and frankly I’ve never had a good answer for him.

“I just love it,” I say. “I can’t explain why.”

Well, maybe now I can explain it. In college I had the best history teacher, Dr. George Vourlojanis. He made it come alive for me and I almost switched my major because of him.

I had never cared about history before I took his class. It was boring. Just a bunch of names and dates. But Dr. Vourlojanis had us do a project dealing with the Great Depression. We had to interview someone who lived through the years of the depression and find out about their life during that time. It didn’t have to be a relative, but I chose to interview my grandparents. What a gold mine that turned out to be. Genealogically and historically. Not only did I learn what it was like for them in that time, but I found out more about the Roosevelts, the New Deal, the WPA, the CCC, etc. than any history text book will teach you. It was info about how the people viewed these people/events/ideas/projects. It was all put into context and it was fascinating.

I wont lie, I always get a thrill just adding a new name to my family tree, without knowing anything else about the person, but I now realize that my main reason for doing genealogy is to find out about my family in the context of history. The more I learn about the time period they lived in and what they dealt with makes their lives more meaningful to me. And the more I learn about my family’s genealogy the more meaningful history becomes as well.

I’ve never viewed myself as a feminist, but this morning when I read Larry Lehmer’s blog post “Think it’s a man’s world? Think again,” I was immediately annoyed by his ending statement:

A world without men will do much more than upset the genealogical order of mankind. Car oil will go unchanged, bugs will go unkilled, sports will go unwatched and Viagra will go untaken.

As if women can’t be mechanics, touch insects, or be athletes. (I’ll ignore the Viagra comment.)

Then I thought about it some more. Playing the Devil’s advocate, and agreeing with him that women can’t do any of those things…

If those are the only things we lose if men weren’t around: non-electric cars, a world where insects are killed just for living near us, and where regularly scheduled programs are preempted in order to view people kicking/hitting/throwing a ball/puck around (okay, so I am one of those women who think sports are highly overrated), then I can’t say we do need men around.

On a different, but slightly related, note…

I’ve been reading some of Richard Scarry’s stories to my daughter recently, and I noticed a character named Frances. She is a female rabbit that is the town’s mechanic, fixing everyone else’s broken items. I keep waiting for a comedic point in the story that shows she isn’t as capable as we thought she was, and she needs a “man’s” help, but that never happens (at least in the stories I’ve read). That’s nice. It’s not often that I see a children’s book with a female character doing a “man’s job” and being successful. Especially when that book was written when I was a child.

I haven’t posted anything for a while, but not for a lack of doing anything. I’m currently writing a pretty big blog post that I will post on Thursday and I’m getting dangerously behind on my genealogy book (what’s new?), so I’ve been working my butt off to get it back on track. Hopefully I can get at least three more chapters completely finished by the end of this weekend. They are on track to be finished, but the way things are going, something will likely pop up.

Also, many other personal and family things have happened recently and I’m just a little overwhelmed at the moment. I don’t want to go into details, but these things might change my whole outlook on life (in a good way), and thereby change the frequency of my blog posting. When I started this blog I hoped to post something at least every other day, but right now, I’m thinking that I will be happy if I end up posting something once a week.

Miscellaneous things:

We all went outside today and while daughter played in the yard, Joe and I did some much needed landscaping. I fought with a bunch of grape vines that were trying to kill our dogwood tree. I’ve cut down those damn vines every year, but they still keep coming back. And they grow so fast. The tree has already lost a pretty significant limb from the vine’s strangle hold. We also removed 5 (or 6?) pine trees from the edge of our property. They were getting way too big and invading our neighbor’s yard. I’m surprised no one had complained about them yet. We still have a couple more trees that need removed. One, a mulberry, is actually starting to grow around the neighbor’s fence. Tomorrow’s task will be bundling the branches to go out with the trash. That’s not gonna be fun.

I think our daughter is having a growth spurt. The past few days she’s actually eating (she’s really picky about her food) and sleeping about 16 hours each day. Normally she only sleeps 10-13 hours each day.

I just know there’s more I want to say, but I probably won’t remember it until I post this. It always happens like that, right?

Oh yeah… I’ve been trying to pare down my Hiveminder tasks for a long time now and nothing has really worked, but tonight I think I really did some good work on that front. Very few of my tasks have set due dates so I wasn’t putting anything in the due date field, but I think without the due date field filled in it really limits the site’s usage. I also don’t think I was using the “hide until” field properly either, but now I think I should only have 5 or so tasks popping up instead of the 1-2 pages of stuff like before. There’s nothing so frustrating as something I have to organize everyday that is supposed to help me stay organized. We’ll see in the next few days if I’ve fixed it.

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Update:

ALL my time spent on Hiveminder last night might have been for naught.  I forgot to change the “heads up” entry to 0 instead of 1, so I still have quite a few items on my to-do list that I don’t want to see yet.  Now I need to go back in at some point and change them all to 0.  Boo. 

A few months ago someone (I can’t remember who) pointed me to Chris Brogan’s blog post: 100 Blog Topics I Hope YOU Write

I didn’t have a blog at the time, but I knew if I ever did get one I’d eventually end up being at a loss for things to blog about, so I bookmarked his post (despite it not having a ton of ideas applicable to me). Sometime in the future I plan on covering a couple of the topics he listed.

My first one will most likely be “What I spend money on.”

If anyone knows of any other good lists of things to blog about, let me know. I’d love to see them.

I’m actually not at a lost for things to say at the moment, but I have realized that all those things that I wished I could twitter about but I couldn’t fit into 140 characters just don’t seem to be enough to warrant an entire blog post.