It's News to Me

Happy Birthday Dad

Originally uploaded by Dr Reelgood & Co..

On November 7th, Mike and Cheryl and their kids helped me celebrate my 66th birthday with a dinner at their home. Mike captured this official portrait of me posed before an assortment of cheeses and fruit that he had purchased for the occasion. It was a delicious and enjoyable way to celebrate my birthday. He suggested that the caption for the picture should be Dad cuts the cheese on his birthday, but in the end, he labeled it a bit more soberly.

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My sons and their families gave me gift certificates for Father's Day this year.  One of them chose a gift certificate from Home Depot and the other chose one from Amazon.com.  I appreciated both of them, of course, and will try to find something that I'd like to have from there.

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I virtually never take a vacation, last year's cruise to Alaska with Carole being a spectacularly notable exception, but I do take virtual vacations. For instance, I am participating in two vacations, vicariously and virtually this Memorial Day weekend, with my son Mike and his extended family at Ft. Walton Beach, FL, and with Andy of Yellow Swordfish and his wife, as they visit the American west and southwest from the British Isles. (Also see Andy's posts here and here.) The beauty of virtual vacations is that I can switch quickly from the beach to the Grand Canyon and I don't incur the shock to my bank account of having to stop every 300 or 400 miles to get soaked at a gas station, nor do I have to leave the familiar surroundings or the comfort of my own computer. All in all, I'm glad I'm here rather than there.

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I visited with my son Mike last night, as I always do on Tuesdays when he is working late, and he noted that when he read my post about Shutdown Day he thought to himself that I might had better try a few shorter, trial runs at this thing before going entirely cold turkey for a whole day on the 24th. I suppose he thought that the shock to my system might be too much for me, much as a doctor would advise a man my age to come in for a checkup before initiating any serious exercise program, lest I precipitate a coronary. I think he said it mostly in jest, but in some ways I think he has a good idea.

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Today is my pal Paul's 83rd birthday. I want to wish him a Happy Birthday publicly here on my blog and to say I hope he has many more years of happiness there in his adopted home in Berlin.

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Recently I blogged about the free genealogy program called Family Tree Builder that you can download from MyHeritage.com and how I had gotten involved with it because I wanted to see how the program worked and how easy or hard it was to enter information in it. Now I guess I should acknowledge that I am finding it hard to put aside.

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A few days ago, I talked about Face Recognition that was available from this site. On that same date, I downloaded their free genealogy software, called Family Tree Builder (FTB). And in subsequent days I've gone through their 56-page tutorial, an optional but useful exercise that helped me understand the software and maybe avoid some decisions that might adversely affect my options further along. (I'm probably one of the few people in the world who bothers to read the documentation for a program, particularly if it is good as it is in this case, almost as soon as I pick it up. I know many others, most people in fact, who just jump in and turn to the documentation only when they hit a wall and don't know how to do something. But the difference in these two strategies is possibly the topic of a worthwhile discussion in another post, so I'll save any further observations about that for then.)

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The title of this post is from the lyrics of a hymn, but it describes how I spent almost all of yesterday and most of the evening before.

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012407 Phoenix-Grand Canyon Trip 039

Originally uploaded by Dr Reelgood.

This is one of a number of outstanding pictures Mike got during his recent trip to the Grand Canyon. I particularly like this one, when viewed in a larger resolution (which you can do on his Flickr site). If you haven't yet checked out this series of photographs, I recommend it highly. You can click on any individual picture there and once the somewhat larger thumbnail of it is displayed, you'll find an «all sizes» link above it. Clicking that will display the picture in a large size, and quite a few of them deserve to be seen that way.

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