#TheBookofMe How do you keep emotionally strong?

The first way is what comes naturally -- I'm a cantankerous old curmudgeon.  I'm too stubborn to give in.

The second way is that I have, at my age, no qualms about speaking my mind.  Some of my opinions should be issued with laboratory gloves, because they have a pH of 1.

The third way is that I let off steam by having fun.  Everyone needs to do that from time to time.

The fourth way is by trying to take care of myself.  That's difficult, because right now I'm battling a very difficult insomnia. 

The fifth way is with hugs.  We're a very huggy family, and sometimes a hug is just what we need to set things right.

The sixth way is what I just did last week.  I took the week off to be a lazy bum and do nothing.  No work.  I did play computer games.  I watched TV, binged on "Law & Order."  I feel much better now.

On the other hand, in the seventh way, I get into my work, go back to the late 18th - early 19th centuries, and bid the modern world adieu for a while. 

And finally, I realize that, in the great cosmic scheme of things, my problems aren't that big at all.

#TheBookofMe What Do You Share?

Well, that could get into the realm of Too Much Information!

However, I will exercise uncharacteristic self-restraint.

What, indeed, to I share?

My opinions.  Anyone who knows me on Facebook or, to a lesser extent, on Twitter, knows that I can have very strong opinions.   If you remember high school chemistry, you'll understand when I say that my opinions often have a pH of 1.

My work.  I do enjoy talking about the work I'm doing as a historian studying Spanish colonial East Florida between 1784 and 1821.  A lot of this genealogy blog concerns the genealogy of the residents of that area during that time; I have not much time for my own family genealogy anymore (though today I did get an awful lot of very good documentary hints on Ancestry!).

My fun.  One of the ways I share my fun is in online games.  My daughters and son-in-law and grandson and I all play Diablo III (before anyone gets het up about it involving demons, yes, it does, but your job as a player is to fight them and defeat them on the side of good).  We share fun, and in-game gifts and goodies.  In another game I play, a much more peaceful game called Township, I share my produce and manufactured products with friends, both within and outside of the cooperative I belong to.

Love.  I come from a very huggy family.  We shared our love with hugs and food and humor.  Though there were trying times, my family was basically fun to grow up in.  We still share with food, especially at Thanksgiving and Christmas, though we also take friends and family out to dinner on our nickel throughout the year.  I love my husband, our daughters, our son-in-law, our grandson, our friends.

Interests.  My husband and I have a lot in common, but we also have different interests.  He's retired, and spends a lot of time on the computer (he was a programmer).  I spend a lot of time in my office because I'm not retired!  I have things in common with our daughters, too (like computer games), and that makes our relationship fun.

That's enough sharing for one day!

#TheBookofMe May's Prompts -- late again

I don't know where the month of May went, but it's now June (hurricane season has begun).  I am going to, once again, combine all of one month's prompts into one blog entry.

1.  What or who are you proud of?

I am proud of my husband for having been a good provider in 47 years of marriage.  He even, on our modest income, got me through graduate school without a student loan.  We've had some rough patches, as we all do.  But we have come through them, perhaps a bit financially bloodied, but unbowed.  We have a comfortable retirement.  Well, he's retired.  I'm probably an old ADHD, and will never retire, as I always have to be doing something.

I am proud of my daughters, who have become hard-working, life-loving, responsible women.  Our older one has a good marriage to a fine man.  Our younger one chose never to marry, and has her own place in the country, where she is most at home.  Both of them have a solid work ethic.  Both of them enjoy their family and friends. 

I am proud of my grandson, who is doing well in school and overall, despite a fairly severe ADHD.  That's why I made the reference above, because I see myself in my grandson.  He has a terrific sense of humor, and is particularly adept at puns.  He made his first pun at the age of about five.

I am proud of having served in the United States Coast Guard, active duty and reserve, enlisted and officer.  I accomplished things beyond what I had ever imagined I could.  It was a tremendous growth experience.

2.  What frustrates you?

Computer games, at times.  There is one cardinal rule of computer gaming -- the game always cheats.  When I can't seem to accomplish a level, it frustrates me.  However, I'm mule stubborn, so I don't give up until I do complete the level!

Deliberate ignorance frustrates me. Not much else does, though.

3.  What is your favorite way to communicate?

Face-to-face.  That's the best.  I despise the telephone.  I had a job once sitting at a desk with a headset on my head, answering incoming call after incoming call, for the Internal Revenue Service.  At home, I informed my husband that he would have to answer the telephone, because I wasn't going to after a day of doing nothing but that.  I still don't like to get on the dratted instrument.

4.  Name a treasured possession and share why.

Family photographs.  My family is mostly gone.  My father died in 1954 (I had just turned 7), my aunt, who helped raise me, in 1967 (I was in college).  My grandma and my mother-in-law in 1978 and my mother in 1980.  My brother in 1996.  So photographs have been for different stretches of years the only thing I have to remember them.

5.  What and who do you value?

I value my family and friends.  They keep me going.

I value honesty and integrity.  I value incorruptibility.  I value a sense of humor; never trust anyone who does not have one.  I value intelligence. 

#TheBookofMe - Combining March and April

I've been out of town on business and fun.  The business:  attending the roll-out celebration in Washington, D.C. of the website LaFlorida: The Interactive Digital Archive of the Americas, and researching at the Florida State Archives in original documents for data for the LaFlorida site.  The fun:  A reunion of the women who were my housemates in a scholarship house at Florida State University in the 1960s.

So I have let my blog entries slide, and now I'm going to take a page out of the book of Carol A. Bowen Stevens's blog and combine the remaining March prompts with April's, and get it all done.  Fortunately, the prompts lend themselves very well to this treatment.

March:

What is something you would like to change, or something you wish had changed?

For one, I would wish my husband, when he decided to go back to college in the 1970s, had chosen computer science rather than getting a teaching certificate.  He would have been much happier.  For another, I wish we hadn't run into hard times and had to sell the house we loved and enjoyed living in, and which would have been paid off in 2010.

What are your favorite things?  Books.  Music (clasical, show tunes, world music, bluegrass, real country music).  Kitties and doggies.

What frightens you?

Tornadoes.  Idiot drivers.  Category 4 and 5 hurricanes.

Using adjectives, describe yourself.

Plain-spoken.  Casual.  Friendly.  Curious.  Intelligent.  Funny.  Stubborn.  Liberal.

What do you think are your essentials in life?

Beyond food, shelter, and clothing:  Books.  Music.  Family.  Friends.

What are your challenges?

Procrastination!  My health (not much left of it).  Impatience.

Are you right or left handed, and does that reflect you?

Right-handed.  Reflect me?  Not sure I understand that fully, but I would say no.  It's genetic, that's all.  Except maybe to say that right-handers are usually left-brained and left-handers are right-brained, so as a right-hander, that means I'm not in my right mind.  (But people know that about me, anyway, bwahahahahahaaaa!)

Describe something you created.

I'll let  Amazon.com describe it for me.

So now I'm ready for May's prompts!

#TheBookofMe Who do you love?

Shouldn't that be Whom Do You Love?  Anyway . . .

My husband, of course.  Have done for 47 years, and we just keep on keeping on.  We've known each other since childhood, were best buds in high school, though we went to different schools (same church, though).  So on it goes.  He enjoys my adventures in academia.  I keep him entertained.  He takes good care of me, and certainly did last year when I broke my shoulder!  He got to be quite the cook, and made some delicious meals!

Our daughters, of course, too (we have no sons).  Both are fine ladies.  Now middle-aged, which makes me feel a bit old.  But I also feel young in having so much in common with each of them.  They're fun to be with.

Our son-in-law, who is a fine fellow.  He and our daughter have also known each other from childhood, having met at a party given by the sysop (do you remember that term?) of a BBS (and that one?) we all used to participate in.  Our son-in-law has been there for our older daughter since before they were married, and certainly does love her.  He's brought some genealogical diversity to the family, adding German and Dutch to the mix!

Our grandson, of course, too.  He's a great kid.  Now in junior high school.  I can't believe he's 13!  Gads, what an age.  But he'll get over it.  We all did.  He wants to be an architect or an engineer.  Following in family footsteps, he's quite the punster, and has been since the age of 5.  He is also quite the flirt, and the girls just love him.

Our cat.  Well, technically (grammatically) the cat isn't a 'who,' she's a 'what.'  But my husband and I love and spoil her, anyway.  She's a very affectionate cat, who likes to sleep with us and to be with (or on) us on the couch when we watch TV.  She is not quite 2, and is still energetic.  Sometimes she runs around the house at great speed.  She loves to hide and then jump out at us, or come up behind is in the kitchen and tap us on the rear end!  Silly kitty!

My friends.  All of our friends, with very few exceptions, are younger than we are, and most of them have no kids.  Our daughters are also friends with most of these same people.  We have a quite diverse group of friends.  That adds to the enjoyment.

The youngsters I work with on a massive database project, to identify and profile everyone we can find in the original documents, who lived in Spanish colonial Florida between 1513 and 1763, and 1784 and 1821.  I'm the Principal Investigator of the portion known as East Florida between 1784 and 1821.  All these colleagues are younger than I am, some of them by some 50 or so years!  The head of the project, who was my major professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg a few years ago, is also quite a bit younger than I am.  Fine people, all of them!

Others I have loved are no longer with us -- most of my family, my husband's family, friends I've lost over the years.  I still love them, too, and miss them.

#TheBookofMe: What (or who) do you miss most?

The question reminds me of the old saw: "Of everything I've lost, I miss my mind the most."

Well, I haven't lost my mind.  Yet.

I have lost so many people in my lifetime -- my father, my grandma, my aunt, my mother, my brother, friends -- that I miss them all, and don't want to single out just one of them.

I miss my health; it has pretty much gone away, though I still get around.  I don't get around as much as I used to, of course.  We all suffer from that.  But just walking a couple blocks this week in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., where our nephew lives, was a real challenge.  I also did a lot of standing around, and a lot of sitting.  I went up to Washington for the launch of the website of the huge Spanish Colonial Florida database project I've been contributing to.  It was a wonderful launch, and a bunch of us went out to eat afterward, and had big fun.

I miss a lot of people less than I used to, because I'm back in touch with them on Facebook.  I'm especially happy to be in touch with my cousins, though we lost one of our number a couple years ago. 

I miss the ability to travel more and be more adaptable to different environments.  No more camping or hiking, or even taking long walks, because of arthritis.

I miss mountains, because I live in Florida.  I was born in California, and lived there as a child.  I like mountains. 

I miss our boat, because we had such fun with it.  We even were members of the Coast Guard Auxiliary for a few years, and used our boat in a number of search and rescue missions, patrols, and training exercises.  That was terrific fun!

I'm not sure there's much more I miss.  I have so much now.  My husband, our kids, our grandson, our kitty-cat, my historical research.  I stay occupied, so I don't have time to think about what I miss enough to be in any way despondent about it.

#thebookofme What Do You Collect?

I know, it's March already, but I'm going to catch up on The Book of Me by posting my response to the last two of the February prompts today.  I've been really busy!

So -- What do I collect?

Dust.  Not much of a joke.  We have a lot of dust in our house.  I keep telling my husband it's his powder, a necessity in this humid climate, but he insists it isn't.  I keep thinking I oughta spend some money and take a sample to a lab for analysis.

Frogs.  Ever since I was a little girl, I have collected frogs.  Only then, in my childhood, I collected real frogs!  I would gather tadpoles (which actually turned out to be toads, not frogs) in a nearby stream and watch them turn into frogs.  It was fascinating.  That is one of the things that has sparked my lifelong lay person's interest in science.  Once the tadpoles metamorphosed, I would liberate them in the back yard, where they were happy in the damp patches in the lawn.  After I grew up, I collected ceramic frogs and wooden frogs and plushy frogs.  I have quite a collection now.  My grandson has inventoried them.  He even made frogs for me in art camp.  Here is one of them.  You can tell that the art camp was at a museum of modern art!

Books.  Well, I would not really call myself a book collector.  I don't collect first editions or rare books or anything like that.  I can't afford that indulgence.  I collect books in the sense of having a houseful!  I have had to classify them by the Dewey Decimal System!  My studies as a historian has prompted me to build quite a library of books on Spain and Spanish colonial Florida. 

At one time, I had quite a collection of Star Trek memorabilia, but I have had to pare that down.  My three categories of collecting are "Necessary, Nice, and Nuts."  When I divested myself of many of my Star Trek items, my priority became the "Nuts" items.  They're just such fun.

State Universities (of Florida).  I joke that I am collecting state universities, having attended three different institutions in the state university system of Florida.  In the 1960s, I attended Florida State University, earning a bachelor's degree in Government and a master's in library science.  I worked as a librarian for a while, and enjoyed it.  That dried up in the recesion of the early 1970s.  After a lifetime of doing this and that while concentrating on raising a family, I finally went back to college at the age of 60, at the University of North Florida.  After that, I went for another master's degree at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.  Not sure if I'm going to be adding to this collection.

And, of course, as a genealogist, I collect dead relatives!  Only, these days, as I study the families of St. Augustine, Florida, during the second period of Spanish possession, I'm collecting a whale of a lot of other people's relatives, while neglecting my own.  Kinda like the shoemaker whose kids go without shoes.

The Book of Me: Who Inspires You?

That's a loaded question.  I could ask, "Inspires me to do what?"  There are people out there who inspire me (inadvertently, I'm sure) to do violence.  Let's exclude them right off the bat.  (I was originally going to say, "Let's eliminate them . . ." but that could be taken the wrong way!)

That leaves inspiration in a positive sense. 

I have had people throughout my life who have inspired me to learn and to love learning.  My senior English teacher at duPont High School, Mrs. Hartzog, was one.  My aunt, Elizabeth Reed, for whom my younger daughter is named, was another.  That got me to go back to college many, many years later, at the age of 60, and earn two post-baccalaureate degrees, in History and Spanish, and then go for a master's degree in Florida Studies (a program found only at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg). 

Turns out I became inspiration for some youngsters, to hear my buddy, one of the custodians at USFSP, tell it.  That cuts both ways, because the young students who were my classmates inspired me, too, with their energy and enthusiasm.

I come from a family (on my mother's side) with a weird sense of humor that tends toward puns.  I guess it's in the Reed blood.  My grandpa made up songs that consisted of puns.  My aforementioned aunt was a great humorist, and could entertain crowds with amusing monologues that skewered human foibles.  My mother also had a great big sense of humor.  My husband also has a weird sense of humor.  These family members have inspired me to see the absurdity of life, and to find humor in it.

My friends inspire me to see beyond myself to the greater number, and to seek the greater good. 

There were leaders whom it was my honor to serve in the U.S. Coast Guard.  The ones who displayed the best characteristics of leadership led me to strive to emulate their leadership style.  These were the ones who took care of their personnel, keeping up with our professional development, seeing to it that we could meet our family's needs in emergencies, and directing us to achieve the missions of the Coast Guard.

Those are a few of the people who have inspired me.

The Book of Me, Part 8

This great series of blogging prompts comes from Julie Goucher at Angler's Rest. This week:

"This week’s prompt is in two parts and you have several choices.

The prompt is Time Capsule

1.      You can choose who to create the time capsule for as that will influence what you put (or would put into your time capsule)

2.      The creation of a time capsule

a.       you can do this in the literal sense or

b.      you can simply write what you would place into your time capsule and why. It is much more fun to create though!

• You may choose to create a time capsule for your children, or a niece/nephew, for grandchildren – A physical item that you will give to a named person.
• Why have you chosen that person and when do you intend for them to have it?
• You may choose to create a time capsule of your home and leave it for someone in the future to find.
• You may want to create a time capsule relating to an actual event or anniversary
• If you create a physical time capsule, what did you choose to use as your capsule and why?"

Wow.  I have many people I would remember this way, but I think I'll choose my father, Arden Packard.  He had no middle name.  As I am away from home, at graduate school, and all my mementoes of my father are back home, I will do the "virtual" time capsule rather than a real one.  One day perhaps I will do a real one. In fact, I probably would do two of them: one for my grandson and one for my nephew Evan, so both of them could have a better idea of the man their great-grandpa and grandpa was.

As I am doing only the "virtual" time capsule, I have no idea right now what I would use for a container.  I would select something fairly sturdy and eminently portable and storable.  I'll have to think about that.

I would put into the capsule copies of several photographs I have. One is of him wading in the Pacific off the coast of California, where he was born.  He was about three or four years old in the picture. Another would be him in his Naval Academy midshipman's uniform on leave back home, with his mother and father.  Another of him as a very handsome Navy lieutenant.  And more.

I would also put in a copy of his birth certificate and a copy of his Navy service record from the National Archives' National Personnel Records Center.  I would use paper copies rather than media such as a CD-ROM, because as time goes by, the items on the disk would fall victim, I'm sure, to "platform creep" and end up unreadable by the machines of the future.

I would have to distribute between the two capsules the medals my father earned in World War II.  Or maybe I would just take photographs of them.  I would put in an explanation of each one, what it was for.

Finally, I would put in copies of an essay detailing my scant memories of him, along with things my mother told me about him.  I say "scant memories," becuase I had just turned seven years old when he died.  Genealogy has helped me get to know him better, including the fact that he was fluent in Spanish, which is also my second language.
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The Book of ME: Part 3

I'm taking  part in a meme, "The Book of Me Written by YOU," started by Julie Goucher of Anglers Rest. This week's prompt is:  Describe your physical self.

Your size – clothes size

Scars

Eye colour

Draw your hands

Finger Prints

Clothes size?  Oh, no.  Let's just skip this one, shall we?  Though I have lost about 7 pounds in the last two weeks, having cut out refined carbohydrates (mainly grains and grain products).  Next question!

Scars.  I have a scar from a tubal ligation in 1972, a scar on my right knee from when I fell off my bicycle in a gravel parking lot when I was about 10, scars from various biopsies and one large scar on the back of my right leg where a skin cancer was removed, and a mark of my generation: a smallpox vaccination scar on my left bicep.  I also have various small scars on my arms which prove that cat bathing is a martial art.  And I have a set of "railroad tracks" left on my right boob by my cat!

Eye color.  Green with brown.

Draw my hands?  Nah, I am NO artist.  However, I have large hands for a woman my size.  I also have a large frame, though I'm only 5'4" tall.  I never gave a thought to the size of my hands until my husband bought me a pair of gloves for Christmas.  I tried to put them on, and couldn't.  They were too small.  He was surprised, as he said they were standard women's gloves.  I held my hand up and told him to hold his hand against mine.  We were both rather startled to see that my hands are the same size as his!  He stands 5'9 1/2" and is not slight of build.  The best part of that came when our younger daughter wanted to buy him a pair of gloves for Christmas some years later.  She took me along as a "hand model," and the gloves she bought him fit perfectly!

Finger prints:  on file with the City of Jacksonville, Florida (I was a city employee, a librarian at the public library); the Clay County School Board (I was a substitute teacher for a brief while); the Internal Revenue Service (for which I worked for a couple of years); and the United States Coast Guard, in which I served both active duty and reserve.

Now, aren't you glad you know that?
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The Book of ME: Part 2

This is the second of the series of memes devised by Julie Goucher of Angler's Rest.  This week it's all about the natal day:

This week's prompt:
   Prompt 2: Your Birth
    Do you have any baby photos?
    Where were you born?
    Who was present at your birth?
    Dimensions?
    What day was it? Time?
    Did you have hair? Eye colours

Do I have baby photos?  You bet!  Here I am in a photo taken in Hollywood, so it's a true glamor shot!

"And I want to thank my parents, and my brother and sister, and my agent . . ."

All right.  Enough of that.

I was born at the United States Naval Hospital in Long Beach, California.  It's no longer there, at least not as a Navy hospital.  I have two birth certificates: one from the State of California and another from the Naval Hospital.  The latter one is filled out in my mother's handwriting, and has my little baby footprints on the back!

I would imagine my mother was present at my birth.  (Pardon the Packard-Reed sense of humor.)  I don't know if my father was there or not, and there's nobody around to ask who would know.  I think he probably was, though, even though by that time it was all old hat -- I was the third and last.  Also present was the doctor who delivered me.  My documents are at home, and I am not, so I cannot look up the doctor's first name, but his last name was McNulty, and he was the brother of a popular singer of the day (1947), Dennis Day (whose real name was Dennis McNulty).

I do not know how long I was, nor specifically how much I weighed, which was somewhere around 6 lbs.  The time of birth was around 6 p.m.  I am a Saturday's Child -- supposedly, I work hard for a living.

From the photo above, you can see I had a little hair.  My eyes then were probably the usual baby blue-grey, but my eye color now is green.

The Book of Me: Who Am I?

This comes from Julie Goucher's Angler's Rest blog. She is beginning a series of weekly blogging prompts. Who knows? It just might get me back up and running again (while I'm inundated with a ton of reading and several projects in grad school). (With thanks to Julie Goucher, and to Bill West of West in New England , on whose Facebook post I saw this.)

Every so often, we in genealogy need to pause in our hunt for others and take a look at ourselves.  After all, the procedure in genealogy -- what I teach to people in my presentations on beginning genealogy -- is to begin with ourselves.

"This week's prompt: 

1. Ask yourself 20 times “Who are you?”

Each time you should give yourself a different answer, and if you can easily go beyond 20 then that is fine too. . . . This is the sort of prompt that you can re do at various stages of your life, perhaps after some changes or at the start of the New Year.

This prompt is about how YOU see YOU."



Okay.  Me.

I am:

A writer.
A graduate student.
A wife.
A lover.
A mother.
A grandmother.
A person who loves cats and dogs.
A Floridian (a "Floridated" Californian).
A historian.
A research nerd.
A lover of books.
A fan of reading.
A former Coast Guard officer.
A former nurse.
A former librarian.
A person who has had to reinvent herself several times in her life.
A genealogist.
A maverick.
A funny woman.
A friend.
A person with arthritis.
A stubborn woman (I don't give up).
A supporter of the arts.

That's 23.  Let's see what next week's prompt brings.
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