I was supposed to be posting a blog over on Tote Bags ‘n’ Blogs today.  But I forgot. 

Then Lee, the owner, reminded me. And I got written and then couldn’t post it because apparently Blogger is down.

So I told her I would post it here. Life is weird these days. I’ve been Missing in Action here for the last month because I’ve been working madly on Yiannis’s book. And teaching a class and doing all sorts of other stuff that escapes me – just like the blog has.  Anyway, here’s the Tote Bags blog. 

And if I ever get on Blogger today, you can read it there, too.

I’m late today. My apologies. I’ve been preparing for the last class of the semester of a course that I teach in family history research, and I just got back — feeling pleased because all my students are excited and eager and looking forward to doing lots of work on the internet and on research trips this summer.  And now I feel like I’ve dropped the ball.

That’s because I am getting less and less good at multi-tasking apparently.  Or maybe it’s because the weather is all of a sudden 90 degrees and I’m left wondering, What happened to spring? 

Anyway, sometimes life gets away from me (and so do blogs apparently) and this was one of those times.

So since I’ve come unprepared (because I’m also making 200 brownies for the graduation party of my oldest grandson whose party is this weekend), I need to ask your advice.

What do you get a charming, talented, clever, smart, athletic high school senior for his graduation?

Bear in mind that whatever we get him, we’re setting a precedent. There are seven more grandkids following in his footsteps — so far. 

What we do for one, we need to comparably do for all the others in some fashion or other. So, yachts are out. So are trips to Hawaii and other mega-costly things.

I know cash is always an option — and there will probably be a bit of that.

But cash comes and cash goes. And then you don’t have anything to think back on and remember that Grandma and Grandpa gave that to you when you graduated from high school.

I know this for a fact because I remember two things that people gave me when I graduated from high school.  An aunt and uncle gave me some luggage because I was going away to college (he’s not going that far).  And my great-aunt Martha have me a lovely wool blanket I still have.

Every time I put it on the bed in the winter, I think of Aunt Martha.  Mostly I think of her because my cousin got married two weeks after my graduation and she didn’t give him and his new wife a wedding present at all. 

When my grandmother asked (grandma was blunt) why, Aunt Martha said, speaking from experience, “Well, you only graduate from high school once. You can get married plenty of times!”

So . . . bearing that in mind, I’d like to get him something he’ll remember fondly, even if he doesn’t have the crazy family story to go with it that I do.

 
Help, please!!

I’ve been enjoying the fruits of Christmas now for the past nearly two weeks.

The thing I wanted most from each of my kids was a family photo.  To that end, I told my oldest son that if he could get all his boys to a photographer – which really is the hard part – and all the family could get in one photo, I’d pay for the photos. 

Didn’t happen.  It might have, but about a week and a half before Christmas when he was at work a box fell and hit him right below the eye.  ""No pic,” he said. “Unless you want me with stitches.” 

I said unsympathetic things like, “Haven’t you ever heard of photoshop?”   But I understood.  And as it turned out, by Christmas day he had the stitches out, he had all the boys here under my roof, and I had my camera.  Problem solved!

My daughter was easier. I gave her a camera for Christmas.  A drop-proof, shock-proof, water-proof one that so far has last three weeks.  (She opened it early so she could comply with the request for family photo). She actually loves the camera, which is an Olympus.  And so far, if she’s dropped it, shocked it or dunked it – all very real possibilities – it has survived.

The other sons’ families were easier to come by.  One has a wife who is a photographer. She takes family portraits for a living. She took her own family and the other sons’ family and I have the photos to prove it.

They are all sitting now in 4 x 6 format on top of the ancient beloved lowboy that has been in my husband’s family for a very long time.  It’s like having the past and the present together, with all the hopes for the future.  One of the best parts of Christmas, if you ask me.

My other two very welcome gifts were from my husband.  He got me 10 hours of research in the Bavarian archive where my grandfather’s mother’s family is, we hope, recorded. It has taken me literally years (lots of them) to nail down this family to a small enough locality in Bavaria to make searching an archive possible.  But having done so at last, getting someone who knows what she’s doing to look for records on the ground and provide the details that will help me reconstruct this family before they came to America, is a real blessing.

And while that gift is somewhat intangible, the other, a Flip-Pal scanner, is not.  This little scanner is exactly what I wish I’d had when I was in San Francisco two years ago visiting my cousin who has all our grandfather’s diaries.  It does small areas – only 4 x6 inches. But it comes with the software to stitch the scans together. It runs independent of a computer with only AA batteries, and everything is saved to an SD card, just like I have in my camera, which I can stick in my computer and download instantly.

It is so simple it works right out of the box. And the lid comes off so I can go around and scan things in frames. I just scanned a big 19th century framed map of our county that has been in a frame so I couldn’t scan it on my flatbed – not without difficulty anyway. This scanned easily. I am going to download the pics tonight. I’ll let you know how it comes out. But I think it’s going to be great.  And I can see a wonderful future of taking it with me when I visit distant family members so I can scan memorabilia without leaving their house.

It’s going to be great for research too, for much the same reason. It has allowed me to scan small objects and keep records of them that way. 

I am building a virtual box, like Twyla Tharp’s real box for her projects in The Creative Habit, for my next book. It’s got a lot of things in it that I can use to call up my setting and my characters.  And it takes up way less space than a box!

What did you get for Christmas that you love?