The past

The genealogy bug hit again pretty strongly about a month ago. It started when my oldest brother was asking me some questions. He got a subscription to ancestry.com for Christmas, so he was revisiting old info. I got to poking around the site and was pleased by some of the recent developments to their site organization where on-line trees are concerned. It made it much more natural to link sources and records to individuals. This partially led to my working on the genealogy for a co-worker, which has been really fun. I like starting to solve the mysteries of a new family. I’ve also been systematically re-visiting some other friends’ trees as well to update and search for more info. It’s good for me to have a few to cycle between.

Last November Ancestry introduced a publishing ability that basically allows you to push a button and it automatically formats all of the information, records, photos, stories, etc. into an interesting personalized book. My family is very lucky to have a lot of old photos. I’m not talking 1950’s old, I’m talking 1850’s old. There was an early photographer in the family. It’s so nice to put faces to the names of my research. I wanted to make a good book some day, so my mom and I organized some key photos on Thanksgiving. This procrastinator finally started scanning them last week. I’m so glad I did. It’s great to see them organized.

Here are a few key pics:

This is an 1873 tintype of my great grandmother Sadie. My grandfather was very proud of this picture of his mother. He wrote the description on the back of the copy I have. Sadie was the original genealogist in the family. She had the Hopkins genealogy to join the DAR, but also had the first Mayflower links. Amazingly, all of the old research seems to hold up against skepticism. She also was very ahead of her time as quite the independent woman. She’s one of my heroes. Too bad I never met her. She died in 1955.

One of my all-time favorite pictures on the left. This is Sadie again, with my grandfather’s older brother Harold as a baby. Her husband Will is on the right.

This is Captain Spooner and his wife Lizzie, my other great grandparents. He was a tugboat captain who went between Everett and Deception Pass. He built the log cabin at the north end of Whidbey Island that still stands.

Sadie’s parents and Will’s parents. That makes them great great grandparents for me.

Sadie’s paternal grandparents, my great great great grandparents.

Sadie’s maternal grandparents, also my great great great grandparents. This pretty much *has* to be the oldest photo in our collection. If I’m estimating ages correctly, I think this was around the time that photo portraiture was just becoming big. The photos weren’t very sturdy then, so it’s even more amazing to me.

If you’re eager to see even more pictures of dead people, check them out here.

I have *many* more to scan. I managed to very carefully scan the records in the family bible as well. It’s an 1831 bible and was originally owned by those people in the oldest photo. Scanning it made me very nervous, but I worked out an odd looking yet smart way to do it as safely as possible.

I was so excited…

I just stumbled upon what looked like the perfect opportunity for me. I previously declared that I was done with school. Really I meant I was done studying in my major in an academic setting. I’m overall not opposed to learning new things. In fact I thrive on it. I just don’t want to study more abstract and theoretical chemistry.

Way back in college, in my junior year, I tried to switch my major. Science was fine and all that, but computer stuff fascinated me. In mid stream, I began taking the pre-reqs for the computer science. I got 4.0 or nearly 4.0 in those pre-reqs. However, I was late in the game compared to others. It was a very competitive program. I would have had two very intensive years to go after already spending three years full time to that point. I didn’t get in to the program.

I always keep that thought in the back of my mind… what if? I sometimes wonder if I would have tired of it or hated it if I had gotten in. At this point I’ve spent time as a sort of honorary IT member of a couple companies. I’ve tinkered with programming code in languages I’ve never learned. I try to streamline certain activities taking advantage of software tricks. People often come to me with their computer questions of all sorts. I like that. I wish I could always help them. Some areas I’m very strong in. Others I’m better than many. Some areas continue to baffle me. (Networking stuff, for example.) But overall my brain and computers really like each other.

There is a lot of computer use in my field. There are myriad software applications specialized to instrumentation. There is networking of systems. There is spreadsheet validation. There are macros. There are scripts. There are various database applications. Many of these could work with each other.

I always want to understand more of it. I’ve tried on most of them.

I keep thinking I want to study “computer stuff”. I have never been able to narrow that down. Whenever I look at lists of focus, my eyes light up and I want to do it all. I want to program, but would any particular language make sense to learn? And would it really be practical? I could take certification programs to prove what I already know as far as productivity software, but that’s not super exciting. I could learn in areas of my current weaknesses, but does that even make sense?

Anyway, while looking over options at various local community colleges, I wound up looking at UW-Bothell’s offerings. It’s obviously not a community college, so don’t ask me how I wound up there. What I did see was a Masters program. There weren’t any specifics on the description page, but conceptually, it seemed perfect. It was for either continuing computer types or people who had trained in other areas. They specifically mentioned sciences as a previous focus. A Master of Science in Computing and Software Systems.

What I missed in the first line was the word “proposed”. I didn’t catch on until the line “with the goal of offering the masters degree soon.” My hopes were, temporarily at least, dashed.

Makes me wonder how far out it is. I’d still need to see specifics. I don’t know if I’d actually do it, but it interests me more than anything I’ve seen before like this.

First mead review

Last night, I had the opportunity to try a variety of new meads. It was fun to get to share my somewhat obscure interest with my co-worker friends. We had more meads than we were able to try, but I enjoyed the rare opportunity to try a variety.

On hand we had three traditional meads, three melomels, and two raspberry wines. Of those, we only tried two traditionals and two melomels.

A melomel is a mead with the addition of fruit. (Some specific fruits lead to specific other names, such as pyment for grapes and cyser for apples.) I had never had a melomel before, so I was very curious.

First up was a Sky River Semi-sweet traditional mead. It is the only “local” mead we had, coming from Sultan, WA. I suspect it was the overall favorite of the night. It was fairly simple and not overly sweet. There isn’t much to say about it, and I think that’s a good thing. I’d give it a 9/10.

Second, we jumped to a melomel. At least I think it’s a melomel. It was the Black Raspberry Nectar from the Redstone Meadery in Boulder, CO. Apparently the raspberries are added post-fermentation. I was surprised to see that it was sparkling. This is achieved by bottling it prior to completion of fermentation. I can’t reconcile those two facts with one another. Thanks to the raspberries, it was a red color, similar to a ros鮠The carbonation was an interesting experience. There was a definite honey fragrance, but no real honey flavour. Interesting. Not my favorite, but it did pique my curiosity to try more. Probably an 8/10, but I reserve the right to change my mind…

Third up we went for another melomel, the Peach Mead from Mountain Meadows Mead. The peach mead doesn’t appear on their website. There was only one bottle remaining where I acquired it. There were many of the others. I suppose it is on its way out… I was not a huge fan of this one. I think it was my least favourite of the night. There was no peach character to it. It was like a sweet traditional mead, but something seemed off about it. It was still drinkable, but I probably wouldn’t seek it out again. 6/10.

Our fourth and final of the evening brought us somewhat full circle back to the other Sky River mead, the sweet. As the name “implies”, it was, in fact, sweet. It was actually more sweet than I remember from my past experience. This could be based on batch to batch variance. Another possibility is that in comparison to the others, it seemed sweeter by comparison. Now, I’m a big fan of the sweeter drinks normally. Usually you can’t get it too sweet for me. I realize that is often seen as a sign of being unsophisticated, but it’s what I like. I’m glad I got a chance to compare these two head to head finally. I definitely preferred the semi-sweet to the sweet. Other than the sweetness, the simple character of the two were similar. I think others were quite startled by just *how* sweet it was. Heh. 7/10.

We did not try the Chaucer’s mead. We had planned to try some chilled and some steeped with the spices. I’ve had Chaucer’s before, since it is the most widely available commercial mead. I won’t review it though since it’s been awhile. We also didn’t try the Cranberry mead from Mountain Meadows. I’m curious about the “sweet and tart” descriptor.

The non-meads that we didn’t try were Bouteille Call, with the name that amused everyone, and Chaucer’s Raspberry Wine.