Catching Up

On Saturday morning we went to the local computer/electronics/appliance store to find a new printer.  Ours is maybe 10 years old (I don’t even remember when we bought it!).  As my husband pointed out this is our 3rd printer since we’ve been married – 20 years – which isn’t bad in the grand scheme of things.  Of course our first printer was a dot matrix – remember the perforated lines on each side that you had to tear once your document printed out? And it was only black ink.  I’ve had the Epson Stylus 880i and really like it (still do even if it is putting great big inky marks all over the page!).  So I told the rep trying to interest me in another big name printer that I was partial to Epson.  I did find an all-in-one (no fax though as we really don’t need that).  Bought some extra ink and then home to hook it up and install the software for it.

I used the scanner on Saturday and Sunday and it is quite fast.  I won’t get rid of our flatbed scanner becaues it has a slide and negative attachment.  Since I still have oodles of slides to scan, it will still come in handy.  Plus it is larger than the new all-in-one and I can scan my scrapbook pages on it as well.

I’ve also added some more records to Find-a-grave and a member tree on Ancestry (even though I’m not a paying subscriber, I was invited in to this member tree). I just figure that the more information I flood the web with, the easier it will be for people who are looking for mutual ancestors to find me.

Also, for so long I’ve kept my maternal and paternal lines on separate gedcom files (don’t ask why I even did that!) so this weekend I merged everything into one big happy family file. Oh the joy – oh the headache – now I have to merge all those duplicated individuals and then go back and fix family relationships. Why am I doing this again?

I’ve also tried to catch up on reading the submissions for the 5th Edition Smile for the Camera hosted by footnoteMaven at Shades of the Departed (awesome job, by the way!), the Family Heirloom meme hosted by Julie Cahill Tar at GenBlog and the 55th Edition of the Carnival of Genealogy hosted by Jasia at Creative Gene.

In between all of that, I have real life issues – I have family in the Southwestern area of Ohio (around Dayton) and they’ve been without power since Sunday afternoon.  I haven’t been able to contact my mom – who has an electric phone (?!?!) but have talked with her neighbor and received an email from my cousin.  So I’ve been a little freaked out about what’s been going on up there.  Apparently Ike whipped around us here in North Texas and headed straight for the midwest.  You can read about the damage here. Good thoughts and wishes please!