Saturday, August 1, 2015, 7:45 a.m.
What a lovely morning! The sun is just peeking over the treetops, the breeze is cool and delicious. At times like this I am very happy to be sitting in the country house.
The one ring on the telephone the other day was my sister. She called but something came up for her before I answered, so she hung up. She and my Mom are leaving for a holiday in Greece in a few weeks. They travel well together, as they are very much alike in many ways, and both enjoy good health. Bon voyage!
Here at the country house, with only the breezes, the wildlife, and the trees for company, I have been busy working on my genealogy book. The last, I hope, task in preparing to publish is the creation and insertion of charts. I had created quite a few when I discovered a branch of the family that had been neglected. After going back to the primary data sources, updating my data, and finding, after all these years, the burial place of my GGGG Grandfather, the charts all needed editing. So I began again. Thirty charts are now waiting to be inserted, and more than that still need to be created. I am contemplating the inclusion of a map, but quite frankly the digital world has nothing to offer me that wouldn’t take weeks to prepare. It will be more pragmatic to find a digital line map, add coloured dots with Photoshop, and a text box legend, than to deal with the complexities of mapping software. I anticipate publishing the book sometime in September.
The house needs a bit of tidying, it always does when we kick back to cook our meals, sleep in the bed, take showers. Our food is cooked from scratch, from raw ingredients, the state of the kitchen at meal time reflects that sort of activity. Human activity “messes” up the house. Potential buyers apparently are put off by signs of that sort of “mess”. We are considering, if the house does not sell this year, buying a trailer to relax in next summer, in the driveway here, so that we aren’t constantly erasing all signs of our own life. We can just close the curtains and lock the door when people are touring through our property.
Today I feel a weariness with the world. I listen to the trees. They gently, ever so gently, tell me that there isn’t any substance to the fuss and bother, the striving and vying, the outrage and the complacency. The troubling details that vibrate the social drum today will be forgotten when I am gone, and will essentially stay the same after I am gone. The future is only different from today in that there will be other people worrying this poor planet, people other than the ones that are alive right now. There will be other people who walk unseeing and unknowing past my mouldering bones, who will try to make the world a better place, and their every success, no matter how small, is a victory for our uneasy species. They have always existed, these hewers of love and tolerance, and I believe that is why our species is still in existence.
Worldly Distractions
Weather
23°C
Date: 12:00 PM EDT Saturday 1 August 2015
Condition: Partly Cloudy
Pressure: 100.9 kPa
Tendency: rising
Visibility: 24 km
Temperature: 23.2°C
Dewpoint: 15.9°C
Humidity: 63%
Wind: SW 17 km/h
Humidex: 28
Quote
“Age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.”
Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882)
