Starting the muck raking

I have sorted out the HTML and have made a beginning on the history of my immediate family.  I've made a template and have opened up ten files; there will be more.  However, it is much too inflammatory to publish online and will probably be discreetly distributed via CD.

I have also paid out a lot of money for what I hope will be the Will of my Uncle D., my grandfather's twin brother.  It was his will which first caused the poo to hit the propeller and opened my eyes to some of the hidden facts and opinions about my grandfather's siblings and their wives.

I now need to get the wills of Uncle R. and Aunt A. which will be lodged with the South Australian records;  Uncle D. died in New South Wales.  There is already quite a lot of information at the Trove site regarding the court case in which Aunt A. sued the people who bought out the family assets at an extremely low price  -  something which was always a festering sore.

And that is before I even start on my Great Grandmother's family and their doings which I have been reading with a great deal of interest, once again at Trove which is publishing all the archived court cases and social news from way back.

My maternal grandmother's family is more of a mystery but at least they appear, for the most part, to be reasonably respectable, simply rather prone to multiple marriages with a little bigamy thrown in.

It is going to be a lifetime project and will need some editing as the threads cross; it should keep me occupied and entertained for years to come.

The relearning curve is steep

I started on my family slush history yesterday and decided to do it in HTML as it makes it easier to connect up the dots (links?) but alas I have forgotten most of my HTML and am going to have to relearn it.  The simple stuff is still OK but I am going to have to look up how to do tables again because it is the simplest way to do an index.  It should be fun and I will be able to link it to my web page if I want, although I suspect that some of it should never get out into the public arena for the sake of those who are still around and who might find and read it.

And I went out and pre-ordered a MS Surface this morning because I am going to find that I need to know something about Win 8 if I am going to keep on teaching computer  to older people who have not grown up in the computer age.  It is going to be Win 7 all over again but more so and people are going to expect us to know how to show them.  At least the tablets are lighter than my Win 7  computer and I can probably slip it into my handbag.

Techie told me to get one directly from Microsoft but they courier them and I have discovered that it is not possible in a high rise apartment, and the Post Office quite rightly doesn't think that it is their job to take the parcels in.  I was going to have it delivered to D3's workplace but she is going on holidays next week so that won't work.  Anyway, with luck I will get my tablet before Christmas, which is when JB HiFi are expecting to get their first order.

Techie has promised to set it up for me and put in a start button.  The sales person at JB HF said that they are having no end of problems with Win 8 on desktop computers so I suppose that there will be a Win 9 along before too much time passes.  I think that is when I will give up and spend my time doing HTML and dredging up all the oddments of family history and its secrets.

All those cousins!

Last weekend was the second family reunion held and this time I felt that I should go over to Adelaide and meet all the cousins who have been creeping out of the woodwork lately.

D1 and D2 also attended and it was a fun weekend and I'll probably go to the next one.  The hesitation is that rumour has it that it will be held at Victor Harbour and there is no way I am going to go all the way to Adelaide and then all the way to Victor, much as I love the place and knowing well that it is the place where the family's roots are.

There is also a problem with the cats who didn't take very kindly to being boarded at the cattery again; Parsifal's behavior caused Poppy to become quite aggressive.  They have settled down now but Poppy needed room to run from Parsifal and there was nowhere for her to go.  I had to resort to the water spray bottle in order to get the message through to him that he needed to leave Poppy alone.

When I consult with the animal behaviorist I am hoping that we can resolve that problem as well; Parsifal needs to understand that he is no longer a proper boy and that it is unseemly to act like one.

While we were in South Australia we took the tram to Glenelg where I spent some of the early part of my life and it was in Glenelg that I went to boarding school for seven years.  D1 wanted to see it and I suggested that the traditional way of getting there was by tram so we did that.  But it is no longer the tram which used to do the run.  For starters it now goes as far as  the Entertainment Centre on North Terrace and it is not a tram any more but light rail.  Not nearly as much fun as it used to be and I would have thought that the original tram was heritage listed; obviously not.

The kids, bless their hearts, want a barbecue on Christmas day so this morning I went over to Cottesloe and loaded up with sausages and a vacuum-packed rib-eye fillet of steak so all I need to do is salads and a trifle  -  not 'deconstructed' like the one I had at the Playford Hotel on Friday night.  It would certainly be easier  -  slices of cake, a bottle of sweet sherry, some fruit, custard, jelly and cream and they could all reconstruct their own.