Phase I Complete

This was the coldest week of the winter so far. The temperature was in the single digits in the morning and several days in a row never rose out of the teens. Some days there was a stiff wind added to rub it in. It was a good week to stay inside close to the fire (in the furnace).

While keeping the home fires burning this week, I managed to finish Phase I of converting all my old music to digital files and transferring them to a Walkman. Phase I was the vinyl records. It took me nearly two months to get all of them done "in my spare time."

Phase II will be to convert all the cassette tapes to digital files. I have more tapes than records so that is going to take much longer. I'll be doing good if I get them all done this year. The incentive for this project was the purchase of a new stereo system we got as our joint birthday/Christmas present this year. Record players and even casette tape players are no longer included in sound systems. I had all this music we couldn't play anymore. Now that the records are done we can hear the music we listened to when we were dating and all the records the children played when they were growing up.

I am going to take a break from recording music before I start on the cassette tapes. I need to take care of my 2012 pictures before winter is over. Once I have that project under control I'll tackle the cassettes. It's amazing that our lifetime collection of music can fit on a little gadget I can hold in the palm of my hand.

Digging Out

The year of 2013 is nine days old and I have been digging into my winter job list with a passion. I worked on editing the church book full time last week. I didn't actually count the hours but if forty hours is a full work week, then I put in overtime because some of the days were 12-14 hours.

I have a ways to go but am feeling much better about the status of the project so this week I allowed myself a little diversion. I'm still trying to finish up that revised Burkholder genealogy that was supposed to be published in January and got pushed off until April. I need just a few little things yet to wrap it up. Quite a few of the one family are buried in the Terre Hill cemetery and I suspected some of the others were too. I decided today was the day to make the run down there and see if I can dig out what I needed to fill in the blanks.

I stocked up on my cemetery supplies, backed out of the driveway, and stopped with a THUNK. I forgot there is still a pile of snow at the edge, took the corner too close, and got hung up. I marched in to the garage, got a shovel, and dug fifteen minutes to free the car. Not the kind of digging I had in mind!

After returning the shovel to the garage and washing my hands, I took off again, backing out carefully this time. A half mile down the road I realized I had forgotten my purse and I needed it to make a stop at the post office. Back home I went, retrieved the purse, and backed out carefully again. I was beginning to wonder if God was sending me smoke signals to stay home. But I'm too determined to give up easily. If the message was not to say I should stay home, maybe it was to give me practice in not taking the corner too sharp.

The rest of the trip went smoothly. I found the cemetery and almost everyone I was looking for. I harvested the pictures of the stones and came home to fill in the blanks in the genealogy. It turned out one of the people I could not find is not there because he died in Virginia in the Civil War. Now I just have to look for two estate settlements in the Lebanon County courthouse and six death certificates at Harrisburg. Then I think I can close the book on that project, provided no one else pops up that I need to dig out.