I’ve been neglecting ye old blog, but there’s a lot going on. That’s life. It somehow manages to stay as full as you want or allow it to be. I keep thinking of all these cool things to talk about but by the time I get back to a computer my mind is onto something else.
The big thing that happened this week is that I finished the new website for my company, which is this nationwide medical startup based in the Dallas area. It’s been a two month process, but it’s quite satisfying to complete something you’ve worked on for that long. As the resident web designer, I was in charge of building everything and making sure all the various pieces work as expected. I am also responsible for managing all the little changes and suggestions every stakeholder wants to make. For example, whose opinion has more weight… the chairman of the board or the COO? Yeah. You spend time some time navigating things like that. Usually, if I get change requests for things like colors and fonts, I’ll just try it out and show them how it looks. A lot of times they’ll go with whatever was there to begin with. In this project, as in other projects I’ve done with my freelance clients, the client likes to make one or two changes to put their mark on the project. So, even if you spend several days implementing a design that was already agreed upon, expect a couple more days of final changes and requests. Don’t take it personally.
In other news, it rained like crazy this weekend for a total of about ten inches of rain. Dallas has some serious weather that Austin can’t touch. I looked out the balcony Saturday and it was raining sideways. The wind was howling. It gets windier here than anywhere else I’ve ever been I guess because it’s so flat. On Sunday while it was still raining, I braved the low water crossings to check out the Dallas central library, so I could get my library card and check it out. Nerd alert.
Up on the eighth floor I discovered a huge genealogy research center funded by the Dallas Genealogical Society. They have census records from 1920 and 1930 as well as ship manifests and other such documentation. I sat there for about an hour and worked on my family tree, which was fascinating. In viewing the 1930 census, I found the record for my grandfather’s family. It shows the street they lived on in Louisville, the neighbors, and the ages of his parents and brothers and sisters as well as all their names. I also found a 1910 directory entry for my great-great-great-grandfather who worked as a property assistant at the Masonic Temple on Center Street in Louisville, Kentucky. On my mom’s side I found the Thornton line that was traced back to the 13th century. It was weird to find the draft records for several men in my family. The draft records show their age, their weight, their height, and their occupation. It is very interesting.
Genealogy is humbling. You see how short the human life really is when compared to history. Eighty years is not a long period of time. Consider how quickly the past ten years have elapsed. You live, you procreate and before you know it, you’re an old-fashioned name listed in some family tree.
i do think that that letter was rather simple and straight forword