February 2003 Archives

Last night, after bedtime stories, Jacob and I had this conversation:

“Okay, Jake, time for lights out.”
“Books.”
“No, we read three books, now it's time for sleeping.”
“Four books.”

Clever lad, is our Jacob.

Finished—after seven months and 1,254 pages—Programming Microsoft Windows With C#, by Charles Petzold. I bought the first edition fifteen years ago (more or less) and dutifully bought every update; this is the first one I've actually read, cover to cover.

Hard to say how much of it I actually remember, after so long....

We have one of those in-the-ear thermometers for Jacob; he thinks it's a toy. Sometimes we spend a few minutes taking each other's temperature.

We did that tonight, and mine was 102.5°. Or maybe 99.5°. Or possibly 100.4°. It's very hard to get a consistent reading, but apparently I'm running a low fever. Who'd have guessed?

[I would—I haven't felt quite right since last weekend. Now I know why.]

A mildly silly addition to the Genealogy section: Census data. It's really just an excuse to fool around with XML and XML style sheets, but it might prove interesting or useful someday.

[The Census section was removed on October 28, 2003.]

I wore shorts today. It felt good. It was even a (relatively) warm day—sputnik recorded 37° at 3:00pm. Alas, weatherdroids are predicting single-digit temperatures and snow this weekend. Back to the long pants, I suppose.

Jacob is quite recovered from his brief—but messy—illness. He had a great day, according to the daycare ladies.

March 2nd is the next new moon; the rumor mill says that's when the bombs will start falling in Baghdad. I guess we'll find out on Sunday.

The drugstore receipt for Jake's anti-barf medication has a cheery personalized banner across the top, that's supposed to make me feel all warm & fuzzy about buying medicines there. It says, “I'm RX FLOATER. I'm here to serve you!” Well, that makes me feel better already, Mr. Floater.

(Maybe Mr. Sinker has the night shift?)

Poor Jacob, threw up all over Papa again this morning.

We called the doctor's office; the grumpy nurse said to bring him in. The doctor—who wasn't grumpy—said, “It's a virus. Try to get lots of fluids into him.”

So Jacob & Papa are staying home today.

Jake slept a lot, played a little, and watched Shrek several times. (He doesn't actually watch it any more, but he surely will notice if I change the channel.) He ate more than he did yesterday. He was very happy when Jennifer came home, and played all evening.

He played a little too much, and wore himself out.

In today's newspaper: an announcement by Ahmed Azzam Bakkar that he is changing his name to Ashton Ahmed Azzam Bakkar.

“Very catchy, sir.”

Jacob wouldn't eat lunch or dinner yesterday; he had a few crackers after the movie, but that was about it. We wondered if maybe he was getting sick, but he wasn't acting sick and didn't have a fever.

“He'll be fine in the morning,” we decided.

He woke up early this morning—even before the alarm went off—very unhappy about something. He didn't want breakfast, he just wanted some juice (and to watch Shrek).

About forty-five minutes later, Jake was sitting at his table, I was on the couch having breakfast, and Shrek was still playing. Jacob got up, walked over to me, and threw up in my lap. Poor little guy, guess he was sick after all.

He's staying home with Mama today.

Jacob is much improved. Perhaps tomorrow he'll be well enough for daycare.

Downloaded numerous iPaq updates today: I want to start using the wireless network card at work (as well as at home), but there's a screw loose in the DHCP handling. Seems an OS update is required to fix that....

[On the other hand, OS updates completely wipe the iPaq, and I don't feel like reinstalling everything just now. Maybe this weekend.]

Cold today. The high was 23°, at midnight, and it's been downhill ever since.

We took Jacob to the Savoy 16 this afternoon, to see Jungle Book 2: his first big movie. It went very well. He was a bit dubious about the theater seats—he's not quite heavy enough to keep one down by himself—and a bit clingy at first, but after a while he sat back and enjoyed the show.

I imagine we'll be going to see lots more movies....

Our plan for the day was a trip to Bloomington: Jennifer was going to hang out with quilters, Jacob was going to spend the day with grandparents, and I was...um...I hadn't really figured out what I was going to do. Maybe a trip to the Normal Public Library, maybe a movie. Maybe a nap.

When we woke up this morning, snow was falling, weatherdroids predicting three to six inches by dinnertime: so we called everyone in Bloomington and begged off, pleading inclement weather.

Another Saturday, another research trip to the Urbana Free Library. Today's project: look for Kibbes in the 1910 Census for Parke County, Indiana. My grandmother, Ruby Kibbe, should be listed there, as she was born in Caseyville (aka Diamond), in Parke County, in 1897 (or 1901).

I found a Ruby Kibbe—Raccoon Township, Enumeration District 86, Sheet 8B, Line 61—but there's no telling yet whether it's my grandmother. Futher research is required.

It snowed fitfully all day. Total accumulation: zero.

CNN says:

America Online will begin offering advertisers space on the “Welcome Screen” that greets its 35 million users when they log on with the No. 1 Internet service provider, according to a published report Friday.

...which makes me very glad that I don't use America Online. EarthLink can't pop ads up on my desktop, because I don't use their software.

Poking around in the EarthLink Account Management site this afternoon, I discovered that I can have eight mailboxes. It used to be three; I don't know when I got five more. So I created some nice ones for Jennifer, Jacob & myself. Maybe I'll retire the old one, which has been compromised by spammers (guess I visited a web site I shouldn't have).

[My account was upgraded in August, 2001. Apparently, EarthLink sent me an announcement, which I quickly forgot all about.]

The forecast for the weekend is turning ugly: rain, snow, cold. Or maybe not; the weatherdroids aren't sure. I hope it's just rain—we all have Big Plans for the weekend, and don't want them snowed out.

Curious spam this evening: the subject line says supplies: various high quality rubber products, carmat, doormat, toys, rubber ball, rubber fitting for toy / car / motocycle / sole and footware. I was just saying to myself, “Self, we need some high quality rubber products! But where oh where can we find them?”

More geekstuff: two years after announcing their product, and fifteen months after I first heard about it (25 November 2001), the Scopeware people have shipped version 1.0. Only $30, too—there's a free version, but it has pop-up ads.

Free or not, I'm still not interested.

If you show Jacob this picture—

—he will say, “Papa!” I think the glare off my hairless scalp is how he recognizes me.

Finally got around to having dinner at the new Baker's Square out at the mall—only three months after our first attempt (on JFK Day last year). The food was all right, but the pie was very tasty.

Very tired. Funny how going to bed just half an hour later than usual adds up after a few days....

Tried to balance the checking account last night; it took two tries to get it right. Seems I forgot to enter a couple of purchases, so it was a surprise to see them on the statement. And the second page of the statement stuck to the first, so I didn't see it, which made me wonder if the bank had lost a bunch of transactions.

But finally I got it straightened out.

Reinstalled Windows XP on my work machine. There was a lot of cruft lingering, from all the experimental software I'd installed over the years; now seemed like a good time to clean it up. With all the updates (100MB!) and applications to install, it ended up taking most of the day. It was a pleasant diversion from regular work.

(SnipSnap runs quite well under Windows XP, if you tweak the startup script a little & enable cookies on your web browser. I guess I don't need to run it on the Linux machine after all.)

sysadmin took away my museum-piece 266MHz Pentium II, and replaced it with a slightly less ancient Celeron, still running Linux. I don't think they installed X, or any of the posh GUI toys, alas.

Did a test run of the state income tax return tonight. It went well. (No embarrassing mistakes like the checking account last night.) We get a nice refund, too—whenever the Illinois Dept. of Revenue can scrape up the cash, that is.

Weather forecast is looking better this weekend. We'll have to think of something fun to do, since we spent last weekend snowed in.

An oopsie from CityDesk just now:

No apparent damage to the database, though.

Rolled over in bed this morning, and looked at the clock just as it rolled over to 6:00am and the alarm went off.

A little warmer today, though not the 40° promised by the weatherdroids. The roads are clear enough, but parking lots & sidewalks are a slushy mess. At least we're not digging out from under two feet of snow, like they are in Boston.

Jacob is starting to string words together. He'll give me a cookie and say, “Papa cookie mouth,” which means he wants me to eat it. (Papa doesn't need much persuasion on something like that.)

Clever lad, is our Jacob.

Roads still a bit icy this morning, but they cleared up nicely later on: the wind died down, so the salt stayed put long enough to work.

Supposed to warm up a little this week. And Spring is only a month away....

Tried to get some pictures of Jacob on his rocking horse, but he was moving too quickly. He just has too much energy to hold still for very long.

Bitten by the Y2K bug, three years late: the (rather scary) JavaScript in the Weather page had getYear() instead of getFullYear() in two places, which meant that pages for years prior to 2000 did not display correctly.

It's fixed, not that anyone noticed it was broken.

Hm...is it a Y2K bug when broken code starts working on 1/1/2000?

No new snow today, but the temperature is still below freezing and the wind is still above 20mph.

We stayed home all day. Jake didn't seem to mind.

While I was paying bills this evening, Money 2002 popped up an ad for Money 2003. Seems if I order online I'll be eligible to win all manner of wondrous prizes.

No, thanks. I figure I'll wait for Money 2004 and see if it's any improvement over Money 2002.

I don't expect it to be so: Microsoft designs its software to run on next year's hardware, which means Money 2004 is intended for a 5GHz Pentium 4 with 1GB of memory, and will run like chilled molasses on anything less.

An interesting quote, from David Stutz:

Recovering from current external perceptions of Microsoft as a paranoid, untrustworthy, greedy, petty, and politically inept organization will take years.

Yep, that about sums it up—though, really, Microsoft is too big for any single perception to encompass all of it. Parts of Microsoft seem dedicated to creating great software; parts of it seem more interested in DRM, lock-in, and the behavior that got them in trouble with the Department of Justice.

Learning a bit more about SnipSnap, mainly by poking around their web site. There's no real documentation yet, so getting anything done involves guesswork or playing monkey-see-monkey-do with people who already know how. (I wonder if they're working on any.)

Still, I like it. I'll probably use it at work.

A few inches of snow fell overnight; the wind has been toying with it ever since. There's a big drift across the driveway, and a bigger one blocking the front door.

This did not deter me from doing the weekly grocery shopping. (Judging from the crowds at the grocery store, not too many people were deterred.)

[Deterred: what de dog leaves on de sidewalk.]

My mother told me that Ruby Akers—my paternal grandmother—was born on April 10, 1897; but the Social Security people think she was born exactly four years later. There's no telling who is right (could be they're both wrong); but if the latter, that would explain why the 1900 Census makes no mention of her. Must remember to check the 1910 Census, when the weather settles down a bit.

Speaking of which: now the weatherfolks are saying, Total storm accumulation, 6–12 inches. Lots of shoveling tomorrow, I suppose.

Felt rather ill last night—I was sure I was developing an ear infection—and had very little energy this morning. A dose or two of caffeine cleared that up.

And my ear feels fine today. Thanks for asking!

The ice storm never materialized: the temperature stayed above freezing, so all we got was rain. (Rather a lot of it, too.)

Now the weatherdroids are saying three to six inches of snow by tomorrow night, and another inch on Sunday. We'll see.

Weatherdroids are predicting an ice storm tomorrow, beginning around sunrise & continuing all day. I missed the 1990 ice storm (also on Valentine's Day); might not miss this one.

Poor SnipSnap, I let it run too long on the nasty old Pentium II machine at work, and something bad happened: a frenzy of disk thrashing commenced around 4:00pm, was still going on when I left somewhat later, and now (9:00pm) the machine isn't accepting network connections. I guess trying to run a nontrivial Java application on a memory-starved machine isn't such a great idea after all.

I hope the database can be salvaged.

Met Jennifer & Jacob for dinner at the Hideaway, a curious restaurant / bar tucked away in an office complex on Devonshire Drive. Jacob sat in a regular chair (having rejected booster seat and high chair) and had a grilled cheese sandwich with french fries. He was well-behaved throughout, and enjoyed flirting with the hostess.

Research night at the Urbana Free Library, courtesy of the Champaign County Genealogical Society: I spent an hour trying to track down Jacob and Catherine Dean (my great-great-great-grandparents). I didn't find them.

I had the theory that, since their son John Dean was born on April 12, 1856, in Crawford County, Indiana, I might find the entire family listed in the 1860 Census. There is a three-year-old John Dean listed, and there's a 25-year-old woman named Catherine in the same household, but nothing else matches. It's probably not him.

Better luck next time!

The Society's next meeting is March 11: an actual meeting, instead of a research night. Perhaps I will attend.

Last night's forecast said, 20% chance of snow, so this morning we were unsurprised to find two inches of it on the ground. Like yesterday, this made the morning commute something of an adventure, but (again) we all arrived safely.

Poor Jacob, he crashed into something large at daycare, so he's sporting an impressive bump on his forehead.

Everyone's favorite boogeyman, Osama bin Laden, has apparently mailed in another recorded message: death to the infidels, people of Iraq unite against the invaders, blah blah blah. Meanwhile, the Secret Police—er, Homeland Security—people are saying there's an imminent threat of terrorist action, either in the United States or the Saudi peninsula.

It's a strange kind of war. At first, it seemed like we won in Afghanistan; but winning implies that somebody else must have lost. Who? The bad guys are still out there, still plotting against us. And we're finding new bad guys to go after: Iraq, with North Korea to follow.

It makes me think of the never-ending world war in 1984.

As we watched Nova this evening—mountain climbing in the Antarctic, with Jon Krakauer—a weather alert began scrolling across the bottom of the screen: Severe thunderstorm warning for Logan, Illinois. Later it changed to: Sever thunderstorm warning for Macon and De Witt counties. I was certain that it was some kind of operator error, but it wasn't: the Weather Channel radar showed a diffuse but very swift-moving line of storms sweeping down from the northwest.

And sputnik recorded a peculiar spike in the temperature, simultaneous with a big increase in wind. I don't think it actually rained here, though.

An inch or so of snow fell overnight, making the morning commute quite an adventure. But we all arrived safely.

jwz, having tweaked the main page of the DNA Lounge web site, says:

The new page has a somewhat wider minimum width than the previous layout did, which bothers me a little bit since I tend to usually have two windows side by side, but I doubt anyone else will care, since the whole rest of the world seems to always run their browser windows maximized.

I don't. Nor do I run two windows side-by-side, for that matter. I must be an aberration. (Mozilla on Linux comes up full-screen, with some sort of annoying sidebar thingy full of menus & junk. If I used Linux more often, I'd have to figure out how to disable that.)

Well...it seems Google has found patrick-rice.net. Welcome, googlers. Make yourselves at home. I hope you find what you're looking for.

Finished up our federal income tax return: it's printed, signed and in the envelope, ready to mail. We'll be getting a refund, but a little smaller than last year. This is due more to changes in tax law than to changes in our financial situation (though maybe our $12 in gambling winnings had something to do with it).

Next up is the state return. There's no hurry on that one—we'll be getting a refund, yes, but there's no telling when the Illinois Dept. of Revenue might get around to sending it to us: seems they're a bit short on cash, so they'll pay us when they feel like it.

Hm...the justifcation for withholding is that taxpayers can't manage their finances well enough to meet their tax obligations on April 15th, so the state must help them by confiscating a portion of their income every paycheck.

Seems more like the state can't manage its finances, but I don't suppose this means we'll see an end to withholding any time soon.

Yearly weather charts, 1984–1987, are on the weather page. No monthly or weekly charts, though.

Poor Jake, he's been coughing for a few days. He has no other symptoms (no fever, no runny nose), just the occasional cough, like his throat is being irritated by something. I've had the same thing for almost a month now. I wonder what it is.

A more-or-less spontaneous trip to Indianapolis today. We hooked up with Maryann (who lives in Indianapolis) and J.D. & Jeannie (who don't), and had adventures:

First, lunch at Shapiro's Deli (www.shapiros.com), where the food was nice but the choices were just a little overwhelming. (We also thought they didn't take credit cards—they do—and so I wrestled with a balky ATM to get some cash: it coughed up $20, then trundled a long time before putting up an apologetic out of service message on its screen.)

Second, a visit to the Children's Museum. (They have a web page: www.childrensmuseum.org.) Very nice—though six busloads of Brownies made the place a little crowded.

Third, a brief visit to Maryann's house, to pet the cat and look at everybody's vacation pictures. (And to change a stinky diaper, as it turned out.)

Finished reading Worlds of If: a Retrospective Anthology, edited by Frederik Pohl, Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander. Stories from many big-name authors: it was sad to realize how many of them have died in the sixteen years since the book was published. Poul Anderson, Keith Laumer, Isaac Asimov, James Tiptree, Jr., Theodore Sturgeon, and probably a few more I don't know about.

The receipt—still in the book—tells me that I bought Worlds of If at the Kroch's & Brentano's bookstore in Randhurst mall, on December 30, 1986. This means that sixteen years and two days elapsed between buying the book and commencing to read it.

I don't know if that says something good about me, or something bad.

[Apparently, Kroch's & Brentano's is likewise no more: the chain closed in 1995, and Carl Kroch died in 1999. No word on Brentano's whereabouts, though.]

Apparently Jacob napped quite well this afternoon.

Curious email at work today: a reminder from HR that all full-time employees are required to take a thirty-minute unpaid lunch break, each and every day they are at work.

Hm...“Sorry, Stephen, I can't work on your project until later: I must take my mandatory thirty-minute lunch break.”

<shrek>
Yeah, right. Like that's ever gonna happen.
</shrek>

[Actually, it did happen, during the Mathematica 3.0 Death March. I had just unwrapped my McBurger when Stephen popped into my office to talk to me about something. I held up the burger and said, “These things taste like cardboard when they're cold.” Stephen left & came back later.]

Managed to get the at-work installation of SnipSnap back online: there's a database repair script that works very nicely. And there's even a way to turn off the snipsnap-phone-home ‘feature’ (though just now I cannot recall what it is).

Fought with the printer for a good long while this evening, trying to print a picture of Jacob. Wasted ink & paper on a number of printouts of our front sidewalk (with a few pixels of Jake visible along one side), but never did get it right.

Jennifer, on the other hand, got a perfect printout on the first try.

I find myself reading fewer web sites as time goes on. There are a few I go to every day (more or less), a wider set that I go to only when I have a specific need, and the remainder of the vast Internet goes unread & ignored: there's always something more important to be doing instead.

And CNN.com is trying to boil a frog, by gradually switching their site to subscribers-only: Sure, you can read the article for free, but only subscribers get to watch the video that goes with it. Soon, there will be special subscriber-only articles, and then everything will be subscriber-only (like Byte). Sorry, this frog will go back to reading the newspaper.

If the subscriber version of CNN.com had no advertisements, I might be interested.

Tried to shop for clothes at Sears.com today, and was told:

At this time, most Sears men's clothing is available only in our retail stores.

Well. I guess Sears doesn't want my money. Fine with me!

Finally got the old Chicago weather data into my Access database, and ran off some nice charts. Soon they will be here, but not yet.

Jacob is learning numbers. Their names, anyway: he can say ‘one two three four five’ (and quite clearly, too) but I don't think he knows yet what any of them means. When we ask him how old he is, he holds up one finger and says, “Two.”

He hasn't made up his mind yet about face-washing and tooth-brushing: sometimes he enjoys it and even wants to do it himself; other times he howls in torment and tries to wriggle away. We tell him that cavities hurt, and he should brush his teeth so he doesn't get any, but we have yet to persuade him.

Installed SnipSnap at work, on the five-year-old Pentium II that used to be the build machine for Mathematica 3.0 for Windows but is now my Linux sandbox; it runs, albeit slowly.

It also seems to have reported back to the home office: my name appears in the Recently Changed Weblogs sidebar on the SnipSnap web site, with a link that will only work from within WRI (assuming the firewall is properly configured). It never asked me whether I wanted to do that, and I don't know of any way to turn it off.

Dampens my enthusiasm for the product, I must say.

I also installed it on the Linux side of things at home: with two CPUs running at twice the speed of the at-work machine (and twice the memory), SnipSnap is much...er...snappier there. It also has a different recollection of the administrator password than I do, so I can't log in or make any changes: I can only view the boilerplate created by the install script.

Jake went to sleep early this evening. Poor little guy, he never got his nap this afternoon. The daycare ladies were most apologetic: seems he wanted to sleep on a cot like the big kids, instead of in a crib like the babies; or maybe he didn't; and naptime was over before he made up his mind.

In today's mail: a Change of Coverage notice from the homeowner's insurance people. Seems we're the proud recipients of a shiny new Fungus & Mold Exclusion: if our house starts turning green & fuzzy, we're on our own. The rates went up, too. Thanks bunches, Mother Mutual.

Lots of sunshine this morning, which almost makes up for the temperature's being thirty degrees lower than it was this time yesterday: 24° vs. 54°, according to the NOAA.

Lately I've been wondering what's become of Eric S. Raymond. DejaNews...er, Google...reports no newsgroup postings from him after February, 2002; his web site seems stagnant; his blog hasn't been updated in two months; he's no longer on the board at VA Linux...er, VA Software; he's off the lecture circuit. There are vague references to working on a new book; maybe that explains his disappearance.

Flags in town are flying at half-staff, for Columbia. The news is full of debris sightings: I'm surprised that so much of Columbia reached the ground, given the altitude & speed at which it broke up. NASA is trying very hard not to jump to conclusions, but everyone else is (including me). People are wondering how long the Shuttle fleet will be grounded, whether they'll ever fly again, and what's to become of the International Space Station.

Myself, I want the human presence in space to continue—even if it's just low Earth orbit, which is the equivalent of playing in one's front yard and calling it ‘world travel’. I also want the United States to remain a spacefaring nation, but I begin to wonder whether we have the constitution for it.

[And I find myself wondering how much random roadside trash will be collected & shipped to Barksdale AFB as ‘Shuttle debris’.]

Curious that Antarctica—which was originally misspelled in yesterday's entry—is divided into East and West Antarctica. The difference between East & West is pretty arbitrary at the South Pole....

Temperature 50° at 9:00am, and very humid. As soon as Jacob & I pulled out of the garage, the car's windows fogged up—on the outside.

Sad news in my inbox this morning: one of the WRIfolk—one of the warehouse crew; I don't believe I ever met him—was in an accident on Saturday, and is not expected to survive. Sigh.

[He died even before this was written.]

Hope for the future: America Online (aka DuLoc) has 170,000 fewer subscribers than it did three months ago, apparently because people are switching to broadband service (cable or DSL, neither of which is available to me). Perhaps this is the beginning of the end? Dare we hope?

4:00pm, the temperature is 55°, and a thin but intense line of showers is passing through. Behind it, the temperature is much cooler: 46° in Bloomington, 37° in Peoria.

Left my umbrella in the car, and my winter coat at home. Oops.

7:00pm: the rain has stopped, the temperature has fallen to 36°.

I think sputnik has a problem: either the sensor package isn't transmitting data, or the base station isn't receiving it. I thought it was just the temperature sensor, but now I think it's everything. Maybe sputnik needs a new battery?

I imagine NASA-kicking will be a popular pastime over the next few weeks; perhaps my comments yesterday qualified as such. It's just that I can't accept that putting seven people in space for two weeks needs to cost as much as it does.

I want a real space station, not a lashed-together mess of shuttle-sized pods build on the ground. I want settlements on the Moon, and an outpost on Mars. I want a trip into space to be no more expensive or difficult than a trip to Antarctica. Thirty years ago, it seemed NASA's mission was to provide all this; now, all their money and effort go into keeping the Shuttle fleet flying, with nothing left over to think about what comes after.

Maybe I've read too many science-fiction novels over the years to be satisfied with the future according to NASA.

[NASA, on the other hand, is already starting the “If only we had more money...” drumbeat.]

Jacob got some new shoes yesterday:

If you look closely, you can see that we've written Jake on each heel, as an aid to the daycare ladies.

All day, the weatherdroids predicted a high of 54°. The actual high was 43°. Silly weatherdroids.

Still trying to get my old weather data (temperatures at O'Hare, 1984–1988) into my weather database, so I can run off some charts to include here. Maybe tomorrow.

Another Shuttle has been lost: Columbia, oldest in the fleet, broke up during re-entry this morning. Seven dead, debris scattered over Texas and Louisiana, everyone wondering what happenened & why.

My first guess was that some structural member failed due to age (Columbia was over twenty years old), but it's starting to look like the left wing's heat shield was damaged on liftoff, and failed on re-entry.

Lots of amateur video on the news—amateur, since the networks don't bother to cover shuttle missions any more and have no footage of their own—looking very much like Mir's re-entry two years ago. Lots of talking heads on television, talking without saying much.

(People will interpret this disaster in light of their existing opinions regarding NASA and the Shuttle fleet. Myself, I think NASA should be embarrassed to fly twenty-year-old spacecraft, and I wish they had it in them to design a worthy replacement; but I fear that they do not.)

Went furniture shopping this morning, looking for a nice couch; found one, but couldn't decide whether it would fit in our television room (it will) or whether we want to spend that much (probably). In the end, we left without buying anything.

This afternoon, while Jacob slept and Jennifer worked on her current quilt project (a big flannel quilt), I did a little genealogy at the library. The WPA birth index for Posey County (Indiana) lists five children for James Clinton Sturm and Arena Aldredge, but no names. Very frustrating.