They gathered the last of the debris from in front of our house yesterday. Not every house on the block was as lucky. I still haven’t figured out the rationale behind the collection pattern. It looks all but random. There are some mounds of branches and weeds in front of several houses, a few stacks of cut up trees elsewhere, and piles of fence sections. It is a relief to see it all going away a bit at a time. There are still many fallen trees along the sides of the main roads and on the bike paths, though they’ve been moved out of the way, so it will be a while before we can say everything’s back to “normal” (whatever that means).
We also had our first rainfall since the day after the hurricane this morning. The hurricane made landfall on Friday night/Saturday morning, and we had another decent rainstorm on that Sunday, and not a drop since. I’ve been watering some of the more delicate plants to tide them over, but this morning’s downpour should take care of things for a while.
I haven’t been doing much with my genealogy research for a while, but I received scans of a batch of documents from my niece that I’m going through a bit at a time. Much of the new information is for contemporary generations, but I found a couple of names that got me on the trail of my paternal grandfather’s line. I hadn’t found out much about the Vincents back more than a couple of generations, but this new trail allows me to extend that by at least two more generations. I’ve found one conflict in this new information, and it’s the part that ties us into the Panormos. However, I’m fairly sure that the information I had previously is correct, as I have scans of census records and marriage records that confirm it. The alternate name for a great-grandmother that is included in these new ancestry records appears nowhere else, and I can’t figure out where it came from. More research required.
It looks like a couple of the Mad Men characters will be in L.A. next week. It’ll be interesting to see the 1960s view of that area. I like the fact that Pete has no idea that he’s already a father when he’s in the midst of a situation where his wife can’t get pregnant. I do wonder what’s going to happen with Don’s wife. She’s a very fragile, confused character.
I’ve been slowly reading the novella “N.” over the past couple of nights. Though the story is very much the same as in the Marvel adaptation, it’s not exactly the same. There’s a lot more in the text version, of course. King’s tribute to “The Great God Pan.” In his author notes about the story, King theorizes that everyone has a touch of OCD, and I think that’s true. I’ve always been obsessed with numbers. When I used to cycle regularly, I had a diary where I kept track of daily mileage and average speed. I have a book where I record how far I get on each tank of gas. At the gym, I watch my total mileage, RPM and heart rate as much as I watch the TV screens. I look at the statistics on the weather page each day or two to see how our rainfall amounts compare to the historical averages. Nothing debilitating or anything to be concerned about, just my own mild variant of OCD.
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