Monday, May 20

Stephen Jay Gould died today. Even though I've read a lot of his books and essays, I'm sure I have much more left to read. Still, it's sad that he won't come out with anything else.

Meachams in Salem, Mass, during the Witch Trials. I saw this map years ago, but this is the first time I've seen it on the web. The Meacham property was right at the bottom of the map, in the middle near the Johnson's Plain which is bordered in dashed lines. Right to the north of the NW corner is a number which marks the property. I have larger scale drawings which show this better; I'll link to those on batterman.org.

Sunday, May 19

Something's not right -- we've had relatively cool weather all week, and yesterday and today were beautiful. Today it didn't get to 70° until afternoon, and the humidity was around 25 percent for most of the day. And we have yet to see mosquitoes this year. That's unheard of in Houston in May! I took advantage of the cold front and stained our front porch and steps.

Saturday, May 18

I was surfing for Meachams a couple of weeks ago, and found records for two generations prior to the oldest we had in our records. Thomas Meacham was apparently born in 1541. His son Ambrose was allegedly the father of Jeremiah, who came to America. I don't recall seeing the name of the town in England the family was from, Crewkerne, before either. Next time we go to England, we'll have to go there and check the church and cemetery for signs of them.

Friday, May 17

Today a group of representatives from the IT Applications and IT Infrastructure groups at work attended an offsite advanced multimedia demo. It was quite informative.

After more than a month without rain, we finally had three inches today. My rainlilies, which supposedly only bloom after rain (and that's been true for the last two years) had given up and bloomed anyway. Now with the rain they're going nuts.

About that multimedia demo -- the real story is that about 25 people in my IT department played hooky and went to see Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones this afternoon. It was really fun. I'm not a big Star Wars fan, but enjoyed this one.

Sunday, May 12

Happy Mother's Day, Mother!

Last night we went to a World Trade Gala. It wasn't terribly exciting, except for the singers from the Houston Grand Opera. The food was not bad, and the band was good, but it was held at one of the hotels at the Galleria, so was a little too close to work to be a treat.

Today we went to Galveston for their Historic Homes Tour. It was very good. They include one house that is being renovated, meaning gutted. That was interesting both because it let us see what is involved, and because you could see the history of the house before it is covered up with paint and wallpaper. For example this house had at least four layers of wallpaper, all of which were visible. And as we went up the stairs, we could see the waterline from the 1900 storm about 12 feet up from the already elevated ground floor.

Tuesday, May 7

This weekend I conducted an archaeological dig in the backyard. First, some background. It's been very hot here, so we asked Ivan, the guy who mowed our lawn last summer, to come back. It's not the mowing that's hard (well, yes it is hard when it's 98 degrees out), it's the trimming. Ivan does a decent job. I wasn't too happy with the sharpness of his lawnmower blades last year, but this year he has a brand new mower. Anyway, we have the narrow strip of yard alongside the garage on the left. Since I have my herb garden on the right and a shade garden on the left, both with undulating rock wall borders, the remaining grass is hard to mow.

Anyway, I decided that I want to make that area into a rock garden. More like a dry stream bed, with boulders to step on. We asked Ivan for an estimate to do the digging. He has to do it by hand since we have a storm drain pipe back there. He gave us a good price, and Ed liked the idea (he actually expanded on it, extending the creek to the gate), so we are going to do it. But I started thinking about when Daddy and I put the arbor up back there, and I found three pieces of old china, an old-fashioned nail and another piece of old metal while we were digging the footings. If we put in the rock bed, I'll lose the chance to look for more artifacts, which are from the turn-of-the-century house that was here previously. So I decided to dig a few holes to look for things.

Unfortunately, all I've found so far is duct tape.

Wednesday, May 1

I haven't updated for awhile, for many reasons, mostly work-related. So what have we been doing? Well, Ed's been traveling a lot. He's in Washington, D.C. right now. We've completed the window treatments in the house, adding natural wood shades in the family room and office. We have screens on some of the windows (three months late, and just in time for hot weather). It's been hot and humid, and hasn't rained since the Steele's left. Saturday we went to the Art Car Parade, which was very good. I have pictures and Ed has video, but we haven't gotten to sit down for an hour and make them postable. Sunday we were invited to Galveston by Mike and Carla, who were nice enough to buy a vacation rental in Pirate's Beach, a Galveston community (relatively) far from the commercial parts of the Galveston shore. They had no renters last weekend, so we got to spend the day there and walk on the beach. Hopefully we'll get more chances! The water was warm, but soon it will be too warm.

Has anyone followed Frontier House on PBS this week? I just caught the last episode, which I enjoyed.