Notes - history lesson / guilt: personal or cultural? / toilets & Owen's Tree

        You are up earlier today, breakfast and the paper as usual. Sunny, so you assume you are going for a walk shortly. You started work on Owen’s genealogy last night.

         I didn’t get very far. I am not sure how much information I should put down in terms of education and occupation as well as notes. I have lots of notes, but I don’t want this to be a cluttered working model like mine is.

         Cut the notes but do not shortchange the education and occupations if you have the information. The genealogy is to serve as part of his own education, it will teach him something about the world and how it is. History will be more personal. People who do not know their ancestors or care to know their bloodlines don’t know who they are in terms of where they came from in the human family. You would not be who you are without knowing these things and learning from them yourself. One grandfather was a housepainter and revenue officer the other was a milkman for forty years. Neither had a college education and one quit after the eighth grade to go to work. Both grandmothers worked in the same factory to support the war effort in the 1940’s. Common enough in terms of values, don’t you think? –  Amorella.

         You know how to shake my heart, Amorella. You should not do that, it is unfair.

         You need to realize how important these simple facts are to you, now you are more aware. You want Owen to be aware also one of these days. Some may have royal blood in their lines and be unaware of it. Having bloodlines at all is also revealing. If everyone had a copy of their DNA, that alone shows something unique and common at the same time as well as their history on this planet. Without knowing history one can do little about the focus on the future. Post.  – Amorella.

         It is easy to let these matters slip by; they do wonders for one’s perspective on the world and their place in it.

         Fill in all that you have, boy. It will run out soon enough and you’ll have only a few lines trickling back.

         I will need to get more information from Paul’s side of the family. No matter what I find it will be new and interesting and full of humanity from the East to balance out the humanity from the West. This ought to be a fun project. And, if Owen shows no interest, he can pass it down to his children, more than likely someone will find it interesting.

         Perhaps Dr. Harold Hancock’s class at Otterbein on Far Eastern history will come into play.

         Far Eastern was a great class, so was his class on Russian history. Almost every page was filled with information I did not know, certainly not in detail. Dr. Hancock was one of my favorite teachers. His classes were fun and eventful. 
 

        You are over at Pine Hill park, walked the dam over to the other lake, stopped and chatted with Carol, then she moved on and you headed back to the car. She wanted you to walk down the hill to the north side of the dam and back up the thirty some steps each emblazoned a yard deep in the eastern hillside but you politely declined. An attempt at guilt, you think. And, this is how the world works, orndorff – play on a person’s guilt. You see, it is a cultural aspect of the United States and possibly elsewhere in the world too. Prodding with no other incentive than to make the guilty feel like they have done good work by completing the task. – Amorella.

         In the books the characters enclosed in their soulshell for their own good have to think these things out. Cultural guilt counts at a mind level and perhaps even the heart level, but it hardly ever counts at the soul level. Some things just have to be let go and forgiven by one’s self. In here, people who think G---D/Jesus is going to do it all have another think coming.

         That’s a little harsh, Amorella.

         That’s the reason some climb in their soulshell in the first place. Harsh would be having no shell to climb into, boy. People say they want justice, well, in here they have it. They may not have it in the real world, but they can have it in a fiction just like you, boy. – Amorella.

         The beauty of fiction. The fun of imagination. Keeps me busy and occupied on things I enjoy doing.

         You are home after two large unsweetened ice teas and splitting a white chocolate and raspberry scone. Now the focus is new toilets. You’ve done your research and it is up to Carol. Post. – Amorella. 

         I like the M-W word of the day today, mostly because I didn’t know the word and I love Orwell.

 T

he Word of the Day for August 18 is:

          

vaticination   noun

1 : prediction

2 : the act of prophesying

Examples:

The book's plot hinges on a teenager with a knack for prophecy and a fondness

for offering strangers her vaticinations.

"But as is the case with romance, evidence of interest in vaticination and

prognostication comes to us from many different sources, not just the Icelandic

sagas." -- From Stephen A. Mitchell's 2010 book Witchcraft and Magic in the

Nordic Middle Ages

Did you know?

When George Orwell's novel 1984 was published in the late 1940s, a displeased

critic said it broke "all records for gloomy vaticination." (In Orwell's favor,

another critic asserted, "It is impossible to put the book down.") While it's

about as difficult to predict the future of a word as the future of the world,

hindsight reveals that "vaticination" has endured better than other words based

on Latin "vates," meaning "prophet." "Vaticinian" (prophetic), "vaticinar"

(prophet), "vaticinatress" (prophetess), and "vaticiny" (prophesy) have all

faded into obscurity (although two synonyms of "prophetic," "vatic" and

"vaticinal," also keep the "vates" lineage alive today).

 ** **

         Dusk. You have spent much of the afternoon and evening working on Owen’s family tree. Lunch at Chipotle-Panera, then over to Home Depot to look at toilets after talking to a former student who owns a ‘Floor Store’ in the VOA Centre. You checked to see if they had put wood under your cabinet in the downstairs ‘powder room’. They had not. So, you are interested in new toilets once again. Otherwise you were going to redo the wood floor in the first floor toilet.

         I’ll get caught up with most of the family tree tomorrow. I can only work on it so much. It is easy to make mistakes. I did find out that my niece’s husband is of the same Scottish clan that Carol’s great-great grandmother (also her great-great-great grandfather). Several new members of the family since five or six years ago. And, I received help from Cathy and Peter, Paul's sister and brother. Interesting and fun. Good time for an update.

         Post. Until tomorrow, dude man. – Amorella.