We Are Holding Our Own*

I know folks are curious about Executive Order 36 which shuts down the Department of History, Arts and Libraries and except for an out-clause given to the Superintendent of Education calls for the halt of collection circulation for the Library of Michigan. The Detroit News reports that some LM collections would be moved to MSU. There is a proposal to re-purpose our building outlined here: Granholm Announces Conceptual Plan for Michigan Center for Innovation and Reinvention. The Library for the Blind will be moved to the Commission for the Blind which should protect it and, according to the EO, the core mission of the library will be protected as well, although the core mission is not defined in the EO. Approximately 55 people work for the Library of Michigan.

In case I haven’t said it, I work for LM. I am loyal to the Library of Michigan and won’t say anything here that could jeopardize our position. I have nothing but good things to say about the employees of the Department of History, Arts and Libraries and of course my peeps at the Library. I have many thoughts about the decision to close us but again, I’m thinking of our position and won’t share those thoughts in this forum.

Thanks for your good wishes and good thoughts. Go Libraries!

What I’ve Been Reading

Here are some of the things I’ve been reading. All of the images click to Amazon where you can read reviews.

The Sisters Antipodes. The true story of two families in the diplomatic corps – one American, one Australian, who decide, basically, to swap families. The spouses switch partners and the kids stay with the mothers. If you like stories about interesting relationship patterns it’s  a good read. Unfortunately, the author does not demonstrate emotional growth from page 1 to The End. She doesn’t show a progression of feelings and understandings. She’s just jealous, angry and pissed off, always. And she uses ten words where one would do. And she was demeaning to the other patients in the psychiatric ward where her sister stayed which pissed me off. There but for the grace of God goes she -  if she hasn’t been in therapy for two decades with all her Daddy issues I’d be shocked. But other than that, seriously, it’s an interesting read.

A history of the scientific study of sex. This is by the same woman who wrote Stiff, about what happens to dead bodies. The book is not titillating, it is informative and educational, and I’m learning stuff I didn’t know. The author is funny and has done great research. But the book is limited. She doesn’t talk much about homosexuality, for instance, and what she does say is mostly about gay men. Have there been many scientific studies of lesbian sexual activity?

And back to gay men. This is a book about two flaming queers – very typical, body-obsessed, Starbucks-swizzling, Candyland-planning men approaching middle age. Who, I’ll be god-damned, fall in love with the country around Saugatuck Michigan and move here from St. Louis. It’s amazingly refreshing to find two people who moved to Michigan because they like it here. The funniest parts are about the transformation of city folks to country folks – they give up cable, glossy magazines, shopping, their high-powered incomes, and more, so the author can write. A very good, quick read.

Mailboxes, Etc.

First Dance

After 6 1/2 years of marriage, Scott and I had our first dance at a Michigan Youth Leadership Forum event last week that we attended as part of Scott’s participation in the Association of State Employees with Disabilities.

The Michigan Youth Leadership Forum (MYLF) for Students with Disabilities is a unique career leadership training program for high school juniors and seniors with disabilities. By serving as delegates from their communities at a five-day event in the state capital, young people with disabilities cultivate leadership, citizenship and social skills.

Tree Trimming

Y’know how you can start out doing one little thing and with no intention on your part it can turn into two seemingly unnegotiable weekends worth of work? OK, that just happened to me and Hubby.

For us, it started with an afternoon where Hubby and I took a perimeter look at our house, pulling weeds, cutting down mini-saplings that were growing in the bushes, pondering whether that hasta we transplanted 2 years ago would bloom this year, wondering whether the 25 year old air conditioner that sits on a slab in the side yard would start again this year, bemoaning the fact that the supposedly indestructible peppermint that I used to dry into tea has vanished, picking up trash. Just the usual. This was the weekend after Memorial Day, when we planted tomatoes in large buckets and I planted the Wee Garden with four varieties of sunflowers that are due to grow into four heights. Y’know, the Midwest in the springtime.

Well, the next weekend, Hubby and I are sitting on the deck one morning looking over our fence into our side yard and I see half a dozen saplings growing up out of the pine trees. Big saplings. Not to be toyed with saplings. Saplings that mean it. The pine trees are enormous – maybe 35 feet high with enormous girths and very wide boughs. Some of the saplings are as high as 6 feet. I  say we have to get those out of there. Hubby suggests we get to it. It’s early yet.

We have to do a little pruning of the pine trees to even get at the saplings. Just a little, mind. One snip there, one there.  Hubby is on his knees covered in dripping sap crawling under this enormous tree and before I can blink he has the bottom two layers of one tree cut away and he is moaning and complaining in the voice he reserves especially and particularly for the maintenance efforts of the people who used to own our house. Thus begins a steady stream of blame and complaints that I have learned not to interfere with lest I am blamed as a a. naive and b. unsupportive spouse. I note that soon one tree looks very different from the other tree and the saplings that need to be removed are on the other side of the pine trees entirely.

“Ah, hubby? I think it’s time to stop and move over to the other side of the tree.”

“Let’s start taking the brush over to the driveway.”

“Ah, hubby? I like the trees the way they are, let’s just leave them.”

“Look what’s under here!  A concrete slab, an old rake, fence posts, and a barrel.”

“Really? Wow, those people who lived here before us must have used this as a dumping ground.”

“Those dumb people who lived in this house immediately before us. They… blah… blah… blah”

“But hubby? We don’t know what we’re doing and we should really stop now.”

“Nonsense.”

Now, I believe that trees have souls. Pruning a tree for the sake of it’s health and the safety of the humans and homes who live near it is fine by me.  But reckless trimming with no plan whatsoever does not fall into my general comfort level.

But shortly put, once we started we couldn’t stop. There was just no way to stop without the trees damning us. They looked ridiculous half an hour after he got in there. We had to make it work. And we did. 27 lawn bags, two trimmed pine trees, most of two bushes, one truck of brush to the chipping center and more than 40 hours of labor later and we’re looking pretty good. More to go on that side of the house in years to come, but we may be done for this year.

I’m thinking of getting a little bench for under there. I’d have “before” pictures but like I said we were into this without planning.

Kitchen Cupboard Project Update

Remember the Winter Project of 2008 that became a Continuing Saga and turned into the Day I Stripped… Paint? To cut to the chase, Hubby wanted to refinish the kitchen cupboards and so to ease me into the project we decided to refinish the pantry doors. It’s been 6 months since my last post on this. 6 months in which the pantry doors have sat partially sanded in the garage and I’ve tried not to think about them.

Hubby and I finally had the heart-to-heart where I said, Dude, I am not refinishing the kitchen cupboards with you. To which he replied, Well then you can paint the pantry doors white for all I care. To which I was like Dude, I just stripped white paint from one side of one of them, it took me a full day of my life that I can never get back, and we might as well as least finish the job on this.

The pantry doors sit forlorn but we have decided to finish them this summer. It might be more accurate to say Hubby has decided we will finish them this summer and I have agreed more to get off the topic than anything else. We will, I note, do the sanding in the backyard as when I sanded one side of one door in the garage the whole garage became covered in a fine layer of sawdust.

210 W. Washtenaw

A piece of information that my third cousin once removed (Third Cuz) was able to share with me is where in Lansing my second great grandparents lived – the Egans. The street still exists and here is me this morning in front of the corner where they lived.  It is now an insurance company building.

Here’s the building where Francis Egan went to work every day, also photographed this morning. He was Deputy Secretary of State and a rep from Detroit:

I called down to the State Archives to see if they would have records on where his office was but I was told those records don’t exist but I might be able to find out which seat he was assigned in the legislature.

Wow. It is so amazingly easy to do genealogy on a person/place when you A. live there, B. speak the language, C. have access to the Internet to learn so much from others. I have lots and lots of choices among histories of Lansing that will cover the time period in which they lived here, too, all right in the library.  Heck, I took these pictures on my morning break. It’s two blocks from my building to these places.

Third Times the Charm

You never know who is reading your blog. And how far they’ll come to make contact.

Above is me, my mom, and my third cousin once removed. She began following this blog when I wrote about my maternal grandfather Francis William Schryer (in Jan of 2008). He is a family member we have in common through Fran’s maternal grandmother Emeline Wright.  This cousin followed me through several posts, including one in which I noted that I changed my name to my mother’s maiden name in college. She finally hit paydirt when I referred to my Web design business which has contact information on it and wrote me asking, “Are you Francis Schryer’s granddaughter?”

Francis Schryer died when my mother was 15 and my grandmother remarried long before I was born to a man named Jack Hess. Jack is the man I always knew as Grandpa and he never shirked his grandfatherly responsibilities or treated us as less than his own grandchildren – he knew all us cousins from the day we were born. He is in his last years now, suffering from Alzheimer’s, and I have extremely fond memories of him.

But hiding behind the title of “Grandpa” in my life was the specter of Francis William Schryer. I grew up hearing painful stories of the chasm his death left in the family and listening at our regular family gatherings to my mother’s brothers tell their stories – about the remarkably harmonious marriage Fran had with my grandmother. The rhythms of the family’s life in Hillsdale in the 50’s. The days surrounding Fran’s aneurisms and finally his death at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. That night the family minister came back to the kitchen where my mother and great-grandmother were playing Canasta and my great-grandmother asked, “Well, how is Fran?” The minister said, “Not so good, he died about three hours ago.” And in that moment my mother stopped believing in God. She never changed her mind.

When I chose to change my name I knew I wanted to get closer to my mother’s family and his ghost played a part in my embracing the name Schryer and my interest in the Schryer family history. Fran’s family. My family.

“Are you Francis Schryer’s granddaughter?” Despite his shadow over my family, she is the first person to ever ask me this question. I am unquestionably, determindely and joyfully  my grandmother’s granddaughter, but only a phantom relation of his. Yes, I could finally tell someone, Yes, I am Francis Schryer’s granddaughter.

I had the distinct pleasure of meeting this third cousin once removed today at a restaurant she chose for it’s Weight Watcher’s-friendly menu (yeah, she reads the blog). She was driving through the general vicinity from Toronto on her way to Chicago and stopped to have a leisurely lunch with me and my mom and exchange family stories.

She is a very, very, very serious genealogist. She gave me and my mother binders of family history information. She’s organized the way you’re supposed to be – CAREFULLY AND WITH FULL DOCUMENTATION. Her notes are impeccable. She has photocopies of census, death and other records in neat, tidy groupings. She has little red dots next to pertinent information so you don’t have to slog through ancient, hand-written documents. She has carefully labeled photographs. She has family groupings that put mine to shame. She has it seriously down. I found myself apologizing for the family history I haven’t even written yet. “Mine’s not like this,” I said. “Yours is a narrative, dear,” my mother said patting my back. The three of us talked until a “narrative” was a very good thing to be writing (and it is, it is).

We had a good time and it was wonderful to meet someone whose knowledge of the family meets ours exactly (she knows one side, we know the other, with just one generation of overlap) but her references to her every-day knowledge of Canada terrified me into remembering how much I haven’t learned yet about Canadian history. The sciatica put an end to family history work for a few months as my recreational sitting came to a grinding halt but now that I’m back to it I need to start in with a few works (in English!) on the relationship between the English and French Canadians in Quebec and the Ottawa River Valley in the early 19th century. Suggestions welcome!

Customer Service Challenge at the Corner Quality Dairy

So, part of my healing from sciatica has involved gentle, daily exercise. I walk 40-60 minutes a day and build this in by including a 40-minute circuit down to QD for my morning coffee.

When I first started this I showed up one morning before they opened (they open at 6). I was abrupt with one of the sales clerks, asking her when they open although it was perfectly obvious as right at 6 am she came to unlock the doors. The sales clerk has an unforgiving nature.

For the next few days she was rude to me, refusing to look at me or speak to me beyond telling me that my refill was going to run $.61. I figured, no problem, this will wear off. In my turn I was particularly nice. Cheerful “good-morning”s. An effort to provide my $.61 exactly. Always left her with a genuine, “Have a nice day.” I’m not bad at winning people over although most people don’t dig in their heels. But this QD Lady is different. Now she’s taken to cheerfully talking to people in line behind me while she doesn’t make eye contact with me. I continue my friendly, “Have a nice day,” as though we make pleasantries every morning.

A QD challenge! It’s like my time Zingerman’s all over again with a little role reversal thrown in for good measure.

The Snakelady Is Back

So, where the heck have I been? Ladies and gentlemen I have been down the rocky river known as sciatica. Which is an ailment I did not expect. It meant I couldn’t sit for more than 10-30 minutes at a time. Seriously. Not even to Twitter much and certainly not to blog. I set up a standing workstation at work but I don’t actually think that well standing all day and had no interest in doing so in the evenings at home. But I’m feeling lots better and will hopefully be back to blogging now.

Cheers!