Tonia and her family got one unit. Lal and his family got the one across the hall from them. Patsy, Lonnie, and I got the downstairs unit. What that meant was that I'd wake up in the morning and go to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. Patsy would be there playing solitaire or addressing Christmas cards at the dining table. We'd exchange pleasantries and then settle down to talk about whatever. We generally had at least an hour or two before we had to go do something. She'd brought some neat show and tell from Florida with her. One thing was this picture of her, my sister and our Grandmother. It was probably taken back in the mid '80s at one of the family Holiday parties her father had hosted for all of us.

Another day she showed me this genealogy book her brother John had put together back in the days when he was a house husband. It was something like 300 pages out of a laser printer. The guy had given a copy to every member of the family one year as Christmas presents. He had started with a genealogy program that gave him the opportunity to "fill in the blanks" on his family tree. He traced it back to colonial times and put in lots of historic notes. I copied a few of the more interesting notes to give you an idea.

Patsy mentioned that the C. is somewhat ambiguous. There are different stories about what it stood for. I forget the details. I always called him "Uncle Dave". David was (and still is) another cousin to me.

Check out this 19th Century will from Georgia:

How about this Texan:

That one made me look up an wince. I'm glad I've already been given more than one day.

Here's another more typical entry. This one features a Trout:

There are lots and lots of entries in that general vein.

This is the entry John did for his mother:

I think Patsy mentioned that her mother dipped her foot in the Mississippi to end the trip. It was water, even if it wasn't the Pacific. I remember Winnie talking about it, but I never saw the stack of clippings.

I guess you had to find out somewhere else that John married a Kathy (not his sister) and Kathy married a John (not her brother). My brother and sister and I are listed by name in a genealogy chart with a table like this for other branches of the family. It lists me a "Peter Johntian Harter". I suggested that maybe they ought to add "AKA Tian Harter". Patsy said that the computer her brother had the software on had crashed. He did have a backup of the genealogy files, but they aren't compatible with any modern genealogy program. I said that's why all of my stuff boils down to plain text files and .jpg pictures. I don't want to marry a format that will go obsolete before I'm done with the information. Even though the software is gone, the books themselves are a great piece of family history. I bet over the years they will get cloned (Xeroxed) many times.

Another time we discussed working. She spent many years as a mental health professional for the State of Florida. During that time her job took her to lots of evacuation centers during natural disasters. She said she'd tell people "I'm on boredom patrol." I gather keeping idle hands from going crazy was a big part of her job. I'm thinking now I should have asked her more about that.

One morning I talked with her about my misgivings about the mental health establishment. She said "I did intake screenings at Florida mental institutions, and we always started people out with two weeks on no drugs. The idea is to find out how much of their problems could be solved with regular sleep and meals." She also thinks medicine is overprescribed in many States. She and Lonnie both just retired from long carreers as social workers in that State, so she ought to know.

Patsy knows lots of solitaire games. She showed me two I wasn't already familiar with. One involved dealing out the cards face up into a four by 13 grid and then picking up the aces. Those holes are the opportunity you have to rearrange the cards. The rules allow one card to be moved into the hole to the right of another card, but only within the grid, and only if it follows (same suit and one higher) the card that will be on its left after the move. Blank holes in the left column can be filled with 2's. The idea is to get the cards in ascending order by suit. Once you get stuck you pick up the cards to the right of the ones that are in order, mix in the aces, shuffle and repeat. You get three tries at that. Getting stuck before all the cards are organized after the third deal means you lost. I only played once, but I won that game.