After all these years - a reunion.

We woke up to snow - about 6 inches of the white stuff covered everything.  It had started snowing by the time we went to bed last night and it has snowed all night.  It is still snowing now (9am).  Bill went out and shoveled the walk but he was too late for our upstairs neighbors – they were out there at 6am in the heavy snow smoking.  The rule in this apartment building is no smoking indoors.  There is an elderly gentleman down on the ground floor who goes out all times of the day and night to smoke. 

The people here put their windshield wipers up and away from their windshields when it snows.  This is a good idea because the ice forms and welds the wipers to the windshield and then when you want to drive away, you cannot do so and use the wipers to clear off the newly fallen snow………….I never thought of that before, but then in Prescott we have our vehicles parked in the garage.  At these apartment blocks here there is no covered parking available.  Even in Phoenix, they have covered parking for some cars to protect the car from the blazing sun and the hope is that it will not be quite so hot in the car when you get in at the end of the day to drive home.  Fat chance when the temperature is 110+ degrees – it matters not much whether you are parked under a tree, covered park or out in the open…..it is just a matter of how quickly you’re a/c can cool the car so that you can live.

The presiding officers of our congregation decided to only hold the sacrament worship service today so that we could go home early and be able to get there before the snow got too bad.  Well, the snow tapered off and by the time we finished our worship service it had pretty much stopped.

As we were leaving, we met a man we had not seen since our Johnstown Days.  He is now in the stake presidency and is a physician 40 miles away from where we live.  I was overjoyed to see him.  What a happy day this turned out to be.  He was serving as a missionary in Johnstown when our children were quite small and we visited him and his wife a couple of years later when we visited Salt Lake City in 1984.

When you are a member of this church, the world just shrinks in size with each reunion with friends.

 This is the scene through our Bedroom window.  This was before anything got a chance to melt.

 The hooded figure is Bill Markham shoveling snow - what a good doobie he is!

.Bill talking to elder Alan Barker of the Augusta Maine Stake Presidency.

Our Saturday Adventures.................

 We went to two craft shows this weekend - the pictures I have here are from the best of the two.  There were two basket makers.  The above one is a producing artist and the one below is suspect as to whether she makes them all or is marketing for a group.  I think this due to the fact that all the baskets she has on display are of many different styles....and appear to be of a different hand.

 The burl baskets of these pictures were spectacular.  I hope that you can see them and appreciate what this fellow has done.  Magnificent.  They all appear to have been made by the same person.

 This was a collection of Gourds that had been painted up.  I particularly loved the Loons on the left here.

 This lady was using a magnifying glass to see what she was doing.  Does that signify age here?

 There were a number of quilt sellers but their work was not notable.  This quilt seems to be an original - at least it is not a pattern I have seen, although the 6 panels could have been a technique class that she has taken.  In any case it caught my eye.

 The Glue Gun Queen strikes again!  We all know that starfish do not invite such widely disparate shells to make their home on the starfish back.  the collection of shells he has attached to the star fish are not rare shells but rather they look like something you can buy at Michaels in the multi packs which are sometimes nestled in the center of a larger mollusk shell.  Some of them look like common mussels and periwinkles that I used to pick up when I was a kid.  In any case, the glue gun queen has cobbled together some unlikely shells that would probably not be in the same place as the starfish anyway.  And what is with the greenery and flowers?

 These antlers have been carved and painted to represent Eagles in flight.  An interesting take I am sure.

The above picture is another part of the Glue Gun Queen's booth.  They offered styrofoam shapes covered with feathers in the shape of Owls, Eagles, chickens and assorted birds that look like they are the feathered Christmas Decorations from Michaels.  I was rather disappointed.  Compared with the other booths at this fair, this man would not have been admitted if I was in charge of the jurying.  They offered an assortment of small animals like foxes, ferrets, mink, cats and kittens and mountain lions which were imported from a maker of such animals in California.  When I asked about them, they were quick to tell me that the fur on the figures comes from domestic animals.  I wonder what that could be?

Found a Weaver in the mix.  she had a lot of hand towels etc. and she was spinning wool.

We had a fun time today.   In the morning paper there was an article about a cookbook that the local Universalist Unitarian church was offering the community as a fundraiser and the main number of recipes were from a member of their church who is over 100 years old.  There are original oil paintings on some of the pages, done especially for this edition of the book.  This lady and her husband were the leaders in this congregation for over 30 years until he died.  On some of the pages there are photocopies of the actual 3x5 cards in her handwriting from her personal recipe file.  I think that this is a real treasure of a book.  We then went to two craft shows.   The first craft show was at the Armory here in Augusta and they charged $3 admission which I thought was an odd amount to charge.  The only exhibitor of note was a harpist and I bought her CD's.  The rest of the exhibitors were bead stringers, pet food makers, Glue Gun Queen Wreaths for the Christmas holidays and face cloth crocheters etc.  They did have a concession stand where we ate chili and Bill ate a hot dog and was very macho in that he had raw onions on his hot dog.  Woooeeee!
The Second craft show we attended was in Waterville - about 20 minutes north.  It was magic from the minute we stepped inside.  Most of the crafters were like the people you might find on the square in Prescott on the MAG day or exhibitors in the MAG gallery or the Prescott Co-op but they were not quite up to the standard of some of the things I have seen at VanGoh's Ear.  I have put the pictures up for you to see.
We left Waterville and drove back to Augusta in time to put the casserole in the stove and get it cooked to take to the Church Halloween Party.  It was packed and there were lots of children.  Don't know where they came from but they were all there.  They had face painting, cake walk, donuts on a string, bean bag toss, wet sponge toss (at a young man sitting there and shivering), and a few other activities to keep the kids occupied.  The forecast is for lots of snow by tomorrow morning so they have curtailed the meeting schedule for tomorrow.
I am not ready for snow - and it is not like I have not seen it before or driven in it before - it's just that I have been spoiled by 17 years of comparatively snow-less winters in Arizona, and the weather report for New York shows people stranded and in fender benders......................and the snow is headed our way.

Happiness is..............................

Finishing the first week of digitizing with 7,400 images processed................
Hearing three women in conversation (as they were leaving the research room), "So what gave you the inspiration to ask for your mothers burial records under her maiden name?  Did you know that before this?"  and the answer, "I just felt inspired to ask for her under her maiden name.......that's all".  For those of you who frequent the Family History Center, we know from whence her inspiration came and there is no question what powers are at work here.  It really put a smile on my face when I overheard this conversation.

An apology - to those of you who accessed yesterday's blog and saw the pictures of the artifacts, I have had to take them down.  I did not know that they were not public property.  My apologies to all who saw them, went back to look at them again and did not find them.   Next time I will ask before I put anything up.

We are now up to tome 14 in the archives - and we are pretty proud of ourselves and our efforts.  Perhaps we will be able to increase our output next week.  I am truly grateful to be able to do a mission indoors.  Oh yes it chafes me not to be outside, but this place is reputed to become bitterly cold in Winter - I am the pepto bismal Michelin person already - I wonder how much more cold it can become.......Ah Yes!  A lot colder.

David texted me about not having body wash.  He says if he uses soap that his skin itches.  So he asked me to send him a bottle of body wash - it would cost more than the item's purchase price to send him a bottle so we put some money into an envelope and sent it off yesterday.  Well, snail mail is all it is reputed to be but David is in need now and texted today asking where was the money........I reminded him that he lives 3,000+ miles away and it takes time.............perhaps he will not bathe until the money gets there?????


So happiness is hearing a genealogical find being discussed.......
Sending off some $$ to a son who is in need.................
Getting the first full week of digitizing under our belt...............
A WEEKEND TO RECOVER FROM ALL OF IT   !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Artifacts that are way older than I am...................

  Below is a fossil of many centuries ago - they estimate about 5million years ago?

 This is the one and only Blot I have found on any of the pages of the books we are digitizing.

 This little blue trailer home is on the road that we use to get to the Archives every morning.  I think that it is totally cute and way too decorated but it makes a statement anyway.

The Michelin man is an equal opportunity employer.  He does not mind if I appear in PINK!  And for those who are wondering how cold it was - It was 43degrees......and Carol, my neighbor in Prescott sent me an email saying that it was 32 degrees in Prescott this morning when she was leaving for school.  What will I do when it really gets cold here?  I really think that one of the tender mercies of God was to let me have a mission where I will be inside a warm building (digitizing records) and not out in the cold and snow trying to track down members of the church who no longer attend in the capacity of Member/Leadership Support Mission activities.

The index books that we have been digitizing are unique in that 4 of them have fine grain leather as their cover.  I guess someone thought that it would help make them last longer, I don’t know what went into them getting such wonderful covers for these books.  They did not hold up well  and were very fragile as we used them.

Bill put on a rubber finger cover for using with papers to allow you to pick them up easily.  We are not to wet our fingers or use that sticky stuff the bank people use to pick up the papers – they are fragile to start with and a wet finger will leave a mark and possibly cause more problems than we already have.  The books are put on a cradle which is an interesting contraption to use.  It has a central bar that is mounted on springs and two side plates that are also mounted on springs and each side will operate independently of the other.  For example, when we first put the big books on the cradle, the thicker heavier side pushes down lower and the thinner side stays static and when you put the glass cover over it to digitize the image, they both lay flat and give a good image.  I think it is rather ingenious how this cradle works.  So far, we have digitized 12 of the court ledgers and 9 index books.  The remaining three ledgers have self contained indexes that arein the front of the book.   Any books I have usually have the index in the back but these are in the front and I wonder if they were assembled there like that for the printer to do the bookbinding.  I asked the Archivist about this and he thought that the index was assembled on a regular basis during the court sitting and that the index was put together separate from the court record but later assembled in one book.  The most notable thing about these records is the exceptional penmanship that is used.  I cannot begin to think how accurate and exacting this job must have been for the clerk who wrote all the notes, but to write all the letters uniformly and the same throughout the record is amazing to me.  I took Calligraphy in college and did some pretty fine work myself, but there were always some letters that did not turn out quite as expected.  Not so for this clerk of the court who wrote these records in the mid 1800’s.  I asked if it might have been a quill but was told that most probably it was a metal pen nib dipped in inkwell.  I remember using inkwells when I was in grade school in Australia – those inkwells were used for a lot more than dipping pen nibs into……..like pigtails of the girl in front, pencils and whatever else we found to shove into it for devilment.  The finest nib we used was a mapping pen but that cantankerous nib always blotted somewhere and was not happy to be pressed firmly but you had to use it lightly on your mapping book.  I was really glad when they came out with affordable fountain pens, but even these sometimes dropped blobs of ink where you did not need them.  In all the 12 books we have digitized, we have found only one page that was blotted – I guess the clerk really blotted the copybook with this one.

One of the workers came into our room and asked if I would like to see some artifacts that were being photographed in the basement.  There is a PhD student who is researching one particular Indian Tribe who lived along the Kennebec Valley and they were known as the Red Paint people.  Apparently they found a certain amount of Ochre colored material that was smeared on the dead and the more important you were, the more Ochre was smeared on you.  It seems that at one time there were Sword Fish in the Maine Bay because they have found swordfish remains in the archeological digs of this particular tribe.  It is a theory that is being tested “ Was the capture of a swordfish enough of a dangerous activity to warrant one being smeared a lot by the Ochre?”  The Ochre is found many miles from here and there is evidence that this particular tribe had contact with peoples from over 1,000 miles away.  This tribe lived in this area about 2,000 years ago according to the dating of the artifacts.  This tribe disappeared  and left no trace of where they went – much like the Sinagua people of Arizona.  No one knows where they went either.

As we were driving to the Archive building this morning I saw many flocks of birds  – clouds of them reeling through the sky –they appeared as an amorphous bunch, seemingly without any specific direction to their flight, wheeling and dropping on unsuspecting trees in the middle of Augusta.  They were so far away that I had no chance of identifying them.  There was a similar flock of birds careening around the sky near Walmart.  I guess there is safety in numbers, especially if you are heading south for the winter.  If you are going to get lost, at least you will be lost with company and not be on your lonesome.

The clerks here tell me that this is the season for craft sales etc. ready for the winter holidays etc. so this weekend we are going to check some of them out.  I hope to get a local cook book to add to my collection of area-specific cook books.  There was a bake sale today in the atrium of the building – or rather it was a totally diet damaging effort on the part of the organizers to derail those of us who need to watch the waistline.  We bought something anyway and it was delicious.

I'll be competition for the Michelin Man

)

 There are loads of restaurants in Bar Harbor - this is just one of them that we did not eat at.........you have to watch your waistline sometime (as well as the pocket book!!!)

 Looking down the main street towards the harbor.  Everything here is geared to the tourists and trying to separate them from their hard earned cash - just like every tourist trap.

 This is  Testas Restaurant.  We bought our tickets for the bus tour here and wanted to eat here but after we saw the next (Picture below) item, we decided against it.  If this is what they use as a WC then the prices may have been pretty high in hopes that they could afford better in the future..................maybe!

 The Thirsty Whale where we ate the best clam chowder I have ever tasted.  The waiter here gave us three pieces of paper and announced, Solids, Liquids, Specials (menu for the meal, drink and special of the day)

 In the background of this picture you can see the sand bar that joins the mainland to an island (background and to the right of the picture.)  It is low tide and at low tide you can walk from the mainland to the island but you had better cut your visit rather short or the incoming tide may assure you of about 12 hours stay on the island before you can walk out again.  It is because of this sandbar that Bar Harbor gets its name.  The cruise ships anchor on the other side of this island and send their paying customers to the shore in Tenders (small boats).

 A pier jutting out into the bay.  The water was very quiet the day we were there and you can see how far out the water is at low tide.

 the high water mark is delineated by the refuse high up the beach near the sea wall.  the Mansion in the background used to belong to some rich people but now is is a restaurant and Yacht Club the bus driver said.  I have no idea if that is right, but you have to take her word.  I collected some sand from this beach to add to my sand collection.  It is a dark grey in color and does not look inviting to lay out on it and not only that, the seaweed stinks because it has been out of the water and left high and dry and the little creatures that were clinging to it in the ocean have died from lack of water.

 This blurred picture is a clandestine picture of a glittery shop.  Seems like it is made of dichloric glass or some other stuff that makes it glitter.  Rather pretty but looks nothing like the Blue Heron it is supposed to represent.

 The sun shining through the fog on the State Capitol.  I thought it was rather a spectacular sight myself.

 The state capitol minus the fog - taken about 4pm the same day as the above picture.

 An example of the beautiful writing we get to see daily as we digitize.

 The computer screen that shows us what the camera is seeing.  The thumbnails on the bottom of the screen are pictures of what we have taken so far.

 The nine books we have digitized so far.  The index books are lying on top.

Today 's sunset from Wallyworld parking lot.  It was spectacular.

We finished Book  Number 9 of the court records for Oxford County, Maine and we are half way through digitizing the index books that go with them.  We have 44 volumes that are ours to digitize.  The books are very heavy and in contrast, the index books are very thin and extremely fragile.  It is a good thing that we are digitizing them now because in a few years they will be a crumbled mess of pieces of old paper.  As it is the covers have fallen off a few of them and one of them is so fragile that it is just a collection of papers that have an alphabet letter on them to distinguish them from each other.  It is so sad to see the degradation of the paper, but happy that we can preserve them.

The leaves that remain on the trees continue to give us joy as we drive around.  But soon they will all be gone and become mulch for next year’s crop of dandelions.  You can always rely on the dandelions to come back year after year but purchase a prize rose bush and you have to almost pray over it just to have it bloom if it survives the winter.  Surviving the winter is a feat in itself for not only the rose bush but me.

I went out and bought insulated boots today and the salesgirl assured me that they were warm and that they were waterproof.  I also purchased thermal underwear and I only have a few more layers to go and I will pass for the Michelin Man.  Cold is not my forte and my waistline disappears under various garments designed to keep the cold out and this winter is no exception.  It is not even winter yet here, and they assure me that it gets MUCH COLDER here than Prescott and I believe them.  I went into Dicks sporting goods store and saw all the wonderful ski jackets there that start at $100 and on up – but I don’t ski so the jackets are still in the store.

This apartment building has an in house washer and dryer setup.  It costs $1.50 to wash a load and $1.50 to dry a load.  The washers can be controlled to not just wash everything in the hottest of hot water but the dryer is another story.  It dries your clothes really well and if you put the setting on delicates it dries them hot – medium us hotter than that and high is melting point for any garment that is not 100% cotton duck.  So, I have resolved that after our stay in this apartment and using the laundry facilities here, my clothes will be beat to death and good only for the trash bin as we leave.  Whooppee!  I get to buy all new clothes when I get back to Prescott.  There is a BIG sign in the laundry room telling you exactly how to use the washers.  First you load your clothes, close the door, open the little drawer that takes your detergent and the instructions specifically say that you are to use NO MORE THAN 1 table- spoon of detergent per load.  Close the little drawer, insert your coins into the slots and push them into the machine, then press the start button for 20 seconds and away the machine goes, whirling and sloshing and the spin cycle is truly vicious.  A centrifuge could not go faster than the spin cycle these machines generate.  I am glad that they are enclosed in the machine, because in my estimation, if they ever broke loose from their moorings, we would never find our clothes – they would have rolled clear to Boston by the time the spin cycle was over.

I guess I need tell you that I was surprised that one tablespoon of detergent was sufficient to get the clothes clean – and it doesn’t, but I don’t know the owner to inform him of this.  So, when we arrived, we went shopping (before I knew the specific instructions about the laundry facilities) to get the necessities and knowing that I use about ¼ cup of detergent in my own washer at home, I bought a gallon bottle of detergent to do laundry here.  Well at a tablespoon a load, it will be a long time before I even make a dent in the gallon of stuff that we have.  I wonder what would happen if I used two tablespoons of detergent in the washer?  I won’t break the rules, I need a place to stay for a year or whenever we get done with the job in hand here in Augusta.

Yesterday there was a heavy fog that we had to drive through to get to the Archives.  I looked up at the State House (Capitol) and the sun’s rays were diffused over the building through the fog and it looked wonderful.  Hope you like the picture.

Laugh or cry - it's your choice

Today was exciting.  Yes, turning pages and digitizing can be very exciting – especially if you find you have made a mistake and you have to re-do the work…….which we did after doing 638 pages we discovered that somewhere in the setup of the camera, something had reflected onto the glass and was captured by the camera and put on the page as a white slash shape.  The exciting part is that we found it before it was sent off to Salt Lake City for the adjudicators to find and then send back for a re-do.  So we did find out some new things about the program and how to make it work for us so that our output will be better than it first was.

The books we are working with are more than 160 years old and are totally amazing to work with.  Just to handle one is impressive and I am full of admiration for the bindery that put them together and see them still in one piece generally and not falling apart.  We have digitized 7 of them so far…..4,000 + pages all told.

The pages of the books have lots of white spots on them and some smudging and I was thinking about that and trying to find what was causing this bleed through on the edges of the pages and causing spots on the rest of the page.  Well, it turns out that they tried to do gilt edge on the pages but the pages seem to have absorbed the color and it has bled onto the page to about ½ inch in some places and you can see the sparkle of the gold on the page.  I also discovered something else about these books.  It seems that they are copies of proceedings of court cases and that they have been written onto separate sheets of paper and then they were stitched into this huge book at the bindery.  I was impressed at first at the ability of the writer to keep such uniform letters and not have pieces scratched out or erased or re-done etc.  and to do it in court when the accusations are flying across the room etc.etc. (I’ve seen Perry Mason in action!!!!!)  The writing is unhurried, uniform, very readable and no spelling errors that I can discern with a quick look down the page.  I came to the conclusion that they were transcripts when I saw a number of pages whose bottom notations are cut off and only half the writing remains.  If it was a book that the writer had been using, nothing would have appeared to be cut off.

The books are also very,  very heavy.  We have to capture the picture of the spine of the book at the very beginning of the process.  This means someone has to hold the glass up while the other one opens the book at the middle and place it face down on the cradle, lower the glass and capture the image.  Then the glass has to be raised again and the book retrieved and then opened at the first page, have the camera take a template.  The next thing is to do something called an LSI reading.  This is a complicated process  and when it is done, we can then begin to do the capture of the images.  The more we do the preparation process, the easier it becomes…..but we are not perfect at it yet.

As I turn the pages and do the capture, I can see patterns of the organization of the writing there.  There are lists of names on some pages that are the juror’s and other pages with lists on them have the heading “both Plaintiff and Defendant did not appear in court”.  From time to time I catch glimpses of the court costs incurred – sometimes by the Plaintiff and sometimes by the Defendant – depends on who won the case.  Saw an amount of $1.50 and a few pages later $500.00 and other amounts.  In the mid 1850’s those were huge amounts of money.  One Plaintiff pleaded that he was a good, honest, chaste, citizen and has never violated his marriage vows and he never did anything improper towards any female and hath been held and esteemed a man of good character and reputation and hath never been guilty or justly suspected of being guilty of adultery or other disgustful crime.  The writing went on and on extolling his virtues and he testified that the defendant had uttered false, scandalous and defamatory remarks about him saying that the plaintiff was caught in the very act of adultery with………(name of the woman)…… but further perusal showed that the defendant came up with witnesses and dates and places and the plaintiff had to pay up.  Oh and the crime was Adultery.  This case would not even make it to the front door of the court house today now would it?

Through all this digitizing, along with the correct way of doing things so that a computer somewhere will organize it into some sort of coherent presentation, there has been a spiritual lesson.  It is this – that exactness and honor are requisite in the performance of the digitizing so that researchers will be able to find their ancestor and get to know a lot more about them through the court cases.  These cases contain family facts that may not generally be known or that had been colored with other paints to mask the shame of the criminal past.  I suspect that some of these cases got buried altogether and when they are unearthed, there will be an Aha moment and the ancestor takes on a more believable form than the “butter would not melt in his/her mouth” representation that is commonly held in the family.

Another example of exactitude is the digitizing camera.  We have to calibrate it exactly to achieve the crispness needed for folks to read the reports on the internet and it is parallel with the exactness we need to have in our lives to accomplish this mortal set of tests we face.

When I was given my commission by President Steven Campbell, he said to me that I would be inspired to seek other records that would be pertinent to these digitizing assignments.  I was contemplating the first book that was digitized by us and it came to me that there had to be an index somewhere, but it was not in the room with the books.  I asked the worker in the archives if there was such a thing as an index and he thought a minute and said, I will go and look, and he came back later with an index for each of the books.  I feel sure that this was pure inspiration because the written agreement that is in place between the Archives and Family Search, did not mention about index books or even ask if there were any.  How about that?

After all the heavy duty things connected with the digitizing, there are lighter moments that take place in the archives.  There is a worker named Arthur (goes by Art) and he goes around singing.  Today we found out that the phone in our room does not work and we asked Art and others to look at the problem so that we do not have to use our cell phone minutes to iron out the problems when we talk to our trainer.  Well, when Art came in with Jeff, another worker there, the two of them were laughing and channeling Peter Sellars in his role as Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies of long ago.  They both had us laughing even though we were ready to cry because we had just found out that we had to redo the 600+ pages.  One good thing is happening, it takes a lot of effort to hold down the glass cover over the book and then click the camera – well my upper body is getting a workout.

The squatters are still on the capitol lawn living in ratty looking tents.  In today’s paper there was a picture of them dismantling a wooden pallet to use to keep their tents’ from rising up due to the earth being very moist and getting ready for the winter season.  I wonder how long they intend to stay there?  There was a comment in the paper that some “truly homeless” folks had come to live with them – any port in a storm is a good port……but the squatters are not happy at being joined by the homeless people from the streets of Augusta. 

There was a  note in the paper about a man who died on Oct 1.  His family has been going through his stuff in the storage locker he has had for about 20+ years and they found a body of a woman in the unplugged freezer .  Rather like the fellow in Prescott who did the same with his wife.  He claimed her body when she died and took her home and put her in the freezer until medical science finds a cure for her disease and she can then come back to life was his explanation.  His daughter found her mother in the freezer – caused a big fuss in Prescott.  They thawed the body, did an autopsy and found that she died of natural causes, and he was given the opportunity to take her somewhere and bury her.  Story goes that he took her to Canada……………..now that is where she can become part of the permafrost and stay frozen forever.  Just goes to show, we never know what is in a person’s freezer!

Computers are obedient - they do what you tell them to do

Well, we thought we had it right.  We did the prep for the day and then started digitizing.  It was going along swimmingly and then my phone rang.  It was our trainer.  He had been trying to reach us for over 2 hours by calling Bill's cell phone number - but everybody knows that he has it either on vibrate or completely off and he is deaf into the bargain so no wonder people give up trying to reach him and call me instead.
So the trainer had me sit at the computer and then the fun began.  He has a program on his computer that can access what I put on my computer and even what I have prepared to send to Salt Lake City on the Shuttle (external hard drive).  That said, he discovered that we had made a big BOOBOO and he had to call someone from the computer engineer dept of the church office building to see if they could straighten it out.   Well, after three very frustrating hours using my cell phone minutes AARRGGHHHH! we hung up the phone with the problem all straight and me so frazzled that all I could do was to straighten up the area, turn off the camera and computer and leave for the day.  So I went shopping - shopping will cure all ills.
It is so amazing though to see the things you can do with computers............I could see his computer screen and he could see my computer screen and the fellow in Salt Lake City could see my screen and our trainer was in Canada................so the connection was between the three widely separated areas.  What next?

Bar Harbor trip and Arcadia National Park

Our trip to Bar Harbor was wonderful because the Oaks and the Maples have turned brilliant colors and the landscape is alive and more vibrant on this trip due to the cloud cover and resulting diffused light.  If it had been a bright sunny day, the colors of the leaves would more than likely look washed out in any photo I may have taken.  It is about 100 miles from our house to Bar Harbor and I was amazed at the number of ponds and lakes that are just east of Augusta.  Well, if you look at a map of the place the little ponds are not noted – there is too many of them, and a lot of the little inlets are not noted either, but I soon came to realize that many of the inlets were probably brackish water and others were actually tidal basins and the tide was out.  Oh what fun to have been able to slosh around in the mud that was left behind – but we could not do that because we had to be in Bar Harbor to catch a bus tour around Arcadia National Park.  One scene that we missed photographing (due to traffic) was an idyllic inlet or perhaps it was a pond,  that had two rather pretty cottages right on the water’s edge and they were reflecting in the water.  This was near Lake George which is only 25 miles or so from our apartment.

I have talked to my friend Kathy, who lives in Virginia, about the beauty of this area with the leaves etc. and she is very excited that I am here.  She helped a friend of hers move here some time back and it is bringing back lots of memories for Kathy to know that I am in the very area she brought her friend.  To me, the area looks a lot like Pennsylvania with its evergreen trees and rolling hills and quaint wooden homes and totally charming white painted wooden churches.  The only thing that is missing here that they have in Pennsylvania is the well laid out Amish farms.  There are a lot of farms around where we live but they are different in appearance than the Amish farms and also there are no Amish buggies on the roads here.

I am interested in the signs we see along the road – signs advertising the wares of the shops and cottage industries.  One was a bait shop that advertised that it had shiners and worms available.  I have no idea what shiners are, but they must be absolutely dazzling to the fish and make them just want to jump onto the hook to thrill the fisherman.  Along the way there were signs from time to time that announced “Public access” and I assume that this meant access to a pond or beach.  The only thing wrong with the setup was that there was just a path leading through the woods and no parking lots for cars.  Another sign I saw advertised “Silk Weeds” and it looked like a recycled clothing store and antique shop.  There are loads of Antique shops here.  Some of them do not look too antique to me, but I suppose their contents are considered antiques.  I am not well versed in Antiques, and anything that does not appear in the Sears Catalog could very well be an antique as far as I am concerned.  I worked for Harvey Eugene antique and quilt shop in Prescott and the owner assured me that the furniture that she had for sale there were indeed antiques.  Well, the drawers did not pull out easily and the paint was chipped and the chairs were rickety and I wondered who would want this stuff in their homes.  I guess there are some segments of the community who are interested in trying to re-create the look of colonial Americana but that is not me – so I go into these Antique shops, wonder about the lives of the people who originally used them and the uses for each piece of furniture displayed.  The most unique Antique shop I have seen is the one on Rte. 69 close to Mayer in Arizona.  My friend Shelley and I walked through it and we saw that they had a very old automobile for sale there – right in amongst the furniture and lamps and old linens etc.  I wondered how they got the car into the building in the first place and if anyone wanted to buy it, how much moving of stuff they would have to do to extricate this marvel of machinery.  All around this particular store were signs, “PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH”.  Well, now, that was an invitation to handle everything, because after all, we are tactile persons.  I notice that it is now for sale – imagine that – they want people to come and buy the place with all the ‘touched stuff’ in it.

We saw many places that sold Lobster and some were called Lobster Pound, others just plain Lobster Bar and some were bold enough to advertise Surf and Turf – even though you do not find Lobsters in the surf……and turf implies race horses – if you did not know much about the verbiage of America and the culture that it supports, you would be totally confused and probably go look for a McDonalds somewhere….just to be on the safe side.  One sign caught our eyes – it advertised “Young’s Lobster Pond” and it was in Belfast, Maine.  Put us in memory of Young’s Farm in Dewey but in their pond there were only some waterfowl – no lobsters in Arizona ponds.

There are lots of Ice cream shops along the road and in Bar Harbor, the recommended Ice cream shop was selling their wares for 99cents.  The bus driver said that it was a high end shop and that the sale was an attempt to get rid of their ice cream and their wickedly delicious fudge in preparation for the Winter.  Next weekend is the last cruise ship to come to Bar Harbor for the cruise season, and all the shops will then just close down and the place will become a ghost town of sorts until the spring when the tourists come back and the cruise ships come into port.  The people in Maine are not verbose at all and there is great economy in their speech – the fewer words the better but they are packed with meaning…so listen closely and you will be able to get from here to there without too much problem.  Misinterpret the hand waving and nose pointing at the direction you need to find and you may never be heard from again.

The fancy sign in Bar Harbor on the main shopping street

 Some trees that stood still enough to get photographed.

 If you stare at it long enough it does resemble a face and they say it is an Indian.

 This was one of the extra stops.  It is a birch bark teepee that has a removable top to let the smoke out when the lady of the house was cooking food.

 A couple of pictures taken at a totally clear fresh water pond that has a sign on it that it is used for drinking water.  Well, I think that the decaying leaves in it may just add some flavor.

 These two mountains are called the "Bubbles" but they are commonly called the shape they represent....and cannot put that in a blog because it might be offensive to some readers.  The picture below is my all time favorite picture because of the combination of sky, mountain, foliage, reflection and perfectly still fresh water pond.  It was taken at Arcadia National Park.

An example of the economy of speech was at the Thirsty Whale restaurant.  The waiter greeted us with three pieces of paper and announced, pointing to each in order, ” solids, liquids, specials”, and left us to fend for ourselves.  The solids were the entrée’s and appetizers, the liquids were the wines, beers and assorted coffee and tea offerings, and the specials were what they had on tap immediately.  The food was delicious and the Clam Chowder was the best I have ever eaten – Campbell’s soups New England  Clam Chowder, eat your heart out.

One place of resort for tourists had a couple of cannons out in front with a pile of cannon balls in front of them.  I think that the cannon balls were way too big to fit into those cannons but they looked good anyway.  We did not have time to wander through the shops but looked in the windows and saw that the prices were pretty high.  Well, also if you purchased anything, you immediately became a walking billboard for the area.  One shirt we saw was pretty cute.  It had fluffy lambs all over it and under it was written “Baa Harbor”.   Bill saw a quilt shop – I totally missed it (must be losing it here) and we stopped in to see what they had.  Found lots of pretty fabrics – especially about light houses, ocean and Puffins.  I bought a quilt pattern that is about Puffins.  It follows the Log cabin construction and looks totally cute up on the wall.  It is a pattern by a local designer and I have a signed copy of the pattern.  The operator of the shop told us that she was a genealogy buff when we told her that we were here digitizing the records of the Main Archives.  She thanked us very much for giving our time to do this because it has been a great help to her research for her family in Maine.

Our trip to the Arcadia national park was wonderful.  There were only 4 of us on the bus, so the driver stopped at extra places along the route and told us all about the history and geology of the place.  We went to the top of the mountain and could see for miles out over the ocean.  This was Cadillac Mountain.  She told us that the  mountain was named after a French man who fell in love with Maine and he wanted to have the mountain named after himself.  She said that Cadillac was the name of his favorite wine and so he changed his name to Cadillac and devised a coat of arms and wanted a car named after him – so he built a factory and produced Cadillac cars and the coat of arms on the front of each  vehicle is one he devised.  Now, I do not know if this is true or not, but it does make for a good story.

We stopped at the Thunder Hole on the rugged side of the park and there is a rock formation there that they say looks like an Indian head.  It is Maine’s boast to have it since the nose fell off the old man of the mountain at Frankonia Notch .  I suppose if you have to have something to brag about, then a rock formation that looks like an Indian head will have to do.

The neighbors here are doing a lot of leaf blowing but because of all the rain we have had, the leaves are not “Leaf Jumping Leaves”.  When David and Sara were growing up in Pennsylvania, this time of year was wonderful for them to jump in the leaves that fell off our trees.  We went for a walk on the rails to trails area in downtown Augusta and walked to the next town – about 2 miles away, called Hallowell.  The leaves on the trees by the river were perfect.

Thus ends our adventure for this weekend.  Now it is time to turn our attention to the job of digitizing records.  I have a love/hate relationship with the manual but I feel more confident in doing the work now than I did this time last week.