This past week, my family traveled to North Carolina to visit family and attend my niece’s wedding.
The wedding was beautiful—full of love and fun, which is no surprise given that the happy couple are loving, warm, generous, fun people. Everyone seemed to really enjoy themselves.
We had a great time at the wedding, and it was wonderful to visit with family we hadn’t seen since Christmas 2019.
But traveling with an unvaccinated child is fraught these days.
Rest stops were in and out fast. Meals on the road were eaten in the car. Hand washing and masks were a must.
North Carolina as a whole was only 38% vaccinated when we went down. The area we visited is likely below that average. At the wedding, only 3 people were masked—my immediate family.
So while we had an absolute blast at the wedding, I am hoping we don’t pay a high price. I am counting the days until we are past the 14-day incubation period.
We returned home to find our state’s case rate rising, the transmission rate at 1.08, and the dreaded Delta variant exploding.
I’m so sick of this.
Mask up. Maintain distancing. Get the vaccine. I don’t know about you, but I am ready for this to end. At the current rate of vaccination, we will not reach herd immunity until March 2022. A full 2 years after the world shut down.
Let’s kick this thing to the curb, so we can all breathe—and travel—freely again.
The Quick and the Dead—CoronaLife Day 495
After being away last week, I tried to get back into the swing of things once we arrived home. We’ve had a heat wave, eerily red suns from smoke from Canadian wildfires, a tornado warning, and a heavy thunderstorm that gave us a pond in our backyard. I also took a trip to the ER with a calf muscle injury that I am 98% recovered from at this point.
So, not exactly conducive to concentrated working.
I hunkered down, however, and actually have had a pretty productive week. Since I last wrote, I proofread 40,500 words of my mother’s family history book. And still found mistakes when I went back to quickly look at something in a chapter I had already proofread. I will likely need to read the entire thing one more time before giving it to someone else to proofread. My second read-through will probably be out loud, since most of my problem is shifting tenses, and hearing it will help me catch that.
I also updated several family trees that will go in the book. Apparently, I have been working on this a lot longer than I thought, since people in the trees who have died were still alive, and children who are alive now had not been born. One chapter had no tree at all yet, so I created that one from scratch.
Lastly, I found an image I plan to use in multiple places in my book. One spot will likely be the back cover, and the other places will be as backgrounds for chapter title pages. I had wanted to use maps of Ireland and the UK in strategic places, but could not find one I liked that was not prohibited by copyright. I finally found a line drawing of the British Isles that allows use for reprinting in books with no copyright attached. I will, of course, be using attribution, as they requested.
So I am making progress. After I finish the chapter I am proofing, I have five more to proofread, and one chapter to write from scratch. It is very hard to write a family history book while you are still actively researching, because you keep finding more information to add!
Although there is much work remaining, it is work I enjoy, this strange co-mingling of the quick and the dead. Through my pen, the dead live again, and hopefully my work will live on after I am dead. Those who think time moves only forward never viewed the world through the eyes of a genealogist—the past is ever with us, and colors every aspect of the present.