A Few Chapters and a Bunch of Notebooks

I've been stuck in bed with a horrible, exhausting cold for two weeks now, so the work goes slowly. I had the good fortune to aquire an iPad before the cold struck, so I've been fiddling with that. If you don't want to work, there's not much of a learning curve and everything is almost seamless, but if you're like me and try to make things do what they were not intended to do, it can be quite a curve. I LOVE my iPad. It does many, many things, is light weight and pretty, but it's not a laptop. I had to learn a lot more than the basics (while sniffling and coughing) to do actual work along with playing games, listening to music, and making some notes. What I learned was how to make eBooks that can be read in an iBook reader. Big smiles here! In the end, it's easy, and they look fantastic. I had to figure out what I could and couldn't reasonably do so I would know what direction my project might be taking and whether I should be focused on scanning to PDF, making Word files, or whatever. Meanwhile, the mid-project results are less elegant, but are fully functional.

The shelf in my photo shows one set of the Chapters I published from 1992 to 1995. I got a smidgen of the way into the project before it got derailed. That's OK. It was huge and I was no longer clear how I could get it where I wanted it to go. Meanwhile, I had transcribed a lot of information, researched the references, filled in the blanks, and presented it in readable form. A glitch came a number of years ago when I found that my old WordPerfect 5.1 files would not convert completely intact to Word, but I've now scanned the printed copies of the chapters, and anyone interested can find downloadable PDFs on this page of my web site. The Word files remain for me to do something with as the project progresses.

The notebooks you see to the right of the chapters in the photo are filled with pages of chronological project data - research, synopses of material, etc. These notebooks are labelled by year(s). Some of the notebooks are alphabetical files of people, places, historic events, etc. And there are more notebooks in the other room.

I'm getting a certain amount of clarity about the path I want to walk through this mountain of fascinating information, and even some clarity on the results I want to achieve. It's a process, and, I'm really excited to be getting back to it. I'll keep you posted. (By the way, if you have an eBook reader (or at least it works with some brands), you can import the PDF files. They don't work as perfectly as a real eBook, but the graphics, captions and footnotes are intact, which is perfect for this stage of the game.

This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.

Energizer Bunny and Storage Boxes

Still going here. More and more, this (above) is beginning to look like this (below) . . .

. . . and this (below).

There is still some of this (below) left and it actually seems very manageable now.

These fantastic bankers' boxes (I love them) moved me from Colorado to Oregon in 2001. They are so cool. The size is easy to handle, they are modular and stackable, and I used minimal padding because the boxes are sturdy and the stuff inside didn't get crushed. And, they have lids (easy as pie to open and close). An added bonus: when you arrive at your destination with almost zero furniture (plus you have things that are not easy to find a place for in your new apartment), you can stack them and drape with nice fabric and have instant tables and headboards. I did that for a number of years, and now I'm down to my final few unpacked boxes. It's kind of sad, really. I've grown to love the look. Maybe I'll keep a few for old times' sake.

Just briefly, one of the things that got me started on this Total Cleanup thing besides my new NeatDesk scanner was the desire to start working on the old letters project again. Seriously. The Hudson and Joy: A History in Letters blog that I started was a good first step into the digital media era, but it was becoming cumbersome, and I'd barely started. A couple of weekends ago I set up a new section of my web site for the project, and it's a lot easier to manage and should make a good presentation of the mass of material I'm beginning to bite back into. Here it is! There are already some sizable downloadable files, and (as I said before of the blog) I'm just getting started.

This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.

Posting History

I love posting this stuff. It took quite a bit of my time this evening, but the project is on fire. I love it! Check out my Hudson/Joy old letters blog to read the letter. In an urelated comment, my backpack smells like Starbucks, and that ain't all bad.

This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.

HJ Project: Working with Old Archives with New Technology

I spent some time again posting some of the old letters and journal entries from N.C. Hudson. One of his letters to Helen was written on a page with this engraving at the top. I've already given this to the Sioux City Public Museum, so I made the scan from a xerox and was working from my previously transcribed text. I'm really enjoying finding time for this project again, doing the research and making the stuff available at long last. (I didn't see this engraving anywhere else online, although it could be hidden somewhere.) I hope to have the time to continue.

Technology and the Internet are still astonishing to me, when I remember what it took only a few years ago to publish anything like this. The xerox I scanned the engraving from is so much inferior to the scan of the original I could have made now, but at least I was able copy and paste the digital text from a Word doc, and not have to resort to scanning from an old typewriter (the work I did in the 1980s) or primary or secondary handwritten transcripts. That will come soon enough as I get further into the material. In such a relatively few years, the ability to present historical documents has gone miles. I find myself wishing I could have the originals back again to make good scans, and one of these days I may be able to visit their repositories and do that if I still have the interest. But I'm not just moaning. I'm glorying in what can be done. I remember writing "the dream target book," for those few who know what that is, back in the 1980s, and wishing like crazy at the time that there was something like hyperlinks. Well, now they exist, and someday I may put that project online. With the links I only imagined.

Here's the link for the letter and engraving on the Hudson and Joy blog.

This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.

Dinosaur Bone Puzzle Day and Some Work on the H/J Blog

I'd been waiting for these to fill an order for dinosaur skeleton puzzles (models), so I was very happy to see them arrive - but I also thought I was going to have a helper here to sort out the six different dinosaur types (Pteranodon, Stegosaurus, Velociraptor, Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, and - oh, yes - that famous dinosaur, Woolly Mammoth). It's great when you get to do this stuff and call it "work." Anyway, as it turned out, I was able to get them sorted and re-boxed myself, although it took most of what I had to put into it today. The re-boxing is because I am only shipping out part of what came in, and they need to be specific quantities of each dino. It seemed like a lot more stuff than you see here, and actually several packed boxes are already outside the photo area. I didn't exactly need the fan today, as it poured for most of 12 hours or so.

The inflatable dinosaur (which is not part of this project) stayed around to help keep an eye on the process.

This is not quite as exciting an image, but it was also a lot of fun, and -YES! - I begin to feel like I'm accomplishing something on this new direction of the Hudson/Joy project. I spent a lot of time last week organizing the blog better, and tonight I spent a lot of time transferring journal entries and scans and also figuring out how to work with the 1800s dates in blog format so that it doesn't take forever to put the posts together. With the exception of one love letter and marriage proposal (which is truly amazing and romantic), most of the entries are not that much fun to read yet. Some aren't bad, but I had to start somewhere, and that was really hard to decide.

After posting some material from 1856 when Hudson was already in Iowa, I decided to go back and make my starting point the marriage proposal linked above. After that, without an answer, Hudson goes west to Iowa, and the history begins to get interesting, because the state was really just getting settled, and then also on the home front, his letters with Helen start heating up. This is a good place to begin a long stretch of the historic and romantic material, but I also love the earlier years. I really had to think about it, but there is a certain momentum that tells a story beginning in 1855. Eventually I'll go back and fill in, but much of that is already in the chapters I've had printed. After a certain point in 1856, it will all be new.

This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.