How I Spent My Summer Vacation

You might have been wondering after all my recent troubles, but yeah, I'm still online, though you wouldn't know it from all the activity here.

It took me a while to get all the things done that I had to do to get a new computer up and running the way I want it -- the downloading, the file transferring, the updating, the backing up, etc. -- but all that was finished some time ago.  The only real glitch is that there's a setting somewhere that's keeping Firefox from remembering any of my passwords.  It won't even ask me if I want to save them.  Hmm.

I've been spending most of my free time trying to catch up my Civil War blog.  In case you didn't know, it's the sesquicentennial (that's 150 years) anniversary of the Civil War, and I've been doing a series of posts that tells what happened on the day of the post 150 years ago as it relates to the war.

I've been working on this since October 2009 with several posts on John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry.  At first the posts were few and far between, but as the 150th anniversary of the start of the war got closer, the posts got more frequent.  I got all the way up to the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's election to president in November 1860, just when things were really starting to happen.  The Deep South states were about to secede, and the crisis at Fort Sumter was building.  But I was unable to get online for quite a while, leaving a huge hole in the overall timeline -- until April of this year.

But I was back online in time for the beginning of the war at Fort Sumter.  Or so I thought.  I posted the day before the anniversary of the start of the war, then my computer fritzed out on me and I was gone again for another month.  This was another big hole in the timeline just as some big things were going down.

I've been working hard to fill in the holes, plus keep the timeline current moving forward.  I'm happy to report that the first hole -- from November 1860 to April 1861 -- is now filled in with backdated posts.  It might not be exactly kosher, but you do what you can do.  I've still got the other hole to fill, but I'm working on it.  Hopefully, once that's done I'll have more time to spend updating this blog with something interesting.

I've also started the NASCAR blog back up again.  I'm not posting there like I'd like, but I'm at least summarizing the races again.

Occasionally I might post a picture or two on the old photo blog.  I've finally turned my Flickr account pro and am dumping a lot of old pictures there a little at a time.  Lately I've posted a bunch of photos I took last year of my grandson's baseball team.  I've also posted a few photos that I didn't take, scans of snapshots my uncle sent back from Germany in 1965.

If I'm not doing any of the above stuff for a few minutes, you might find me on the Twitter or checking in on the Facebook or getting caught up with some of my blog and news reading.

See you around the web!