Overwhelmed! ~ Anne McAllister

There comes a time when life is supposed to slow down. At least that's what my mother told me.  I guess that's good. At least it would be good right now. But it hasn't happened to me yet.

Last night I was up until two a.m. (well, that would be this morning, not last night, I guess) working on the handout for a genealogical workshop/lecture I'm giving on Saturday.  I would probably have been up Friday night, except the director of the conference needed the handout by this morning.

I was still working out how I was going to talk about "unlocking the US census" for an hour when I could easily talk about it for dozens of hours. Boiling it down is not my strong suit. I needed an angle. And by two a.am. I had an angle, but no handout.

So I got up a 5:30 a.m. (thanks mostly to Mitch, the golden retriever, who doesn't like thunderstorms and heard one coming). I didn't hear it until it got lots closer, but by then he was sitting on my head in bed and panting for all he was worth. So The Prof and I got up and I went back to work on the handout.

It's now finished -- and sent to the director -- all four pages, single spaced -- to go with the five page single-spaced one on using Google for your genealogy that I had done the day before.  And now I'm preparing to go teach a class in beginning genealogy for a friend who is in California visiting her newest grandson.

And then . . . I've got to get going on doing the quarterly taxes which are due Tuesday. And there are the talks I still need to go over for Saturday (you can't put censuses easily on a power point, they are too darn big), so I'm having to work out other alternatives (none of them easy, at least for me).

And the prof and I are intending to go watch an historical re-enactment tomorrow at the town about 25 miles from here where they are illustrating the settlement of the area.  As a lot of Cornish miners settled this area, and I have a lot of them in my family tree, this seems like a good thing to do. Perhaps I should be doing the taxes, but I'm going to try to do the historic re-enactment first.

Oh, and I'm supposed to be writing this blog, which I have, more or less, now.

And then there's my day job -- writing books!  I think it was three days ago that I last wrote anything on the current book. I really need to get back to it. Soon.

But first ....

Do you have days like this?  Got answers?

At least I'm celebrating the near publication of my upcoming Presents/Modern book, The Return of Antonides, which has a dynamite cover on the UK edition.

Looks just like Lukas Antonides, I'm happy to say.