Friday 5th February 2010 - A Flock of Wild Geese

          I like to do a bit of reading at breakfast. I think an American breakfast beats everything, and I treat it as my main meal of the day. So I like it to take quite a while.

          The old boys like to talk a lot, and share their war stories. It's all quite lively and comfortable. Suddenly I realise it's all gone a bit quiet. There is the ubiquitous TV in the room, running silently on subtitles (or 'closed captioning' as they like to call it here). There is a ladies program, discussing breast enhancement. There was a lot of furtive watching going on. Of course, I ignored it completely, but, if you're interested, they concluded that it was best to be happy with what you've got. If they'd worked that out at the beginning, it would have saved a lot of embarrassment, certainly in the diner I was in.

          I was in the courthouse for another day of deed -searching. These Glasgows obviously had a lot of land to buy and sell, but none of it was in the place I was looking for. There was the passing interest of discovering who was related to whom, and who could write, and who could not. The man who came to be an early mayor of Adamsville, and came to be remembered in local histories as the sainted local doctor, had several brothers who couldn't write.

          But, eventually, I concluded that I was chasing wild geese.

          So it was back to the library, to see if I could find the censuses for the period, and find any interesting names living where I wanted to look. But the censuses were computerized, and the library had elected to make them searchable by genealogists, people looking for names and ancestors. What I wanted to do was look at the documents and see if any place names popped up, or any interesting names in those places. After much trial and tribulation, of the kind only computer programs can provide, I found a way of twisting it's tail, so I could look at what I wanted. But I still couldn't find anything before my eyes had to rest again.

          On the way out of town, there was an accident on the freeway, so a five-minute journey took an hour.

          Later that night, I had no sooner go my mouth round a Sweetwater 420 than I was dragged off to an art gallery open evening on the other side of town. Some of the art was quite good, and I thought it would please them if I let them know my verdict. There were also some blues players, who, apparently, had never played together before, and they too were good.

          The beer, however, did not come anywhere near the Sweetwater standard. The only good thing to be said of it was that it was free at the point of use. That, of course, is no small thing.