I ordered groceries for pickup at Kroger today. Impossible burgers are now $17.49 for 6. That’s almost $3 each! I like them better than Beyond burgers, but not at that price.
As I was leaving after picking up my groceries, this happened.
Why are people? Why? Why would you leave your truck right in the middle of the road? With the door hanging open? When the guy returned, he looked annoyed that I was waiting behind him. I’m not sure what he expected me to do. There really wasn’t enough space for me to pass on either side.
So I didn’t get Impossible burgers, but I got these crackers. They are so freaking good. I often shop at Kroger instead of Aldi, just because I’m craving parmesan crackers.
This post-apocalyptic hellscape is outside my cubicle. I’ll be glad when it’s finally gone, but they’re replacing it with shelving, which is only a slight improvement.
(It’s not anyone’s fault that it’s taking this long to clean up and reconfigure the space. The folks doing the work are backed up with jobs. That doesn’t make it any less frustrating for those of us trying to work in this environment, though.)
I made an accordion book out of recycled book boards and delaminated corrugated cardboard. It is very much not an archival process. I am brimful of not caring.
I need to stop trawling Reddit. This workflow strikes me as incredibly awkward and labor intensive. Maybe it’s because of my job, but my first quibble is with the naming convention. I organize by document type. Some people organize documents by surname, and that’s fine. But I try to keep file names as short as possible. The word “federal” is superfluous. There is no other kind of US census. Second, I’d use underscores to separate segments. I also prefer names in direct order, not reversed order, probably because my one name study documents are intermixed with my own family’s documents. It’s far easier to look for John Basquil than try to figure out which one of the 50+ variants of Basquill the document is filed under, then look for John. John is much less likely to have an alternate spelling. So in my system, that file name would be: Census_US1900_DavidSmith
Short and sweet, and it takes seconds to find what I’m looking for. If it were a state census, you’d obviously use the two letter state abbreviation with the census year: Census_MN1905_DavidSmith
But that highlighted bit is the part that made me break out in hives. I use Evernote for genealogy. As I download document images (full resolution images, not clips or screenshots*), I add them to Evernote with the link for the page I got them from. When I’ve finished adding the information to my database and have finished creating my citation, I copy the citation and add it to the note in Evernote. It adds maybe a few seconds to my workflow, and it’s time well spent. You could just as easily copy and paste the Ancestry/FamilySearch/etc. citation into the note, too.
Evernote is set up like my files are set up, by document type. I’m careful to format names in note titles consistently, so I can use quote marks to find all the documents related a person. But everything is keyword searchable (even the handwriting in documents), so it’s trivial to locate a given note. And best of all, all my documents are available anywhere I have an internet connection.
I can and do, of course, add other information to notes when it’s helpful. So if I want to add abstracts or transcriptions, I can.
I think OneNote has a lot of the same functionality, though I admit I don’t love it and only use it for managing citation templates. And I’m guessing there are other note management apps that might work better than a series of spreadsheets, screenshots, and text files. (I do use Excel for tracking and managing residential addresses from city directories, and it works okay for that. I keep that spreadsheet in Evernote, as well.)
* I would never recommend just screenshotting document images from Ancestry, specifically. Some of them are impossible to read, because they’ve compressed the screen view image so much. In order to even read them, you have to download them. But all their images are compressed to some degree in the screen viewer. Always download the full, best quality image available. If you want to crop a smaller section later, you can, but you can’t go backward if you’ve only saved a portion of a document image. And sometimes you realize later that there’s information in other parts of the document that is useful.
red paper boat 