Researching, Exploring

I'm trying to find someone named William Wilson who was a printer in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1909. Do you know how many William Wilsons there were in Edinburgh in 1909? Many. So many. It's like that town in Nebraska with all the Johnsons.

One of the William Wilsons I've turned up in Ancestry.com's search lives at 39 Duke's Brow, Blackburn. What a great street name!

Today, I'm going to work for an hour, then take a four mile ride to Mattydale. The nearest Big Lots is there, and I want new bedsheets both to have a new set for Danae's visit, and to have a second set in general to make washing easier. While I'm there, I'll drop in to the two nearby thrift stores; Thrifty Shopper and Salvation Army. I haven't been to Mattydale yet, so it'll be an adventure.

Time for another picture? Of course! This shows one of Dr. Evermore's little metal bugs in the foreground (I think its tongue is a rusty wrench) with the primary sculptural installation of the Forevertron in the background. I love this place so much!

Impromptu Dog Rescue

I was a little anxious about taking the time for a long shopping trip, but I turned out to have been in the right place. As I was browsing the Salvation Army store, there were suddenly two big dogs wandering around the aisles. With everybody in the store asking anyone around them "Are those your dogs?" it was clear that nobody knew where they came from. They were very friendly and excited to get attention, so it was easy for me to get one by the collar to look at its tags. A couple who were there together were talking to store staff as I was trying to get the wiggly dog to hold still long enough to read the phone number. A staff member wanted to call the police, and the couple were vehemently telling him not to. The three of us got both dogs corralled. The second one was a little difficult since she didn't have a collar; they grabbed a belt from the nearby rack and I improvised a leash. One of the couple had called the number on the tag and got no answer, but the address was just across a street and down a block so two of us decided to walk the dogs back home while the third met us there with their car. I wanted to get a sense of the conditions the dogs were in and make sure they weren't breeding or fighting dogs; they certainly didn't act like it and generally seemed well taken care of, but one of them had a wound on her paw that concerned me.

It's funny; this is basically the same thing that happened when Danae and I were leaving Evanston for our trip to the Soo Locks. I, and another woman who happened by, ended up chasing an escaped dog for blocks back to its owners house, said owner having no idea the dog was gone. Keep an eye on your dogs folks; they're like kids but can't even talk to tell people where they came from!

It turned out the dogs had escaped the back yard through an open gate and the woman who owned them had no idea they were gone. I'm not terribly impressed with that, but I'm hopeful it was a one-time mistake. I suggested she get tags on both dogs since if they got separated one of them would have no contact info. This is particularly important since they were bull terriers of some kind, and I'm sure a lot of folks would freak out about them. That was another reason I and the couple (who do dog rescue, it turns out) didn't want the police called; authorities respond irrationally to bully breeds. These two were happy and enthusiastically friendly and I'd hate to see them get seized and killed. So I'm glad I happened to go to that store when I did; I feel like I did something really valuable and worthwhile this week!

It was a nice ride other than that. restoman had told me that there were a couple of streets in the area that are so steep the city has left them paved with cobbles to provide extra traction; I found one of them. John Street near 1st North Street. I thought the road my building is on was a climb, but this is the steepest street I've ever biked on. When I first saw the hill down the road from me, I thought I was looking at a wall. I love the terrain in this city!

I have bedsheets. I also picked up a second-hand iron for $2 (now I just need an ironing board...), a cylindrical cheese grater of the kind you use for grating hard cheese over food on a plate, headphones that fit my big ears and head, and a cute black fabric belt with a white heart pattern. I've never owned a belt that wasn't plain leather, and looking at myself in the mirror it's amazing how much something with a strong pattern draws focus. I really like it.

Life Stories

Maybe I'm feeling extra sensitive lately, or perhaps it's because I feel lonely out here, but sometimes the lives of the inventors I'm researching make me sad.

George W. R. Harriman was born the youngest of four in Somerville, Massachusetts on May 25th, 1871. His father, John, was a printer, while his mother, unusually for the time I think, seems to have worked in some capacity for the railroad. In 1900, he married Mable Locke in a November ceremony in Malden. The couple had several children; Roger, Charlotte, Elizabeth, and by the time he was 20, he had moved with his family to Boston. There he worked as a civil engineer after having patented an invention in 1916. The patent is quite interesting; a form of display for geographic information that included half a dozen pages of intricately drawn out charts and page layouts. His brothers, with whom he shared a house, had interesting lines of work as a solar printer (I'm not quite sure what that was) and as a theatrical agent.

Soon after, George and Mable moved to Washington DC. George continued his engineering work, and may have become president of a publishing company that produced city planning maps, as well as accepting government printing contracts. The family remained there through at least 1930, living at one point in the beautiful Beaux-Arts Toronto building, and at another point in a nice townhouse on Q Street, very near Dupont Circle. Sometime before 1930 though, Mable died, leaving George a widower living with just one of his sons and his daughter, the youngest of three. Later, by 1935, George had made his way to a rooming house in Manhattan at 295 East 53rd Street. In 1940, 69-year-old George was living alone, though in the company of other roomers who were a mix of western and northern European immigrants, with a few from places like Austria or Hungary, and a few others from elsewhere in the US. The census taker noted that he was a civil engineer working in "buildings," and that he'd been seeking work for some time prior to enumeration. After that, he disappears from the records. So many people don't seem to leave an obituary, a death record, or a gravemarker anywhere I can find them online. Miriam said that maybe he decided to have a grand adventure, once his kids had become independent adults, and move somewhere new. Certainly I'd love to be in New York City for a while. I'd like to think that's the case, but I have a feeling it's not. But I'd love to know how he ended up in New York City.

Being exposed to so many of these life stories in quick succession, even as abstracted and incomplete as they are, makes me think about my own life story and what it is that I want to prioritize and accomplish. It also makes me miss the people in my life that I'm away from, and miss having time to make new connections. I'm going to make a bunch of progress over Thanksgiving break. I'm going to make time to be social and have people in my life outside of the internet....

Less Gloomy Aspects of Research

So just what the heck is a solar printer, anyway? I can conjecture that it might be some kind of early photography, or perhaps a means of using light to etch printing plates, but I have no good idea. A solar printing press sounds like something that would be operating on a Jules-Vernsian space-faring vessel.

Time Warner cable charges a $5 monthly fee for having a router that creates a wi-fi network. I bought a wi-fi router from Woot for about $15 with shipping. It arrived a few days ago and I have it set up. It works fine except that, for some reason, it seems to drop my VPN to Syracuse University every couple of hours or so. Can I live with that rather than either send it for an RMA, or keep paying $5 a month in rental costs? Yes I can. Now I just need to get a DOCSIS 3 cable modem to stop paying the $10/month modem leasing cost.

There was only one long-haired guy amongst the geography grad students at SU. I had a longish conversation with him at the end of the department picnic just before the semester started that rambled through all sorts of territory. He seemed pretty amazed, though understatedly so, as I talked matter-of-factly about my partner and my sweetie and about being non-monogamous. He declared that I was the most interesting person he'd ever met, though he was also a little bit drunk at the time so that may have contributed to his assessment! But I haven't talked to him socially since then despite adding him on Facebbok. And now he has cut his hair and posted pictures and, while my opinion should have no bearing at all on how he manages his appearance, he now looks about ten years older and, in some way I can't put my finger on, kind of like someone I'd expect to be a jerk. Oh well.

I've tried out my headphones. The sound is mushy and unremarkable, but they are $10 headphones. They will do the job for listening to music at night. I wonder if, rather than hauling my big speakers out here, I should have left them at home and bought a really nice pair of headphones. But I don't think so. They'd get uncomfortable after a while, and I couldn't lie in bed or wash dishes or what-not with them on.

Oh, and remember when I wrote about doing the math behind my age? I was wrong. "Are you sure," Danae asked, "that you're going to be 37 this year? Because I thought you were only a year older than me." I did the math again: she was right; I'm turning 36. Shows how much the number sticks in my head.