Where Have You Been?

Bet you thought I'd disappeared for good...
No, still here.
But I've been struggling to finish up some other projects and entertaining some grandchildren as they wind down their summer vacation.

Here's a view of my list:

1. I'm reading my book for September's book club meeting - The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.  It's considered junior fiction, but it is so engrossing.  I still have about a hundred pages to go and I'm taking discussion notes as I read.  The narrator is Death and the scene is Nazi Germany just before and during WW II.  The setting is a small town in Germany, Molching, where the Jews have been driven out.  But one Jew is hidden there, in the dank, cold basement of the book thief's home.  The book thief is a young girl who steals books, her most treasured possessions.  The book has so many levels and the descriptions of the sights and sounds and happenings in Molching are wonderful.  I am at a turning point in the story.  I am hoping the Jew will be safe from the inspecting Nazi officers...but I don't know...yet. 
2. I just finished 22 pillowcases to send to ConKerr Cancer for pediatric cancer patients.  Today Gracie and I packaged each case individually and she named each one.  I hope they bring a smile to some children's faces.  Also managed to whip up three Christmas stockings for the tornado survivors - to be sent to Craft Hope. 

3.

I'm scheduled to give a talk at my genealogy society in September.  I have most all the research done and piled on the dining room table in some semblance of order, but I need to get my powerpoint together.  I've been putting it off.  But now the weeks are counting down, so as soon as school starts, that has to become a priority. 

4. We've been taking a few field trips in these last days before school starts.  We walked the canal trail at Independence and visited the fair this week.  I think we've hit all the parks in a 20 - 30 mile radius this summer.  It's a good thing that summer is ending because I'm running out of ideas!

5. I'm working on a story about the next Ordway grandparents - Aaron and Susannah Ordway, gggg grandparents, who were originally from Vermont, but they worked their way into New York, then Pennsylvania and Ohio.  I've never found their burial place.  It is taking me awhile to piece together information we gathered in Warren, PA and Strafford and Tunbridge, VT.  Eventually the story will appear here!

So I am coming back with more family history soon.