Random Thoughts

 It has been almost a week since my last visit, and there is a lot going on that perhaps deserves discussion.  I have no real structure to this conversation today, so I will just let it flow.  

To start off, I think mentioning my publishing efforts would be in order.  A few days ago, I sent the Genesis study off to printing through Amazon Kindle, a service I haven't used before.  Whereas in the past Lulu has been my source of self-publishing, I thought I would try something different this time, and it seems to be progressing.  The Genesis study, if you will recall, is based on a series I taught at an adult Sunday School class at St. Mary's Anglican Church in Florida some years back.  It comprises about 38 lessons, and to publish it was a challenge indeed!   Since the book basically wrote itself, all I had to do was essentially copy the lessons from my blog, edit and format them, and then add question sections at the end of each lesson.  Copying and pasting sounds easy, but when you are working with a touch-screen laptop that doesn't have proper mouse function, it can be challenging in all honesty.  After cussing out the computer several times while trying to capture and paste these items, I did finally achieve the objective, but as an act of self-inflicted punishment, I also wanted to start work on my other "bucket list" item, which is my own cookbook of original recipes.  So, this week I am doing that, and oh what fun!  I have a while to go with that yet, as I just have the first couple of chapters captured, and there are at least 7 more to go yet.  I will explain that process now.

The cookbook is a bit different in that it is divided into sections - beef, pork, chicken, etc.  What this entails is going through my food blog, capturing the recipes for each type of dish, and then pasting them into the proper chapter sections.  As of today - Thursday - I have just the beef and pork sections finished, and will be working on poultry, game, and probably seafood tomorrow.  After capturing, formatting, and editing all of that, I then want to add a couple of other new recipes I haven't ever published, especially my mustard paste I do for beef and lamb, as well as the Armenian chaiman recipe I have too.  The book itself will be relatively smaller - I am anticipating a max of about 100 pages - but it will be my cookbook, printed and possibly published as well.  Cooking, and especially creating recipes that cater to my particular culinary quirks, has been an interest of mine from an early age, so it is good to put this into a printed book finally.  If all goes well, I should have it ready to go to press next week at around this time, and we'll see how that works.

A third publishing venture I want to complete during the summer is a book of my old sermons too.  Back in my early 20s, I used to preach in a lot of churches, and I have all those hard-copy sermons still and have placed them in my blog also.  I think a small booklet of those would be a good thing too, so I plan on doing that.  Again, like Genesis and the cookbook, this one kind of wrote itself, and just needs to be organized into a printed format that is bound and publishable.  By the end of July, I should have that one completed as well and ready to send to press.  

These three book ventures - Genesis, the cookbook, and my sermons - have been in my bucket list to do for a long time, and now that time allows me to work on them I am going to get them done now.  I have about one or two other writing projects I want to do, one being a big band music book and the other being a book of my reflections and research in regard to my involvement over the years with Middle Eastern Christian communities, the role of the Jewish people in the course of history, and some apocalyptic ideas I wanted to explore further.  These two books will have to be started from scratch, as I don't have all the material I need to work on them yet, and therefore I will save them for when I get moved and settled into a better place where I can plan somewhat more cohesively.  Had I not lost my original library in Hagerstown, I would have had most of this stuff now to work on, but things happen unfortunately.  So, once I get those done, what is next?  Let me get into that now.

The ultimate writing endeavor I want to undertake is my own life story.  I have been writing stuff down in regard to that for the better of 30 years now, and I also have extensive journals I have kept as well as other things to provide source material.  I also have amassed a small library of other supplemental material - family histories on the various surnames in my background, local histories, etc. - that will be invaluable for providing background and context to the overall story.  That one will take a lot of time to transcribe about 5 volumes of the skeletal framework of my story, as well as inserting new information, formatting (I am using a Turabian format on that work), and turning it into what will probably be a multi-volume set - I am anticipating two to three books out of that one.  I will now detail the plan I have in mind.

The first part of that project will be a sort of family background - I have an extensive family tree I can now trace back about 1800 years, and I want to provide a summary of all that.  However, I don't want it to be just a collection of pedigree charts and stats - which I will have too - but also I want to interject family stories and other colorful information.   The second part of the project is my personal story, and it will begin from my birth until I am 60, or at least that is the plan.  I am choosing 60 as a cutoff point for a lot of my writing as by that point I am anticipating being in the place I should be in, and thus I can settle and consolidate information to make things happen.  The plan is to have all that completed by the time I am 65.  Once all that is finished, I plan on archiving all my personal papers with someone I can trust, and then making at least 3 copies of all my work - one is mine, one is to be donated to my hometown library in Parsons, and the third I will designate for my heir, whoever that will be.   I am also hoping to at some point find a way to have all my personal papers digitized as well, so that they can be better preserved - that will be a monumental task in itself, so I am enlisting some help for that as I have several binders and bins of material I would like to preserve on a drive of some sort.  This means that for anyone who comes after me who wants to research family or local history, they will have a rich reservoir to draw from.  It took a lot of hard work for me to do all this, so I want to make it easier for the next generation to find what they need too. 

There is a certain morbidity in talking about these types of things, and often if I start to get too far ahead of myself, I start to give myself a headache and need to regroup.  However, I feel I am at a place in my life now where I need to start thinking about these things, and thankfully I have been laying groundwork for decades.  Much of my research and other things has gone back 40 years or more, and if I had one regret, it was that I didn't start sooner.  I have kept calendar records since my high school days, and I have been journaling since I was probably around 26 years old now.   Additionally, I have kept every school record, tax record, medical record, and other things for years, and have volumes of those saved and organized as well.  Even with the chaos that happened in October 2024 when I almost lost everything, I made it a priority to get my personal papers packed and preserved first, so they have been with me this whole time.  Not having a permanent home of my own has complicated things somewhat, but thankfully it's not impossible to take things where I need them to go.  But, I think with putting things on a flash drive so they are easier to carry may be a good thing in the long run too, and then stash the original copies in a place where no one can bother them until I need them.  I started that process already with my music collection, and so far I have almost every recording I used to own preserved on flash drives in a small case that I can fit into my hand.  I still have a smaller collection of both CDs and LP records, but the bigger part of my collection is very much preserved now.   However, I will need some help in the future to really put all these plans into motion, and that will be an ongoing exploration. 

I have been looking at things like imemories.com to see what they do, and while they will restore pictures, VHS, and DVDs,  I don't technically see anything about digitizing documents or anything.  So, I will be exploring that further later.  Digitizing the bins and bins of personal papers, photos, and media I have will be a long-term challenge that I will want to possibly contract help for, and I also want to make sure I have the funds to make it happen as that could be a project costing thousands of dollars. I think for a start it would be good to maybe take a lot of the old VHS and DVDs I have, get them digitized first on a drive, and then add them to my personal archive for later.  After I get moved and resettled, I will start researching that some more as well.

I have a lot of mixed feelings as I write this - I am intimidated at the bigger picture when I see it, I also am being made aware of my own mortality as well, and I also garner a bit of peace knowing my hard work can be preserved and useful to someone.  I am not sure overall what is going to happen, and I also cannot predict my own time when I pass into my eternal reward, but I want to prepare as much as I can for all of that. I am 56 years old after all, and for the most part I have only had two grandparents that made it past the age of 80.  While in many ways I care for myself better than my forebears did, I also am uncertain of what will happen in the immediate future - which is why I now want to offer some closing advice to younger people who may read this.

I cannot emphasize enough how integral it is to preserve everything - you may be called a packrat or  a hoarder for doing so, but it is an important responsibility that should not be entered into lightly.   Also, start doing this as young as possible - if you are still a child yet, it is not too late to start keeping personal journals and also a pocket calendar of some sort to write day-to-day things down on.  And, also save all of your school projects - any papers or other projects you create, save them.  Also, save things like tax records, employment documents, medical records, educational records, and other things - they come in handy on a practical day-to-day basis as well as preserving for posterity.   Once you start that process, think also of permanency - you don't want to lose any of that stuff, so find a place that is secure and guarantees you won't lose it due to circumstance.  Also, write a life story for yourself - the way I do this is to do a reflection of several pages at the end of a year in a notebook, so that you have those things fresh in your memory and can document them.  Finally, take advantage of modern technology, as it can be your most valuable asset.  If you can preserve things electronically, do it.  Paper tends to deteriorate over time, and if you scan things and save them electronically, it extends their life.   It may mean a shoebox full of flash drives in time, but that's OK - you will have an entire library that fits into one hand at your complete disposal, and it will be something you can hold onto even in the worst of circumstances.  Taking measures like this will ensure your legacy is preserved, even if something happens in the future that may threaten to destroy it.  

Thank you for allowing me to share today, and I will see you next visit.