Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Murphy's Law and Genealogy


We are in Salt Lake City, in the library, staying at the Plaza Hotel. It took two carts and three men to unload Lil' Red yesterday afternoon. They took our "stuff" to the room, but we had to put it away. Whew!

It is apparent that we are not as young as we were a year ago. There was no rushing to the library last night to get in an hour or two of research. We groaned and moaned, took showers and crashed.

This morning I began the day on the second floor in microfilm. If anything could go wrong, it did. YGGG #2 made magnets for the file cabinets so we could easily return the film to the proper file drawer. The magnets worked good except the second time I used them somebody removed one and placed it on another file cabinet and threw the other one on the floor. The next "go wrong" was when I accidentally let a reel of film wind off the spool.

By that time I was tired of wandering around in the dark and joined YGGG #2 on the third floor in the books. This was a good move as I finally received some rewards for my research. However, when I got back to the room for lunch, I discovered that I had left my photocopy card in the machine. I tired calling YGGG #2 four times, but she can't hear/feel the vibrate on her phone. Fortunately somebody had turned in the card so I retrieved in once back in the library.

When YGGG #2 went to the room for lunch, she returned with a letter from the management of the hotel. I thought we were being kicked out, but instead we are being displaced. They are carpeting our floor, so we will be moving to a different room on Friday. Once again we will be packing and unpacking.

Since last year some changes have been made at the library. There are scanners that plug into your computer or flash drive through the USB port. That makes it easy to scan books and film. How great is that?

Tonight I tried to make photocopies with my hotel room card. It doesn't work! There are signs in the library to turn cell phones to vibrate. They failed to post signs to turn the sound down on computers. All of a sudden this afternoon on a web page on my laptop, it was announced very loudly that I had won a $1,000 gift certificate from Walmart.

Check back later. We will be in a different room and hopefully we will have found ancestors lurking around the corner in the library.

YGGG#1 - Ruby

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