Wow! It's been exactly one year since my last post. I still haven't really decided if I care to make the commitment to blogging. Funny thing is, I've got two of these things that I'm neglecting. One's supposed to be my "professional" blog, but I don't give it any time either.

So in my last post I announced my engagement. We got married just weeks later - we were only engaged for a month! After the wedding we moved to South Carolina, but truth be told we don't really like it here all that much. It's okay, but we left behind all our friends and our family. So now I'm trying desperately to find a job back in AL so we can move back and have friends again. That said, we really don't regret moving out here. We needed to get away from our hometown together and try living on our own for a while. It did two things - proved to us both that we could handle married life without our parents' interference, and convinced us that AL is, indeed, home, which neither of us wanted to admit when we were there.

We'll see what happens. In the meantime, I've got two weeks to knit Christmas presents for five people, so I'd better get back to it!

I'm engaged! S. popped the question on Thanksgiving day and we've set the date for July 26th. The fact that I'm posting this so long after the fact just shows how important my blog is to me these days. He asked me to marry him over Xbox 360 Live. It was awesome! He asked a bunch of people from the internet forums he frequents to send messages to his Live account saying, "J., will you marry S.?" So all day I kept seeing popups while we watched TV saying he had new messages. Right before we left to go to his parents' house for Thanksgiving dinner he said he should probably check his messages to see if it was anything important. When he opened his inbox every message on the screen was a marriage proposal!
In other news, I'm still working on the scarf for my mother's Xmas present. It's coming along nicely, but when I get it to the right length I'll have to bring it to work so V. can help me weave in the loose ends. I hope to finish it this weekend, cuz I'd love to have time before Christmas to whip up a pair of fingerless mitts. I'm also working a second job, which means 12 hour days Monday through Friday. At least I have my weekends free for wedding planning! And knitting, I hope.

Well, the Weightless Scarf encountered tragedy just a week before my "deadline" (aka - my friend's birthday). So it's now going to be a Christmas present - IF I can manage it. In the meantime, I needed something a bit simpler, so I'm knitting the Midwest Moonlight scarf by Ivy Bigelow from Scarf Style. It's fabulous!! It's simple, fun, and beautiful. It's going to be my mom's Christmas present. She's allergic to both wool and acrylic, so she can never find scarves in the store. So I'm making this one out of a fabulous cotton yarn. I'm trying to keep one thing on the needles at a time, but the colder it gets outside the more I'm tempted to go ahead and cast on some fingerless mitts for myself. My hands are always cold!
In other news... I GOT MY RAVELRY INVITE!!!!!!!!!! Yay! It's so much fun. I've posted all my needles and yarn stash and books, joined three groups and found the pattern I will use when I do cast on those fingerless gloves.

On the work front, things are looking up. We're actually ahead of schedule for the first time in two months. And we're having a meeting in the near future to discuss "what we want out of our jobs" because, in the words of our boss, "we can make these jobs into whatever we want them to be." That's music to my ears!

*Sigh* I got my needles and yarn out for the weightless scarf (mentioned yesterday) and, lo and behold, it calls for circulars, not straights. So at some point this week I have to go across town to my lys and pick up some circular size 15 needles. I guess this is going to be a Christmas present instead of a birthday present. With S. out of town this week I had planned on getting the house really, really clean for once. But now it looks as though I'll be working late nearly every night this week, so I have to decide which is more important - relaxing with a good book and/or some knitting, or cleaning the house. Ugh. Well, at any rate, I can pick up the needles when I go across town to have dinner with the 'rents. That way I only have to make the drive once. Whether I actually use the needles this week is another story. I'll keep you posted.

OK, so I've changed the theme of my blog. It's now just sort of about my life in general. There will still be posts about genealogy research, but also about work, life, books and knitting. Maybe blogging will stick this time. Who knows, but it's worth a try.

I started knitting back in, hmm, I don't know - June? My coworker and friend, V., taught me how. I'm still only a novice, but so far I've done a couple of afghan squares, a scarf and a half, one fingerless glove (I wasn't totally happy with it, so I don't know if I want to make the second one or start over the first with a different pattern), and ten flowers for V.'s bridal shower. I got the pattern for these from Blue Bell Knitting Guild. Thanks! They were a big hit!


My next project is going to be a Weightless Shawl from Mason Dixon Knitting for my friend P.'s birthday. I'll post some pics once I get it started.

This weekend I took every bit of information that has already been collected on all sides of my family and compiled it into one pedigree. There's a lot of it, and it took a long time, but now that it's done it's much easier to sort through! My parents have asked me to concentrate on my maternal grandmother's family, so that's what I'm doing now. At first I was all excited because according to what my distant cousin had put together there was a husband and wife in this family line (my 4th grandparents?) who died on the same day in 1748 - both young. That could have led to a really fascinating story - a fire or a murder or something. Alas, when I found other people's records on Rootsweb it turned out that they both died "sometime after" that day in 1748. So no juicy story there. But that's okay, that leaves me with the mystery of when they did actually die. I'm also stuck on immigration records. The man I'm looking for came over from Scotland in the last half of the 18th century and settled in PA. But did he sail directly to PA? And can I narrow down the date of his sailing? And why, oh why, does he have to have one of the most generic names in the world - William Wilson?
A few things I need to do:

• get my printer working!
• find and read one really good book about doing online genealogy research (since that's all I can do right now)
• get back to work.

And so to work....

I know that there are a lot of steps to take before I can actually be a Professional Genealogist. I just don't know in what order I should take those steps. I need to

• Find a mentor
• Join the local Genealogical Society
  
• Take certification classes
• Get field experience
• Advertise and get clients
• Take certification exams & apply for certification
• Take accreditation exams & apply for accreditation
• Set up a sole proprietorship or LLC

Here's the thing, though - which comes first? The coursework or the field experience? The getting clients or the setting up a sole proprietorship? The field experience or the getting clients? And then there are obstacles at each step. I know the names of several PGs in my hometown (who are apparently no longer taking new clients), but I know nothing about their personalities or whether they would be good mentors, let alone willing to take on a mentee. As for the certification classes, they cost money, which I don't have a lot of extra right now. And finally, am I allowed to advertise myself as an independent researcher without registering as a sole proprietorship? Or do I have to register first? All of these obstacles can be overcome with a little bit of investigating, but until I get the time to investigate they are all floating around in my head worrying me. Thank goodness the weekend is coming up. And my boss is back in town today (briefly) so I can talk with her about coming in earlier and leaving earlier. It'll all come together with a little patience.