Bike Ride

 

I had a nice bike ride after work today. This route is fairly similar to one Christina and I took on Sunday, but this time I brought my GPS receiver. It was just shy of 6 miles round trip. About three and a half miles were on-road, so I'm looking forward to getting a bike rack for the car, so we can start closer to the trail. We actually ordered one recently that attaches to the spare tire, but we need to get someone to install it.

Waymarking Sunday Drive

Last weekend, when I dropped Cheetah off at the kennel, I took Route 2 back, since I was headed towards Laurel. I noticed a number of historical markers along the road. So today, after I picked her up, we went north on Route 2 and found 5 markers (I also found one on Route 4, before I picked her up). Surprisingly, none of these is among the 259 historical markers already waymarked, so I'll have to write these up later. That'll bring me up to 8 posted in this category, only two short of my 10 in "You Are Here" signs. I'm not quite sure why these are my favorite two categories.

 

 

 

 

4% More German

In honor of (not celebrating) St. Patrick's Day, I decided to take another look at a project that I last seriously pondered about eight years ago -- genealogy, or more specifically trying to figure out my ethnicity.

I have 256 great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents -- well, we all do. So if I can figure out their ancestry, I can figure out how many parts in 256 I am whatever. For example, my great-great-grandfather, William Grantham, came from England. For the sake of simplicity, I'll assume that all 16 of his great-great-grandparents (my great⁶-grandparents) came from England, too. So that contribution alone tells me I'm 16/256=1/16 (6.25%) English. Add in another English great-great-grandparent on my mother's side and I'm 32/256 (12.5%) English.

When I last left things in 2001, I had figured out 140 of these 256 parts. I was hoping with more information on the web these days, I'd be able to make progress with little further effort (ah, the American dream).

I succeeded, but I didn't make it much further. My paternal grandmother (Oma) has the most unresolved lineage, so I was happy to figure out more about her. Her great-grandmother, Elizabeth Keffer, is of German descent. Her great³-grandfather, Peter Putman, was born in Germany.

So that's 10 more parts out of 256. 10/256=5/128=3.90625%. So I'm about 4% more German than I realized. Approximate tallies to date: 24% German, 14% Scottish, 13% English, 6% Welsh, 2% Dutch, 41% Unknown.

None of this is too important, but if I find any Irish ancestry by next St. Patrick's Day, I promise to put on a silly leprechaun hat and celebrate to make up for previous days gone unobserved.

On a more substantive note, if you go to Google Books and search for "Alexander Cairns" and Wisconsin, the first result is for my great-great-grandfather, who is listed as a leading progressive in Grant County, Wisconsin.

Tourney Time

Well, once again, I'm filling out my bracket. I've uploaded a copy of mine from Yahoo! Sports. I'm filling out brackets on 3 different sites. My goal is to pick the same teams on each site (tracking one bracket is a waste of time, let alone three), but in the past, I've messed that up and ended up with slightly different teams on different sites.

Waymarking Category Hunt

Last August, I mentioned "Waymarking Bingo", the goal of getting 20 categories in a row in my "waymarking grid". At the time, I had 4 in a row, now I have...6. You can see them diagonally above from F22 to J27. For what it's worth, they are "Doorways of the World", "Burger King Restaurants", "Municipal Flags", "Newsstands/Newsagencies", "Art Deco - Art Noveau" and "Tennis Facilities."

Overall, I have 202 of 874, for a 23.1% hit rate. This seems like I'm not making any progress, but I see from last August's post that I was at 73 of 752, or 9.7%. Also, I'm missing 672 categories as opposed to August's 679, so I'm even making slight progress on that metric.

Since I'm not going anywhere this month (haven't even left Maryland), I'm trying to post some categories within walking distance of our house. I've done synagogues, Presbyterian churches, Baptist churches, Presbyterian churches and Lutheran churches. These are all easy to find nearby, and I can put them on my "ignore" list when I'm done, since I don't feel the need to see more of these when traveling. (I also found a couple of Civil War memorials last weekend near the farm where I was buying beef.)

Schadenfreude

I read recently that Bank of America stock fell on fears that the government may take over the bank. I would be very happy to see this happen.

When I moved out to California in 1992, I needed a local bank. First, it was hard to do cross-country banking with my credit union. Second, I needed to establish residency, if I was going to spend a second year in school there. I chose Bank of America through a fairly simple process: I walked from my apartment to campus, and chose it because it had a branch along the way. I was very happy with BofA, and was a little bit sad to close my account when I moved to Georgia the following year. But in 1993, there weren't really national banks. So I set off with a rather large cashier's check locked in my glove compartment.

When I got to Georgia, I decided that I was going to put down roots by choosing a bank with some sort of local flavor in its name. The first one I came across, "Southern Heritage", seemed a little too flavorful for my tastes. (In Georgia, the word "heritage" is generally code for the Confederacy or for African-Americans. In this case, I think it was the former.) My next choice was "BankSouth," which seemed more like it.

I had a happy banking relationship with BankSouth, until shortly before I was about to leave Georgia, when they were swallowed up by NationsBank. First of all, this was an anti-competitive merger -- these were the two main choices in much of the South, so combining them didn't help the consumer. Secondly, NationsBank had completely awful customer service. They instituted a program where, when you called in or visited a branch, their computers would determine how profitable you were to them, so they could figure out whether or not to be nice to you. Also, after the merger, people in their branches were completely flummoxed by my attempts to pay my BankSouth car loan -- yet they refused to give me new loan coupons.

When I moved back to Maryland, I happily closed my NationsBank account, refinanced my car with the credit union and have not been a bank customer ever since. In the late 1990s, NationsBank took over Bank of America and appropriated its name. I guess they figured that they could erase their (deserved) reputation for bad customer service by buying the name of a bank with good customer service. If the entity responsible for all this gets wiped out, so much the better.