Christopher Street

A new hobby

I'm a notorious dilettante. I find a new hobby. I get all excited about it. I buy tons of books, I read everything I can on the Internet. I am totally into it for a week, two.

Then I get bored.

In recent memory, I was going to learn all about wine, I was going to build an online cookbook, I was going to learn to play the piano.

I did learn to knit, and I still do from time to time, but I never bothered to get very good at it. I make a mean scarf, and I can knit the hell out of a washcloth, but that's about it.

So, now I have a new hobby. :)

Last weekend, I was alerted by someone online that Ancestry.com, one of the biggest genealogy research sites on the Internet, was having a free trial. Bored on Memorial Day, I decided to check it out.

Now, I have always thought that genealogy was pretty boring, full of old people and grave rubbings. I watched my great-Aunts talk about it at family reunions every year, and I thought, man--get a real hobby. This one's a snoozer.

And I think that I would have really thought that if I had been involved. I'm not much for HARD work, and traipsing through cemeteries looking for Cousin Jane, who came over from London in 1879 and then died...well, it seemed like it would be a) hard and b) boring.

Hard and boring. It seemed like math class, only in a cemetery.
Ewww.

But then I discovered that a lot of this information is available online. And the Ancestry.com website made it seem like a big puzzle. And I like puzzles. It's like sudoku with dead people.

So, I'm down the rabbit hole.