How to fill time in retirement

I enjoy working on the old family photos and connecting it to the family tree. But it becomes very easy for me to become focused on small details while the bigger picture and goal gets waylaid. I have a tendency to be very detailed oriented, I think it is my math background. But it can make a simple project with a reasonable goal become a lifetime adventure. I would like to present a short brief of what I mean. I had two pictures of family members that I just scanned. I like to do four things with each photo. One, make the digital picture as good as I can from the original hard copy. Two, identify the people in the photo. If relatives, I have the family tree to help me. Three, identify the time of the photo, when was it taken. And four, place the picture at a location, where was it taken. None of these are easy and can be time-consuming. Here are the two photos: The first picture is of a little girl standing on a bridge. It looks like there is a cemetery up the road behind her....

After my last post, a friend of mine asked why I did not include any family tree information. He suggested pictures of the trees and such. It did get me thinking, and I realized I could share some of that information. I use Family Tree Maker and my current tree has 2,704 people in it. Printed that as a tree takes hundreds of pages, that I am not going to share. But I will share some of the information. If you ever start a tree, you have to know who are you going to include. I decided early on that I was more interested in my ancestry and bloodline, and not so much who my third, fourth and fifth cousins are. I guess you could put the whole world into your tree, but it is hard enough to get information on direct relatives. Here is the pedigree report for me. This was saved as a PDF so I had to capture it as an image. Pedigree Chart for BJ Provoncha This page includes five generations. I actually ran the report for nine generations, and that is why there are continuati...

Over 20 years ago, I bought a software package called Family Tree Maker. I spent hundreds of hours looking up family tree information on CDs I had bought from the company. I had a collection of over 30 CDs and that was thousands of other trees from families that also used the FTM. Then in 2010, I decided to upgrade to Family Tree Maker 2011. It was a completely new design of the software and it would import the tree I had created from the old software app. The problem was, the CDs were no longer usable. The software had been bought by Ancestry.com. Now you had to spend money to search the website instead of buying CDs. I said when I got the time, I would buy a monthly (or yearly)  subscription and continue the family tree. Well, seven years later, I have since retired, and I still have not bought that subscription. My focus the last three years has been scanning in old photos. That project is nearing completion (I tell myself this but I keep finding more photos) and I have begun sc...

At the Brevard Zoo, they have two separate aviaries. The one on the left and the one on the right. These photos I am sharing first were taken in the right aviary where the lorikeets hang out. In this particular area, they have a Mountain Peacock-Pheasant and three Northern quail, also known as the bobwhite quail. On my first visit, the pheasant was sleeping and the quail were running along the fence under the bushes. This time, the three quail were nesting in the dirt and the Mountain Peacock-Pheasant was circling them and trying to impress them with his plumage. I am not sure if they can actually mate. What would you call the result, a queasant, or maybe a total phail. Whatever, enjoy the pheasant as he prances around the quail.  The quail looked kind of nervous. But this peacock-pheasant had some moves and attitude.... Just to show you, this guy was prancing around the bobwhite circle... He wanted to make sure all three got a look at the product... He was maki...

I like to go to the Brevard Zoo and take pictures. It gives me practice for when I go on my next Expedition, but in reality I just like the animals. For about six monthes, the Australia-Asia section was closed for renovation. It recently re-opened as Land of Change: Australia and Beyond. It is really nice and I have been twice since it opened a few weeks ago. Let me give you a tour... The entrance is the same as before but the changes are immediately noticable. There is a new open-air theater where they perform demonstrations. On this day, they were showing the dingos. I did not stop in because it was crowded. I wanted to get to the other new areas. One of the first new displays I came to was the small hut containing two Komodo Dragons. I had heard they had got the pair, and the new hut is nice. There is a nice sign on the entrance. My only problem with the hut is kind of ironic. I have been complaing that most monkeys are in caged pens and my camera likes to auto-focus on the ...