The Unemployment Line

Little did I know that earlier in the week, when I visited Colleen Fitzpatrick's great site called Forensic Genealogy, and took her weekly quiz to identify the photographer and the name of the bread line, would I see myself in such a place by the end of the week.

I've been following the decline of my current law firm, Heller Ehrman LLP which is over 119 years old and was founded by part of the Levi Strauss family in San Francisco. But having worked for "Big Law" as it is called for close to 20 years, I've weather similar storms.

This time, given the economic climate I just don't think that Heller will come through. There is lots of press in the legal industry about this and some of my colleagues have even started a support blog which lists resources and ideas as to how to handle the news and end of your job.

To be honest, I've been considering a career change over the past year, perhaps due to some mid-life crisis thing having turned 45 in December. So, in the tradition of my ancestors who often not only took lemons and made lemonade, but would also sell said lemonade for a profit, I am starting some new ventures. I guess the over-arching project is what I call Thomas 2.0.

If you go and visit one of my two new web domains (http://www.thomas20.com or http://www.thomasmacentee.com), you'll see what I've been up to over the past few days. I've taught myself CSS for designing web site style sheets, worked on data entry and formatting, etc. It has been a fun project and one that has kept my mind off of work.

Plus it is a way for me to hang out my shingle. So if you know of anyone who needs a "project manager, web 2.0 enthusiast, knowledge manager, technology educator, blogger, history geek, cyber-sleuth, virtual assistant" please let me know. I'm going into business for myself and I know I will enjoy it. The same quality work I love doing for my genealogy colleagues here, at Unclaimed Persons and over at Bootcamp for Genea-Bloggers is what I'd love to do for a living. Thomas 2.0 work is geared more towards legal technology but not limited strictly to that field.

I hope that I can keep up with the same quality posts my readers expect here at DAF. One feature I am suspending temporarily since it is so difficult to prepare is the One This Date post. I will be posting over the weekend on different ways of automating the report preparation but right now all the work is manual and very time consuming.

At the end of the day though, I know it could be worse. I am lucky to have low expenses and some money socked away for rainy days. And it is pouring right now. I was always taught growing up that someone always had it worse than I did and complaining and crying didn't really solve the problem. As you can see I was raised in a "no excuses" household and it is during times like these that I truly am thankful for the great job that Mom did with me.

And because I can never resist turning a post into a prompt, and I know times are tough all over - anyone want to relate a family story or two about unemployment, or perhaps winning the lottery, or even having built a successful business?

Photo courtesy of Forensic Genealogy - I don't want to reveal the photographer or name of the photo since it would undermine Colleen's quiz feature for the week!

Genea-Bloggers: A B.A.D. Force

As Jasia at Creative Gene, Lori at Smoky Mountain Family Historian and Terry at Hill Country of Monroe County, Mississippi have all mentioned, the next Blog Action Day (B.A.D.) will be held on October 15, 2008 with the theme being Poverty. Any blogger can participate by registering at the Blog Action Day website.

One exciting bit of news and proof that the genea-bloggers movement is a force to contend with, is this: we've been able to convince the organizers to add Genealogy as its own category!

This is kind of a big deal since many times we find ourselves being lumped into the History category on many sites. While not trying to disparage any history-related blogs and bloggers, it really goes a long way for genea-bloggers to have their own identity and see Genealogy as a category when participating in blogging functions or sites such as B.A.D. and Alltop.

So, if you've already signed up and registered your blog, return to the B.A.D. site and change your settings and use the Genealogy category. If you've not signed up yet, what are you waiting for?

My Stuff And What My Ancestors Would Think About It

Larry at Passing It On, has a great post which is sure to start the cogs and wheels in your brain spinning this morning: What would your ancestors think about your stuff?

He poses this question in light of how Americans buy, use and dispose of items and comparing such consumption to the practices of our ancestors. Well, it certainly got me to thinking!

I've noticed various consumption patterns among my family:

- my mother was a product of the Great Depression and lived with 11 other siblings. This meant there often was not enough to go around in terms of food. It also meant there were never any new clothes but hand-me-downs from older siblings. The most profound effect was my mother's purchasing habits later in life. As I cleaned out my mother's house over the past three years, I noticed that she had bought almost 10 of every food item, whether she needed them or not. Cake mixes, canned goods, spices, baking goods, etc. At first I attributed such consumerism to her early-onset Alzheimer's Disease. But then I remembered that Mom always shopped like this. And we never threw anything away! Much of the food had to be disposed of during the cleaning process: most food pantries would not accept expired dry goods, open items but would gladly take canned goods.

- my great-grandparents were definitely thrifty. I think my great-grandmother (Therese McGinnis Austin) still had the first nickel she ever received. They too lived through the Great Depression and my great-grandmother grew up very poor in New York City at the turn of the 20th century. The farmhouse that she and my great-grandfather (John Ralph Austin) purchased in 1947 as a retirement home was stocked with lots of items I would now consider antiques. And my great-grandmother was the first "green" person in our family as far as I was concerned: she had canvas and mesh shopping bags to take to the store; she would sort all the garbage and place organic items in the compost bin; she would make use of all the produce, nuts and fruits she could find near the house; an item was used until it was beyond death.

As I get older and more in middle-age, I find that not only do I not need as much, but I don't want much. And my trick to minimizing consumerism: downsize. At home here in Chicago, we live in a small 2 bed/2 bath condo with almost no storage space. This has forced us to justify each and every purchase and decide if we really need it and where we will put it.

Recycling has always been big with me after living in California for close to 20 years. San Francisco had a great program that worked very well. Chicago's program has been dismal up until recently. They had a "blue bag" program where you actually had to pay for the bags into which you placed your recyclables! Now, our neighborhood is one of the first to have tall, bright blue recycle bins. My only complaint is that they aren't emptied but twice a month and are constantly overflowing.

Finally, one way in which I've changed my consumerism is shopping at and donating to my local non-profit run thrift store. I use the Brown Elephant which benefits the Howard Brown Health Center here in Chicago. I keep a large bin in the hallway closet and over a three month period I will add items that I don't want or can't use anymore. Then I'll haul it up Clark Street and drop it off. I also shop at Brown Elephant especially when I need a book to read on a long trip or on vacation. They sell hard cover books for $1 and if I leave it on the plane I don't feel so bad about it. Also, if I finish the book, I'll either leave it at the hotel if they have a library/reading room or I'll drop it off at a local thrift store.

I think many of my ancestors who came before my great-grandparents would be amazed and even a bit outraged at the level of consumerism we see these days.