Dan and I attended a really fun virtual event today. A good friend Clint Buxton organized a mock town meeting with speakers from the historical society they were reading from Richmond town meetings over the last 200 or so years.… Clint was is the perfect host because he currently runs Richmond County… Like his father before him. As a matter of fact this years marks the first time in 200 years that the town has not gotten together face-to-face on the first Tuesday in March to debate the towns business.… That regard he was the perfect house for this event. He brought the meeting to order with the Pledge of Allegiance just like the real meetings… And then started reading the organizational principles I have some time in the 19th century. This included that women were only allowed to vote in the school election… That was very strange to hear.… But over the 45 minutes people read Old accounts of the same kind of current business that we transact.… There were reports from the library trustees, the constables, the police department, the cemetery committee, and of course the school board.… In the school board report we were gratified to hear that town school number four (our home for the last 40 years) was recently painted and re-slated in the early part of the 1900s… So it was noted that the school lacked sufficient scientific equipment for education… I was glad to report that we’ve done a lot To address that in the last Nearly 40 years :-)
It was a lot of fun… But I have to admit that I’m pretty sad that we won’t actually have a physical town meeting. I attend every year that I’m in town.… And that’s been quite a few in the last four decades.
I am very proud to live in a place where democracy is such a hands-on exercise… It strikes me this would be good for the rest of the world to do as well
Wow… Just type in the name “Indian river reservoir”… Feels culturally incorrect. But that’s where we went today. We took a socially distant hike with our friends Ron and Paula their son Nick his daughter Sophia and her friend Deb and a bunch of dogs. We haven’t been To this reservoir… Which is an Essex… For at least 35 years. The last time I recall being there I got a very unfortunate sunburn while floating on an innertube on a part of your body you’re not supposed to get sunburnEd. -ouch !
We were all properly closed today… Though it’s clearly almost March weather. By afternoon it was just around the freezing mark and there was a little freezing drizzle coming down. The next week looks like a crazy March mix… With highs in the 40s and lows in the single digits
It was great walking the reservoir today. It’s about a 2 1/4 mile loop… But at the end we realize that Deb had lost part of her leash so we walked it backwards… So about 4 1/2 miles which was great. They gave us plenty of time to catch up with friends we hadn’t seen in a long time. Even at a distance that was wonderful
Perhaps the other big news today is that I finally got another Covid haircut. I was starting to look a little wild… So I guess that’s the point
Anyway… Not a bad day. I needed a nice down day. Work is really terrible these days And I needed to think of something else.
I daddy these days we get to dive a little bit more into the past. Here’s a couple of pictures that Diane scanned in today… So nice to take these visits to the past
In parallel , our friend paul is digitizing a ton of videos . Here’s one he found today of our grind paul Webb playing piano at our wedding party. Man can he play !
Is Diane goes through the process of scanning this photo she’ll occasionally share some with me and the boys… It’s so fun to see these things. Today’s theme was costumes… Our boys were always in customs growing up
Another part of our digitization journey happened this afternoon
I dropped nearly 200 pieces of media (VHS, 8 mm tapes, mini eight, DVDs, 8 mm film, real to reel tape, DVDs) off at our good friend Paul’s for digitization. It’s great catching up with him… 
We’ve been friends for almost 40 years… And have so much great history together. It was great reliving some of that today… Can’t wait until we can all get back together
I also can’t wait to see what’s on all these tapes we found. A great shout out to Paul and Ellen at videosynchracies For making this so easy. Paul has absolutely every piece of transcription equipment there is… I completely recommend him !!!!
