Now I'm back.

I got back midday today - a bit too late to make some non-essential meetings. (The essential one is tomorrow).

The trip was good. The meetings went fine; it's just, meetings are sometimes kind of exhausting, you are expected to be somewhere from 8 until 5 or so and there's so much information to be considered and included.

I will say that I noticed a new trend at the meetings this year, one that kind of distresses me: a lot of people would sit in sessions where someone was speaking, and they'd be tapping away, texting or playing games on tier cell phones. Or in one case, sitting there with their lap top open, hooked up to the free wireless provided by the campus, checking e-mail and the news.

I realize there's probably nothing that can be done to stem the tide of people who believe they can multitask, but frankly, it's kind of rude. And it's distracting - the light from the laptop screen several rows in front of me made it harder to see the screen where the presentation was being done.

And I'd be very dismayed if I were a grad student presenting their dissertation work, or someone introducing exciting new findings, and see the faces of much of the audience lit by the glow of their cell phones, as they look down at the tiny screen and ignore the graphs and charts and photographs that (I know) take hours to prepare.

I think we will eventually have to conclude, as a society, that either (a) we have to put away the gadgets when someone else is speaking to us or (b) we continue down an increasingly self-absorbed course, where we believe that we, the individuals, are the only ones that matter, and to blazes with the feelings or work or whatever of other people, and we continue to multitask and fragment our attention.

(I brought my knitting to the meetings, but only had it out during breaks).

(I also have to say I'm deeply dismayed by the Virgin Mobile ad - the one where the priest/pastor says "let us pray" and everyone leans down and starts texting. I realize it's meant to be a humorous parody, but still.)

I probably won't be going to the next round of this group's meetings - they're going to be in Winnipeg. I'd have to get a passport and I'd probably have to fly, the thought of which makes me come out in hives.

After the meetings (my poster was on the last day and it was originally on a different day but it got moved, luckily my travel plans were sufficiently flexible - though apparently most people had already left, I had very little discussion with anyone about the poster and its results), I had a few days to visit family.

One big thing that we did, my mother went through the small stock of old photographs she had and we picked out a number to have copied. There's a nice one of her grandparents (her mother's parents), who were farmers, standing in front of their farmhouse. And an old photograph-postcard her father had made of himself when he was a young man out working at lumber camps in the Pacific Northwest. And one of my grandmother and my two aunts, which, while it was probably taken before I was born, they still looked much as I remembered them. (I don't have a good photograph of my grandmother as an adult).

It's funny that some of the ones I particularly wanted - the one of my grandfather as a young man, the great-grandparents - were of people I never knew. (My grandfather died when I was some seven months old, and my great-grandparents all died before I was born).

I also have photographs of one of my sets of other great-grandparents - actually, both sets on my father's side. His maternal grandparents (I have been told I resemble my great-grandmother Clara), and his paternal grandparents (she looks like she had a good sense of humor, there is a slight smile on her face, and he has a kind face - I think he's the one who was part owner of a shoe store in Chicago, and when he died, all the employees chipped in to pay for a fancier headstone than the family could afford).

I think for me the desire to have the old photographs around - along with my interest in where the people in my family came from - has something to do with wanting a sense of groundedness. Of feeling like I have roots. None of my family has very long-time history anywhere (Well, until you go back to my Burt ancestors, several generations prior; they seem to have lived in Massachusetts for a good long time). And sometimes it's easy, when you live alone, especially in a very "family oriented" place to feel a little beached or stranded.

It's interesting looking at my mother's family history - it's now down, really, to a heavily New England descended from Scots/British group on her mother's side, where the earlier generations all have given names like Lyman and Linus and Patience and Meribeth. And then her father's father's side is all French, with surnames that sound romantic to me (Berthiaume, Cyr...). And they lived in Canada, at least, after they left France (which was apparently VERY long ago).

I have to admit, I think sometime (when I have a passport, you need that now), it would be interesting to make the long trek up to Quebec and Nova Scotia and at least see the sites of some of the towns where they lived. (And closer to home, I think sometime I should get more information on the branch of my father's family that lived near Covington, Louisiana, and maybe sometime take a trip over there just to see what I can see. I don't expect to find any distant cousins or anything, and I don't even expect to find the old homesite (apparently it burned many years ago). But still, there's something about it. The sense that people who were in my family tree lived there, once.