Recent Moments
Medium Stories
Recent Moments
I was desperate, so I reactivated my Facebook account 🕸️
Searching for Sally 🔎
Receiving help 🤝
Grandad’s early arrival and health stories 🏥 🩺
Recent TV shows we’ve watched 📺
(For All Mankind, Frasier, Car SOS, and Roswell)The locking wheel nuts are finally gone 🛞
I used my new laptop out of the house 💻
I modified a cheap coffee frother ☕️
A new driver is taking my son out for the evening 🤞
I find out next week about my eldest sister’s visit 🙊
1. I was desperate, so I reactivated my Facebook account 🕸️
My quest for information about my dad’s family photos led me to reactivate my old Facebook account.
It was strange to see it again after three years, and I noticed I’d lost 20% of my friends. But I didn’t care. Maybe they didn’t like seeing a dormant account in their friends list.
Then I looked at the messages I’d exchanged with a now-deceased relative ten years ago. I remembered her mentioning my dad’s relatives, so I was hopeful.
While the messages did contain helpful information, they lacked the details about one of my aunts that I’d hoped to find.
2. Searching for Sally 🔎
I knew my dad’s sister Sally was in at least one of his old photos, but I wasn’t sure what she looked like.
Decades ago, there was a tragic accident in which she was knocked down and killed. I don’t remember her, but my relatives used to talk of her fondly.
“Everybody loved her. The church was full at her funeral,” my aunt Jessie once said.
I wish my relatives had labelled those old photos. With almost nobody left to ask, I was running out of ideas. That’s when I started a free trial on ancestry.co.uk and started researching my family tree.
Things went well at first, and I found nearly all my dad’s siblings.
But there was no sign of Sally.
I tried everything I could think of, but she didn’t seem to have existed! Eventually, I found a distant relative willing to share their family tree with me. Right away, I saw some familiar faces, including a photo of my dad I’d not seen before.
And then —
I saw Sally! 😊
Even though I would only have been 5 or 6 when she died, and I don’t remember meeting her, I felt emotional to identify her photo in my dad’s album at last.
She had been hard to find because she was born one year before her parents got married, and she’d been given her mother’s maiden name, unlike her younger siblings.
She looked like quite a character, sitting at an outdoor table with numerous bottles and glasses.
I also recognised two of Sally’s daughters in the family tree and remember visiting them with my family in the 80s. One of them had been widowed young, not long after her mum Sally was killed.
Childhood memories of an unspoken sense of tragedy about that part of the family returned to me.
Here’s to you, Sally! 🍻
3. Receiving help 🤝
I find it hard to ask for help — and to accept it — but I’m getting better at it.
My fiancée Stephanie is good at recognising faces across many decades, and she has been a great help in matching people in my old photos.
On several occasions, my eldest son has shown an interest in my dad, the grandad he never knew. He offered to help with the old photos, too.
Switching to myheritage.com
Given that ancestry.co.uk would cost £11 - £20 per month, my son started evaluating free alternatives. I’m somewhat wary about privacy and security, but he settled on myheritage.com.
It has a free tier that allows you to build a family tree with up to 250 people, and when we couldn’t see a way to export from ancestry.co.uk, he manually copied the tree across!
His gaming skills of sitting at his computer doing repetitive tasks for hours certainly came in handy!
One slight gripe is the poor zoom controls when using my laptop’s trackpad.
The biggest surprise was when my son found Sally’s grave online. There was even a photo! I remember visiting that cemetery with my dad in the 80s and wish I’d paid closer attention at the time.
4. Grandad’s early arrival and health stories 🏥 🩺
We clean our house every Saturday morning and try to finish before my father-in-law picks up my son.
Like the previous week, he arrived 45 minutes early while I was still cleaning the bathroom. When I went downstairs to chat, he thought I’d only just got up!
Then he described the medical procedure he’d undergone to check his heart — in too much detail! I’m glad he was okay, but I could have done without hearing all that! 🤢
His old habit of blocking my neighbour’s driveway had returned, but that actually helped for once. When they rang the bell and asked him to move his car, he decided it was time to leave.
Who knows how many more medical stories I escaped! 😆
5. Recent TV shows we’ve watched 📺
For All Mankind (Season 1, 2019) 🚀
Thanks to my free Apple TV trial, I have been watching For All Mankind with Stephanie. It’s a blend of history and fiction that explores how things might have gone differently during the space race.
It took about three episodes for us to get into the show, but we will continue watching. I still struggle to remember all the different characters, but it is becoming easier.
Frasier (Season 7, 1999) 📻
I watched Frasier the first time around with Jane, my late wife. Although it took a while before my fiancée Stephanie would give it a chance, she now enjoys it too.
We watched episode 8 yesterday, and there were some laugh-out-loud moments.
Car SOS (Season 12, 2024) 🚘
In this show, they restore classic cars for unsuspecting owners affected by health problems or other life-changing experiences.
One of my favourites from a few weeks ago was when they restored a Ford Fiesta XR2 because I had the Mk1 and the Mk2 in the 80s and 90s.
(I mentioned mine on Medium in The Day My Car Was Stolen, I Have Done Many Foolish Things Over the Years, and How Many Car Accidents Have I Had?)
Roswell (Season 1, 1999) 🛸
I watched this with Jane when it was first broadcast; we liked the characters and the mix of drama and humour.
I’ve started watching it again with my sons, and it’s nice to see it again. The only problem is it makes me feel old. 😂
The first time around, I was closer in age to the main characters, who are teenagers. Now, I’m closer to the older characters.
(There is also a newer show from 2019: Roswell, New Mexico. I might watch that at some point, but from what I’ve read, it’s not as good.)
6. The locking wheel nuts are finally gone 🛞
My old car has been stored away since last year, and I planned to put it back on the road for the warmer months.
Despite not having gone anywhere, it acquired a flat tyre somehow. That’s when we discovered the locking wheel nut key was damaged, so we couldn’t get the tyre repaired.
We tried everything, but in the end, we called in a professional.
My youngest son is the one who wants me to keep the car, so I delegated the job of arranging it.
We had already removed the rotating collar from one wheel nut, and the man removed that one in about a minute! Then again, he did have a wide selection of tools and a big hammer! 🔨
The other two took longer, but it was all done within 15 minutes for a reasonable £60.
My son then removed the wheel and took it for repair. The tyre place traced the leak to the bead/rim, so they removed the tyre, cleaned up the wheel, and refitted it.
7. I used my new laptop out of the house 💻
After struggling to be productive with my iPad last week while out with Stephanie, I overcame the mental hurdle of being overly protective of my new-to-me 2021 MacBook Pro.
Yes, I took it to the coffee shop and used it while Stephanie was drawing.
I felt somewhat conspicuous because of its size, but it was much better for my purposes than the iPad.
8. I modified a cheap coffee frother ☕️
Stephanie likes frothy coffee, and the cheap coffee frother she uses at my house was chewing through batteries, so I made a slight modification.
In my drawer full of old chargers and power supplies, I found something suitable with a variable output, dismantled the frother, and wired it all together. ⚡️
Running it at 3 volts seemed okay to me, but Stephanie wanted more power, so I cranked it up to 4.5, well beyond the motor’s rating. I expected Stephanie to be impressed, but I got the feeling she thought it was merely adequate. 😂
Ideally, I would have used a coiled cable to make it neater — like the ones on landline phones. But it would have been cheaper to buy a new, rechargeable frother than to buy such a cable.
It was really just a bit of fun, and I have a feeling that poor little motor is on its way out.
9. A new driver is taking my son out for the evening 🤞
When my youngest son passed his driving test last year, he took his friend out for a ride. Now that his friend has passed, he wants to take my son to Liverpool this evening. 🤔
It’s hard not to worry about what they might do and if they will be okay. My son is not very open about his plans, and unlike his older brother, he does not share his location with me.
Even though he is now 18, I will struggle to settle until he’s back home.
10. I find out next week about my eldest sister’s visit 🙊
I’m meeting up with my sister next week, and she told me our eldest sister — the one I don’t get along with — visited recently.
(I wrote about the threat of her visit in The AJ Chronicles: 29 March 2024. And I wrote about why we don’t get along in It Is Hard for Me to Say This, but I Do Not Like My Eldest Sister on Medium.)
I will tell you all about it next week!
Thank you for reading 💛
Alan
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Medium Stories
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My autistic ADHD mind gives me days like this, especially when I’ve not slept well
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I turned one such day into this story!
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