Quarantine Part ? - April 8, 2020

Just leaving "markers" here, I guess, so I can keep track of what day it is.  (It IS Wednesday, isn't it?)

Nothing much happened here at home yesterday.  That's a good thing, I reckon, these days.

I spent most of the morning and part of the afternoon researching for the book I'm writing.  It is amazing what faint tracks the poor people of the world leave in the history books.  Unless one was rich or powerful (and those two things usually go hand-in-hand) or notoriously evil, there is very little historical record of his/her existence, except in the memories of the offspring.  If the memories are a credit to the offspring, they might be passed down for generations; if they are embarrassing enough, they die after a generation or two.

I have spoken directly with cousins who grew up at "ground zero," where this story takes place.  One of these cousins, while doing genealogy research, stumbled across the Alabama Supreme Court case that sparked my research.  This cousin shook down her oldest relatives and asked them if they knew the story.  Most of them didn't know anything about it; the rest of them said that their ancestors had refused to talk about it, but that it had caused a family split, of sorts, back in the day.  The cousin who lives at "ground zero" could not even pinpoint on the ground the original location of the ruckus.

Paper records are hard to come by.  In some cases, there simply weren't any official records.  Where would pioneers record a marriage (other than in a family bible) when there were no official record keepers in the vicinity?  When county governments were established, the record-keeping began, but courthouses all over the south have burned at some point.  If storms or chimney fires didn't get them, the Civil War did.  We are lucky that any records have survived from the earliest days of the counties.  The courthouse at "ground zero" did not burn, as far as I know.  The original courthouse was a log structure, built in the 1820s, off-side the tract that would become court square.  Twenty years later, a new brick courthouse was built.  It still stands today, encased in additions that have been built over the years.  However, a number of years ago, when the courthouse was heated with boilers, one of the boilers burst and flooded the basement, where some of the oldest records were kept.  The worst of the old, damaged books and documents were destroyed; the rest are now housed in the vault of an old bank building that now functions as the county archives.  The Church of the Latter Day Saints has microfilmed and put online some of the records from that county - marriages, land transfers, etc., but they did not film all of the court minute books (or if they did, I haven't found them online).  I need to spend about a solid week scouring those minute books in the hope of discovering some of the details I am missing.

Mid-afternoon, I took a break from researching to get up and move around a little bit.  Since the weather this week has been so pleasant, I have been spending most of my time on the back porch, and every day I've sat here and watched the grass grow in the back yard.  There is always a time in the spring when I enjoy the scruffy look of new grass and the little pops of color from the yard weeds.  Tall white daisy-like things.  Low-growing yellow oxalis.  Wild violets.  I let them grow until they look shabby, then I mow them down.  They got shabby yesterday.  I cranked up the push-mower and tidied up the part that I can see from the back porch.

Come evening, I made a batch of beer bread from scratch to go with the hamburger steaks (with tomato gravy), creamed potatoes, and sweet peas I planned for supper.  I'm not much of a bread-maker (except I can make a decent biscuit and edible cornbread), but I've made enough quick bread to know that there was something wrong with the beer bread recipe I was using, once I stirred it up.  The recipe called for "3 cups of flour (sifted)."  It said to mix up the ingredients and "pour" them into a bread pan.

Now, to my way of thinking, "3 cups of flour (sifted)" means (1) measure out three cups of flour, and (2) then sift it.  Apparently, my thinking is wrong, for I ended up with a dry wad of dough that was nowhere near "pourable."  I took my dough bowl to the sink and added enough water so that I could at least stir it a little bit.  It came out a little dense, but it was tasty and sopped up tomato gravy just fine.

Between the researching and the mowing and the cooking, I did some plumbing inspection.  During the latter part of March, our septic tank filled up with rainwater, and we had to have it pumped.  The pumper guy told The Husband that he saw water trickling into the tank from the house and thought we might have a leaky toilet flap.  The Husband risked his health to go to the hardware store to buy a new flap for the suspected toilet, and The Son installed it that night.  For the following two weeks, as I've been out here on the porch, I've heard strange belching noises coming from the septic tank.  We called the pumper guy back and, sure enough, the septic tank was full again, partly from water running back into the tank from the field lines, and partly from the trickle that was STILL coming from the house. 

I garbed myself with a mask, went to the hardware store (which was doing curbside service only - keep 6 feet apart, please), and bought THREE new toilet flaps.  The menfolk installed them that night.  Yesterday, I went around checking the water level in the toilet tanks, and it appeared that they were ALL leaking.  *sigh*

I called a real plumber this morning.  Amazingly, he answered.  He said he'll come see about it tomorrow.

I should probably clean all the toilets today.  ;)