I Read Two Books

Act the way you want to be and soon you will be the way you act. (Dr. Johnnie Coleman in Acts of Faith by Iyanla Vanzant, 7 December)

Take time each day to quiet your mind and reflect on the here and now. (Susan Smith-Jones, Choose to Live Each Day Fully, Day 311)

When you decide for someone what they can or cannot do, what they should or shouldn't do, what they need or do not need, you are standing between them and God. (Iyanla Vanzant, Until Today!, 7 November)

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I finished reading two books yesterday. This morning I added them to my little file of books read in 2009. I own one of the books and I borrowed the other one from the library. For many years I have been interested in exploring ways to simplify Christmas. The book, "Simply Your Christmas - 100 Ways to Reduce the Stress and Recapture the Joy of the Holidays," by Elaine St. James offers one hundred suggestions we might try if we are interested in achieving this goal. Making any changes in the holiday routines may meet with strong resistance from your friends and family. In her book, "Bright-Sided - How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America," author Barbara Ehrenreich suggested that too much positive thinking may be what brought us to the current economic crisis. She places much of the blame on positive thinking ministers and coaches such as: Mary Baker Eddy, Norman Vincent Peale, Robert Schuller, Joel Osteen and Anthony Robbins. I was surprised that she didn't attack the twelve-step philosophy as well. Because I've been involved in lots of self-help and twelve-step reading myself for several years the book was very thought provoking and somewhat upsetting.

I'm working on another genealogy project. I'm editing a GEDCOM file about the family of Samuel Buskirk, getting it ready to produce a genealogy of over 150-pages. This branch includes the Foggin family which has links to the Henthorns. And it includes the family of Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy's. Late last night I remembered that I have several articles about the Buskirk and Foggin families that appeared in the newspaper column of Catherine Fedorchak. I was able to locate a copy on one of my Zip disks. I'm going to attempt to include them when I produce the report with the Ancestral Author program.

So far no one has accepted my offer to join my new private Google genealogy "site". Yesterday I granted access to my private Google genealogy "group" to two people, one is a new friend and the other is a someone I just contacted again after a break in communication. I'm hopeful that some of the other folks working on similar genealogy interests will be willing to share more of their information on the Internet in 2010. I'm willing to help post their work, if they are willing to share.

Mr. Dickie