School’s out! And I’m going to live in California for the summer!

tags: family, globetrotting, umich

My grandparents visited Chicago for the past few days and brought me a copy of Fisher’s Follies, my great-grandfather’s self-published memoir.

This is what I have learned so far:

• Great-great-great grandfather #1: Aron Fisgot born near Riga, Latvia circa 1810. Was a Jewish ritual slaughterer and had seven children.

• Great-great-great grandmother #1: Goda Josselovna Swaw.

• Great-great-great grandfather #2: Benjamin Ehrlich, born circa 1838. Was a resident of Kansas until 1870. Railway engineer on the Union Pacific….and a Colonel in the Confederate Army during the Civil War (!) Eventually settled and married in Berlin.

• Great-great-great grandmother #2: Karolina Riese. Ran a men’s haberdashery business producing made-tomeasure shirts. (Benjamin Ehrlich was a customer.)

• Great-great grandfather #1: Ellis Samuel Fisher (changed name from Fisgot, which apparently means “fish skin” in Russian). born 5/2/1867 in Latvia.
  - Born when his mother was 50
  - Walked across Europe to London.
  - Employed in fur trade
  - In charge of a plantation in French Senegambia
  - Proprietor of cartage business in Johannesburg
  - Settled in Crouch End, London and then opened a carpet business

• Great-great grandmother #1: Bertha Ehrlich.

• Great-grandfather: Harold Fisher, born 11/26/1903 in London. This is his memoir, so he included an entire curriculum vitae. He went to school for Aeronautical Engineering but was “terminated by skin trouble.” (??) Then he studied to be an accountant and worked for Shell in Venezuela and Trinidad (where my grandfather was born). Eventually he returned to London and started his own practice. The other half of his CV is dedicated to his stamp-related (“philately”) activities, plus other hobbies:

“Do it yourself” and especially repairing guitars and other tricky devices; drawing and painting, especially caricature, strumming on guitar or piano; golf (nine holes only nowadays) managing block of 35 flats including the gardening; sleeping; writing these meoirs and anything else I can find an excuse for and then sleeping some more.
Oh yes! I forgot….philately.
And travelling….but that’s dealt with on the next page.

tags: family

This evening I discovered than my great grandmother’s book on Jungian feminine psychology currently has 7/7 five star reviews on Amazon. Here is the publisher’s summary.

My grandparents had a bunch of copies in their bookshelf at home and I never looked at them at all. But now that I see it is available at the Regenstein I think I will check it out tomorrow.

I think I will also check out Wars of ideas in Spain: philosophy, politics and education by my great grandfather, which has apparently been digitized by Google Book Search (via the Library Project, which means none of it is viewable online).

tags: books, family

Elizabeth’s organization, Build Change, has a new design and updated content. It’s a big improvement over the old design, which I believe was based on a Dreamweaver template.

Formally, Elizabeth is my uncle’s ex-girlfriend. More importantly, she is a really awesome person doing amazing things. She is a big Radiohead and I used to give her mp3s of new bands that I thought she’d like, and she and Martin showed Mike and I around San Francisco when we visit a few years ago. And she was also one of the family members who was there for me during my first (horribly depressing) semester at GWU.

Here is a video of Elizabeth talking about building earthquake-resistant houses in developing countries:

tags: family, video

The temperature outside has jumped up 10-20F in the past few days. It’s so beautiful outside. I wish it was 40F-60F the whole year around. I am anxious to start and finish painting my bike because it is in no state to ride right now.

The time change is nice too. I was waking up with the sun for the past few weeks, which had been beaming through my curtains at 6am.

Mummy visited this weekend. She had a cold. We didn’t do much but she met Peter and we made waffles with McComas and Henry at Henry’s apartment. Also got groceries, mostly tea and oatmeal.

tags: biking, family

This weekend Peter and I went to Boston. The original inspiration for the trip was the Science Museum, which was expensive and disappointing. Not much seemed have changed since the last time I had been the exhibition halls, which is years and years ago. Then we walked to Cambridge and through MIT. Checked out the MIT Press Bookstore: many beautiful covers. Peter stopped and marveled at numerous buildings. We saw the Frank Gehry-designed Stata Center, which among other things houses the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. We did not see Simmons Hall, where Brittney stayed when she did MITES. I would like to go back there and walk around more.

From MIT we walked to Daniel and Tessa’s house and had muffins and tea and talked a lot, and it was very nice, and then Daniel drove us to South Station. I haven’t done so much on a Saturday in ages. It was refreshing to get off campus. I should have taken more photographs.

In other news, while stumbling through the internet looking for infographics, I came across another reminder that C-SPAN is not perfect: Carl Malamud to Brian Lamb: “You should not treat the U.S. Congress like Disney would treat Mickey Mouse”.

tags: cspan, design, family, globetrotting, photography, webloggish