First, our apologies for neglecting tuell.net lately. Life is full of distractions from work, family, home projects and too many interests. Genealogy pretty much slipped to the back of my mind until our annual genealogy.com subscription came due — a significant financial reminder that I should be getting my money's worth from it.

However, I became distracted updating a home theater, eliminating lots of obsolete equipment. It was nice to get all those bulky black boxes off the shelf, but the downside of eliminating a 200-disk CD changer is ripping a couple hundred CDs (plus 50 or so more that weren't in the changer) onto a hard drive.

Also, during a reinstall on my laptop, I inadvertently deleted my backed-up database of movies. That meant reentering the info on about 250 DVDs.