Your Cuyahoga County Library account can be used to gain free access to the electronic editions of a few national newspapers — including New York Times and Washington Post. You just have to use the links from https://cuyahogalibrary.org/read-watch-listen/digital-library/newsstand to get a few days of free access.
Category: Miscellaneous
Accessing Records – Cuyahoga County Probate Court
We went up to the County Courthouse today to view some old probate records — just like the recorders office, this is all stored seemingly forever and available to the public to review. There is a room where the microfiche is stored in cabinets.
Each drawer is full of boxes — when you search the Cuyahoga County probate court records, newer records have files in the “Docket” that you can view. Older cases don’t.
They do, however, contain a record that provides the film roll number.
And each file drawer has a list of numbers housed in the drawer — to find the film for this case, I needed to find the drawer with roll 03575
Voila — here’s the roll. Each box indicates the range of case numbers imaged onto the roll … I confirmed the case number I wanted was in that range.
They also have a film viewer computer — if you select the type of film, the screen will give you a little animated video with instructions on loading the film. Look for that in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.
Autumn Sunset
There was a beautiful sunset this evening – we sat in the front yard and enjoyed the view.
New Office Plan
We’re designing a new office layout — and Anya added a new mythical critter: a turkey, chicken, duck, bee, pig, sheep!
Bookshelf Adventure
We’ve been looking for bookshelves for a long time — both Scott and I have a lot of books, and Anya has an ever growing collection of books. We found about a dozen shelves — cantilever metal library bookshelves — and paid six dollars for them all. Basically, the shelves cost our labor and fuel to remove them from the site.
Now, that was a lot of work. We spent two days loading the truck with shelf bits — they used two 15′ box trucks to move the shelves in, but we managed to pack it all quite densely and got all of the shelves packed into the pickup truck bed in two trips. When we counted them all, there are 16 double-sided shelves and a single sided shelf.
Medina County GIS — Accessing Linked Data
There’s a lot of data that I’ve been using the old Medina County GIS system to access because I couldn’t figure out how to get it from the new Medina County GIS platform — finally got it!
The first step is to select a data layer that has linked data — this could be surveys, old tax maps, building permits, septic permits, etc.
Once a layer is selected click on the “Identify” icon — a blue circle with a letter I inside of it. I’ve been using “Draw Point” — this changes your cursor
On the map, draw your point on the icon for the data element — for tax maps, this is a gray box with some text in it. Building, septic, etc have colored shapes.
The trick, then, is to scroll down on the “Identify” tab — it’ll always start with the general parcel information (ownership, parcel size). But, if you scroll down, there will be new sections specific to the data layer you selected. Here, it’s the archived Tax Map scans. Click one of the “View” links …
Voila — you’ll have the information.
Double Rainbow
We had a quick deluge today, followed by some sun, followed by more rain — and, in the middle, there was a double rainbow over the lake!
Indigo Bunting
I like watching the goldfinches eating the ornamental grass seeds. Today, though, this blue bird showed up too. Looking up small blue birds, we found a rare blue bird native to, like, Venezuela … seemed rather surprising to see one here. And then I scrolled to the next small blue bird — the Indigo Bunting — which is fairly common and native to our area. So … yeah, I’m going to go with Indigo Bunting.
First Firefly of 2022
Scott climbed one of the maple trees today, and we saw some fireflies crawling on the tree trunk. We saw the first lit up fireflies of 2022 tonight — we played a game of kubb just after dark (with really bright flashlights!), and there were dozens of the little guys flying around.
Locking Adjustable Latches
We bought adjustable latches with a little extra metal bit where you can lock them. The problem, however, is that the range of adjustment is limited by the lock attachment point. Eventually, the screw bumps into the lock attachment and you cannot adjust the lock any smaller. If they had offset the lock attachment point, you could adjust the latch the full length of the threading.
Because we needed some smaller latches, we had to use a hacksaw to cut off some of the threads. Now it can be screwed down to its smallest size and our baby chickens are secured in their tractor.
