♪Just bitchin' and mopin' and sinkin' and brayin'♫

I'm battling with my inner bitch today. This afternoon was the last of the online chats that form a part of the online course I've been taking in genealogy this month. There were four chats, one at the end of each week.

Now, I'm not great at online chats. I'm not even that crazy about instant messaging. It's like conversation with a ticking timer. Online chats are kind of like cocktail parties. With the Loose Women (if you're British) or The View (if you're American).I don't like either show. They're talking a million miles a minute, overlapping each other, about things that usually hold little interest for me, unfortunately exactly like this month's chats.

As it happened, I only made it to two of the chats, the first because I forgot it was in Greenwich Mean Time. There's no excuse for this; I've taken a course from this company before -- I plead temporary insanity. I missed the third chat because I failed to receive the week's lesson and I was damned if I was going to subject myself to an online chat if I hadn't even done the assignments. So I spent part of this week doing two weeks' worth of lessons, then glumly presented myself at the final chat.

They chatted, all right. About the snow in Britain. About so-and-so's birthday vacation to Tenerife. About getting dad to look after the kids to so she could do her genealogy research, lol. I got up and made myself a snack. Sat down, checked the printout and saw I'd missed nothing. Checked my email and surfed a little. When I looked again, they were sharing platitudes about the importance of organization in family research and explaining to someone else what IMHO meant.

I'm pleased to say that the course I took last spring wasn't like this, although I didn't like the chatroom aspect then much either. It's useful for enforcing assignment deadlines, but that's about it.

This course wasn't a waste of time (she says hastily). I found small, tantalizing records of a branch of my family who lived in the village of Great Torrington in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I discovered the difference between a tanner and a leather dresser -- my great-great-great-great-grandfather was the latter. And I learned never ever to take an online course in November. Especially when you're doing NaBloPoMo. Which I don't think I'll ever do again in November either....