April 2017. Just spent 45 minutes Googling three businesses in an 1895 photo of Austin, Texas, to see if they were still in business today. One sign was a man’s name on a castle-like red-brick building. Found out that guy was a photographer and a few years later had moved to Missouri and held two patents, one for the screw-bottle cap we have today and another for a special cabinet that held photo negatives. Found out the jeweler guy lasted until the mid-1960s. And the shoe merchant held a patent for a special sort of shoe. Found a write-up in a shoe vendors’ paper about his new fall line in 1905. This is what I consider fun. I wonder if I took a wrong turn somewhere in life. But then, what this sort of random research is, at its heart, is stories. And I have always liked stories, mine and anyone else’s.