Q. What's the difference (surprisingly, there is a difference) between a type of viral disease much in the news these days and ... a hole in the chicken coop roof?

A. One is influenz and the other is outflewhens.

The latter scenario was a problem several years ago when I discovered one of my chickens ranging loose outside, though the outer door to the chicken yard had been closed. I managed to grab her and put her inside the barn coop, but when it happened a second time, I decided to watch and see how she would get back inside on her own, at dusk. She flew up to the wire roof of the outside yard and led me to a gap in the rusted chicken wire, up along the trunk of a small wild apple tree I'd allowed to get established, half of whose Y-shaped trunk had grown into and up through the roof of the yard. I patched the hole and trimmed off one or two lower branches the hen had evidently been using like rungs of a ladder. Chickens are sometimes more clever than we give them credit for.

Now to the other thing — influenza. I got it, at the start of Thanksgiving week, and spent Thanksgiving Day in bed with 103.8º instead of down in PA with my brother, aunt, niece, nephew and two little grandnieces. Apparently, I had the regular, seasonal variety, since I'm informed that swine flu — pardon me, H1N1 — rarely infects folks my age. This was the second of my misfortunes: after backpacking to the summit of Mt. Marcy without incident in late September, early last month I managed to throw my lower back out leaning over the sink to wash my hands. Go figure. So for better than a week I hobbled around with a cane, unable to stand up straight, in the manner of an alte farkrimpter.

Fortunately, I was almost back to normal, and half a week shy of coming down with the flu, for the Researching New York conference at SUNY Albany, Nov. 19-20, cosponsored by the history department and the NYS Archives Partnership Trust. I'd had a paper accepted for reading at the conference, entitled The Search for Dongan's Pond: The 1684 Indian Deed to Governor Dongan and Solution to a Centuries-old Geographical Mystery. This was a reworded and refocused adaptation of a section from my Shawangunk Place-names book that addresses the complicated and fascinating story of the name Maratanza and how it ended up on the wrong lake. The paper was well-received, and I even got a warm compliment from one of the conference's two keynote speakers.

The most interesting of the presentations I attended was entitled "The Virtual New Amsterdam Project," a virtual reconstruction of a street in lower Manhattan, 1660, using computer imagery and of course archaeological, architectural and historical research. The most spectacular image involved depiction of this one street in New Amsterdam as it looked back then, but surrounded by the actual skyscrapers of today. The keynote speaker earlier referred to, from the University of Cincinnati, presented an interesting and engaging discussion of Hudson River art of the 19th century and how influential it was in shaping a wilderness conservation ethic nationwide.

Otherwise, the quality of the presentations was somewhat mixed. I must confess I got a little impatient with the degree to which Power-Point dominated some of the presentations. A few of the historians seemed to have turned themselves into hardly more than clickers-in-chief.

For my own presentation I stayed low-tech, with a large, hand-drawn map, resting on an easel. I like to think this was so retro as to be almost ... radical.