Cleaning day once again

Cleaning day once again and the sun is shining. Warm here today although another cold front is coming in apparently. Rained overnight so perhaps I will not need to water and later today we will plant the rest of the bedding plants - mainly sunflowers. It is late for sure but the summer is still new and we might see sunflowers from them in the early fall. Time will tell. Raspberries seem a bit late this year and will have a look later; last year there were some at the end of June but it seemed early; one gets used to patterns but they do fluctuate. 

I hope to get to the Kipp Newsletter today; we have spent quite a bit of time downsizing the last couple of days so now comes the rearrangement of that now empty space and in some cases dismantling (the holder that Edward created for the canoe can now come down). It was a sad happy feeling watching the canoe drive away but knowing a young family will enjoy that canoe is wonderful. Once the Kipp Newsletter is together then I can move on the Pincombe Newsletter and start doing some research that I need to do for the next Blake Newsletter. I am slowly working my way back into a groove that I was in before Edward's illness. He was busy in his life and I am a home person by nature. He was out and about three days a week and until his illness I avoided being part of all of that. But his illness sapped his strength slowly and I like to think that my starting to go everywhere with him helped to slow that erosion down giving him more years to enjoy. 

But the real me is slowly emerging once again - that quiet person who likes to just work away on projects and life moved on to give me new projects with the DNA of the five of us to work away at resulting in the production of the Blake, Pincombe and H11 Newsletters. I can sense myself again as I knew myself in my late teens before we married. Even before the knife attack which did change me quite a bit; made me a different person than the sixteen year old looking forward to going to University and then Medical School and working in Africa. However, I will not do that now (nor do I actually feel sad about that) but the enthusiasm level is there to take on projects and I like that. 

Well on to breakfast, then cleaning and finally planting the rest of the bedding plants. The day is awake and God has given us another beautiful day to us to enjoy. We must use each day wisely and try to bring the earth back to a place where all survive - the plant, the animal, humankind and most importantly the earth itself. 

Prayers for Ukraine. Prayers for peace in our world so that once again the world can flourish but we need to do it differently; we need to help the world repair itself.

A very busy Sunday

 I was out the door at 8 00 am lining up to get a tetanus shot because I got tangled in some metal wire that had some rust. It is eight years since I had a tetanus shot so that seemed to be a first priority today. I did arrive home in time to go to Church on You-Tube which was nice. As always I am much appreciate of having Church of You-Tube as it is unlikely that I will manage a trip downtown in the next while. Eventually I would like to go perhaps once a month and time will tell on that. 

We had three boxes of hazardous waste that we drove to the special waste disposal event set up by the city and that took part of our afternoon.

As well a new home has been found for the canvas sided cedar strip canoe (18 foot, cargo) that we have had for 54 years and I am so happy about that. Today it was picked up by two very kind people to be delivered to the new owner. It is in good shape and will give a lot of years of service to the new owners. They are a young family like we were so many years ago now. 

The rest of the day has been spent shopping and cooking. It was a very fast moving day.

Planting continues

Yesterday we planted about half of the sunflower peat pots and more spinach as the rabbits ate my spinach. I suspected they were doing that but finally I can see that they mostly have done that. Should have fenced it but didn't - time wonderful time and I didn't get that done but I expect the rabbits enjoyed the spinach. Last night we put up the fence first and then planted the spinach and sunflower plants as they like both equally I think!

In a way this is a new life time for me and I am gradually adjusting to that huge change. It isn't easy to adjust from a marriage of 54.5 years to single life once again although I tend to think of it as widowhood it is none the less a single person moving forward in time without one's spouse. I think in my lifetime I have not made a lot of decisions on my own and that is another hurdle that one has to overcome as I tend to be a slow decision maker - it can take me a very long time to make a decision and usually I just abstain from decision making unless I absolutely need to make a decision. I would probably have a very similar diet for instance without others suggesting that maybe cooked oatmeal every day for breakfast with all the nice fruit is perhaps mundane. But I do not find it mundane and so I will likely continue with that as long as I can cook it or get someone else to cook it for me! But eating peanut butter every day for lunch is perhaps somewhat mundane and I have managed through the years to convert myself to salmon salad, tuna salad, cheese and tomato, hot beans on toast with cheese, egg salad on some of the days but peanut butter remains an overall favourite. Then dinner which is always small as I am not a big eater of meat. I just eat whatever is there mostly if I am living with people which I am although sometimes I will cook up long grained brown rice, and then add scallops and peas which is another favourite of mine or I can put in ground meat like pork or chicken or beef and then wilt spinach into that and perhaps some tomato. I do like potatoes and can make a meal just with a potato again with wilted spinach or asparagus or broccoli. My dinner tastes are somewhat grotesque to many so when I was married I cooked all sorts of meat dinners to satisfy  everyone especially Edward who liked his meat, potatoes, vegetable and salad every day. 

I think that the mourning time after a spouse dies is quite a long period although sometimes shared with a friend one has had through the years or with family of your own. Coming from a large family, I still feel close to all of my living siblings although do not actually talk to them often but that is possibly my fault as I am not a correspondent for the most part. My mind tends to keep pretty busy with my DNA projects and all the work that is involved in keeping this place running. The one room concept does occupy my mind quite often but the house is Edward and none of us are ready to give up that memory and probably not for quite a while in actual fact. 

The weekend though I tend not to do too much labour saving my energy for the cleaning to begin on Monday once again. 

Last night I woke up to see once again the moon and planets in alignment - a thrilling sight to the eye. The sky has been sufficiently clear to have a view of at least partial alignment for a few nights. Edward would have loved that view and I thought of him looking down on us and that view from the spirit world. It is amazing to think that we have at least a million ancestors out there watching us and wondering how well we will do in this next century. 

On earth that is a wonder at the moment especially with Russia having illegally invaded Ukraine and wreaking death and destruction on the people of Ukraine including murdering over 700 children and wounding thousands more. The children! how can they do that to the children! that makes them monsters. Why can't they be part of the 21st century and just stay within their borders after all they have the largest landmass in the world with plenty of riches why are they so greedy that they have to steal part of Ukraine? They pretend to be Christian but they are Nazis; I pray that Russians can rid themselves of these dictatorial monsters namely Putin and his enablers.

Friday will always be an early rising day

Friday is the day that I always get up early to get out the green bin as that is the day that the garbage is picked up in our area. I do not like to leave the green bin out overnight full because of the raccoons. They seemed to like the smell of our garbage and can not think why as we compost everything in wax cartons from the milk (freeze it so it goes out solid) and I do not particularly smell anything. But it was a problem and now for the past four years that I have put out the garbage every Thursday night I hold back the green bin until morning and then I put it out. Mind you it sits all morning and part of the afternoon but raccoons are nocturnal. 

Today I want to work on the Kipp Newsletter once again. I will try to stay ahead of my schedule so that I can have some research time to look at the subsidies for Somerset in the next couple of months so that I am ready for the next Blake Newsletter in a timely fashion. It would be interesting to solve the question of Humphrey Blake's parents (Humphrey died in 1558). I have a couple of reasons - one it would help to reach back further in that family line in a logical research directed way. Second this Humphrey is connected in error to my Nicholas Blake of Andover as a brother to him which is incorrect as Nicholas names his siblings in his will. Thirdly, I am hoping that finding his line will encourage more people to test with known ancestry in the Somerset Blake line and perhaps even the Wiltshire (Calne) Blake line. If these two lines are connected that would be an interesting bonus of all of this research on Blake. 

 I have another good match with the Pincombe family at 23 and Me but it is hidden. However I can tell by the matches in common which Pincombe line he is in so probably nothing new to learn there. I have pretty much got a good set of Pincombe data now going back to my grandfather who died in 1925 when my mother was only eight years old. Pictures that I have obtained of my grandfather's family do show that my mother resembled her aunt quite closely actually (my grandfather's sister died of influenza when she was just thirteen years of age). Although my sisters and I do look somewhat like our mother, two of us have a strong look of my paternal grandmother as well with the third looking more like our maternal grandmother's line. I myself inherited very strongly from my paternal grandmother and a couple of pictures that came my way of the mother of my paternal grandmother tell me whom I look like the most - one giveaway is the curly hair and the face structure. It was somewhat awesome getting that picture. 

Other than that I want to get back to my cluster work on the My Heritage results. I completed my sister's matches and will now move to my older brother's matches.  There are more matches at Ancestry. I do not do much with them other than locate them to family lines if that is possible and these days it is amazing how many I can narrow down to the four basic lines at least and then I have used the other colours and often I can isolate most of them to a great grandparent line. 

Breakfast awaits - my favourite meal actually not being a large meat eater. I do eat meat I am just not heavily enamoured towards meat preferring my cooked oatmeal with cranberries and raisins to which I add after cooked wheat germ, wheat bran, and blueberries. It is a yummy way to start the day for sure.

Successful trip to the City Dump

Another successful trip to the City Dump and gradually the downsizing continues. It is a bit of a wrench as I do this because it constantly feels strange to be downsizing our possessions. Edward was in the process of doing so before COVID but all of that was pretty much on hold from the time that we were locked down except for material he had already prepared. 

Another gloomy day outside and  rain is promised a little later this morning (described as heavy thunder storms) so must get out there in a bit to do some weeding. The rain though is always needed to saturate the ground a little before the dry period comes in July as it generally does. It will be a warm couple of days now which is welcomed as we have had a cold June this year. It does look like rain all day though once it starts. 

We made pizza last night for dinner and it was quite tasty. I am enjoying pizza now although I did not fancy it much until the last couple of years. 

Today I shall continue cleaning the basement as the rest of the house is finished but I want to do a bit of reorganizing down there and today will be a perfect day to do that. 

The world is changing rapidly these days as I read through the information on the BRICS summit which includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. This group was created in 2006 and the first summit was in Russia in 2009. Apparently none of these member states have condemned Russia's invasion. They represent 41.5% of the world's population, 27% of the world land surface and are listed as a voice for developing countries. These five states in 2018 had a combined GDP of 19.6 trillion (US dollars) which is about 25% of the gross world product. This relationship is based on non-interference, equality and mutual benefit. I gather that Russia doesn't believe in non-interference though as they invaded Ukraine (although not a member state of BRICS, they are still a world state).

I think it would be much more interesting and profitable to the world if we continue to rely on the United Nations as the main place for discussion; every voice can be heard there and the present Secretary General has been effective in solving some of the issues in the Ukraine when secure corridors could not be obtained otherwise. It is interesting that the wording used in this particular website was "global hegemony." Looking up this interesting set of words the meaning appears to be the "regional predominance of a single country." It becomes more obvious why Donald Trump was a favourite in some foreign capitals because he was bent on extracting the United States from this position of dominance as he felt it cost the US too much money to continue with this dominance. But he was less interested in a successful United States and more interested in a successful Donald Trump. So his ideas were not entirely useful.

If the United Nations is being properly used then the power lies with the peoples of the world. The dominance of the United States in world affairs is born directly out of two World Wars neither of which they wished to be involved in when they first occurred but ended up being dragged in. The thought being perhaps (looking at it from a Canadian viewpoint) that if a country is dominant then a World War can be avoided - namely World War III. It was a good aim following the Second World War as we certainly did not need another war at the beginning of the 1960s when the world stood still for a moment as John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev stood on opposite sides of a nuclear catastrophe in the making. Stepping back, taking a deep breath on both sides resulted in a peaceful time that followed to a certain extent. War seems to be something that the human race can not stay away from although my own country Canada has never been an aggressive nation trying to solve problems in a negotiated settlement. Would we change? I doubt it. We like to negotiate and the art of negotiation has been finely tuned here over our more than 150 years of existence since we were a colony and the thousands of years before that when the First Nations managed as part of the trade system between the various groups of peoples who lived in the Western Hemisphere. 

As I reach toward my 77th birthday, I do wonder if the human race is capable of getting along; of not making war whenever greed surfaces like the illegal Russian war in the Ukraine as they try to continue their land grab that started with the Crimea (part of Ukraine). When the largest country in the world invades a smaller neighbour to steal their land one wonders at the depth of greed that exists in the world. It is greed that destroys civilizations.