A busy day that saw me go to get groceries (salmon for dinner with mashed sweet potato sprinkled with freshly grated parmesan cheese and mixed vegetable on the side). Lovely meal. Lots of exercise as well. Took me seven tries to get the car into the garage. I am not overly good at that although I used to do it a lot better with a larger van; getting old I guess.
Worked on the Inquisition Postmortem and I do not think it has much more than the transcription in British History Online but I wanted to be sure. A few more documents to order and must get that going so that I can learn more about the Pencombe family in Herefordshire.
Three Latin sessions today and the learning curve is advancing nicely. I actually recognize the endings now in the document. I know a lot of the words because they are all legal terms with which I am familiar but it was the endings that I didn't know as I never declined latin words. Speaking Latin is different for me although some of the hymns that we sang when I was a child in the choir were in Latin but with Duolingo you get that added feature. Looking forward to starting French in the Fall. My ability to read French is still very good but my speaking is dreadful.
Today is a Blake day and I shall work on the le Blak family. I do have quite a bit of material. Plus I have the pictures of Rouen Cathedral where a Richard le Blak has an effigy but I do not know if he is buried there. When you look at the list from Rouen of people granted the right to set up a market in England it is lengthy with 22 from Rouen, 13 from Amiens, 8 from Almain, 5 from Huy, 4 from Malins/Malyns/Malines, 3 from Leges, 3 from Brabant, 2 from Cahors, 2 from Placenza, 1 each from Deu, Lucca, Florence, Caumbrey and Beuvays. Then interestingly enough 2 from London, one each from Rouecester, Northampton and two are associates not linked to a town but a person. There are 73 on the list in total. Presumably the ones internal to England in the list were considered to be non-English perhaps not sure. But one of the individals from London has the surname Bek which I found interesting. Most of the merchants though are from France - I thought there would were be more from Normandy but close by is Amiens.
Time for tea and Latin. The morning advances quickly.
Generally I like to avoid social conservative issues just because I can see no reason for them in the political life of our country. But this latest bit that is being spouted by the Conservative Leader has very bad vibes. Not all women (biologically born) are beautiful (at least do not fit that beautiful perfect look some people have in their minds) and when you enact a legislation that basically limits the use of public facilities to single genders of birth then you leave these women who are not quite so beautiful to everyone except perhaps their friends and family open to abuse in those washrooms or public areas by "catty women" (and sorry they do exist) just because they do not fit into that narrow criteria of beauty. So leave it Conservatives; stay out of social conservative issues. It is a waste of the English language. It will blow up in your face. What happened to all the financial issues? Can you think of any that you could work on instead of this? And I do not even understand all this gender business to be honest but I think people should just be allowed to live their life unless they are injuring/defrauding/whatever other people.
I will share an interesting test we all took as a family once. It was online I think or it might have actually been a set of questions on paper. My daughters probably remember I have forgotten exactly where we found that (perhaps Readers Digest now that I think about it). It was a set of questions headed by "How Male are you?". I wasn't going to do it because I just think such things are ridiculous personally not to insult anyone but we all did it. Concentration on gender to me is a personality restricting way to look at life. Anyway we all took that test and much to my husband's shock I tested the most male of all of us with him next and then my daughters. But clearly environment plays a huge role in how you do things - I grew up with two brothers older than me and two younger with three of them being closer in age to myself. I think, at the time of taking the test, I thought it was very funny but not surprising. My husband thought it was very deeply flawed because he couldn't see that I had any male characteristics. Probably well hidden (my mother would have certainly corrected any of that) but I think it really showed when he took ill and was so sad about his garden because he couldn't do the work so I did it; I moved many wheelbarrows of dirt from the lane way to the back of yard. I manually dug the garden because I wasn't strong enough to use the gas driven rototiller and every day I was out there at 6:30 to 7:00 a.m. and worked for five hours straight planting, weeding whatever to make that garden look like he loved it to look. I am not a gardener but to me that is more of a male tendency to just put your back to it and get it done; no whining no saying it can't be done. Then the other thing that really shows up when it doesn't do what you want it to do you use brutal force (few women use brutal force) like moving big rocks out of the garden that suddenly appear and such things. I think that we have lost sight of just how loose gender really is because of small families where females tend to be quite female and males quite male but not always. People can become the reverse of what they physically are because of surroundings perhaps no ideas on that really. I would not like to ever get into gender issues personally although I do think it is very important to let children be children and not encumber them with changes that affect their entire life until they can make an adult decision that will satisfy them. For a biological woman not being able to have children because of medical changes made and the same for a biological male undergoing changes that restrict his ability to have children - it simply isn't fair to them in the long run to let them convince themselves they need this before they really know what they are giving up. Anyway just thought I would share it for what it is worth.
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