I suspect our American neighbours are glad election day has now happened

 Just as I am not sure that a woman could win as Prime Minister in Canada; a man has once again defeated a woman to become President of the United States. Although it sounds simplified I do wonder if that is the case. Wars are being fought and we think (and for a good reason likely) that a man is more likely to project strength. In his acceptance, the 45th President Donald Trump has said he will be President of all the American people as 47th President. It is good to hear that as their neighbour to the north. I am glad that he said that. I was surprised to see that this was pretty much all over by 5 a.m. this morning actually. The Republicans have also won the Popular Vote. 

Yesterday continuing accomplishment on the Companion Charting book for the Siderfin Family and I have now been through it once making the cosmetic changes to make it uniform throughout. Still the Name Index to complete and without the index there are 152 pages. I also got started corrected the revision I published nearly a year ago now. My this has been a busy but strange year - so much going on in this quiet person's life. Although I feel somewhat blocked in with the new fences it is good they are in and I will not have to be handling these sorts of things. That was a long event from beginning to ending and I had a few days of exhaustion that followed that event but recovered now. It is always hard dealing with people you do not know. My gardens at the fence are devastated but will remedy that in the spring when I see what bulbs/plants do come up.

Had my lovely run around the house for thirty minutes yesterday; usually I do not go outside running unless I have to do that; I had a question one day that I needed an answer to from my neighbour during the fence business and I could have just stopped running but once a runner starts running they hate to stop; an addiction I suppose. I usually run six days of the week for thirty minutes and then follow that by a fifteen minute walk which again I could do outside but I just walk around the house usually. COVID got me into that way of thinking and I have just continued it as I get older and older. I do try to get out for a bit of fresh air and usually have a cross the fence visit with the dog two doors up. He is a friendly dog and made friends with one of my granddogs when they stayed, she enjoyed chatting with him. The other one, just a pup, really was a bit frightened of him and that was a bit nosy but perhaps next time it will work out better. When he talks to me I know he is asking about her so I always tell him that she will come again one day but not today. He is a sweetheart for sure. 

So today more work on the Siderfin books and perhaps completion by the end of November; one can only hope and time will tell. My eyes are doing very well. They do get tired and I just stop and have a rest for a bit. But that is because I am old not because my eyes are less than what they were. Definitely this depth of vision is a great addition to my life. It can still surprise me sometimes especially when looking at something I have known all my life and suddenly I realize that I can see into it. Funny really. NO migraines is also a plus although I suppose I could still have one; no idea on that as I haven't yet. 

I did publish the Kip-Kipp Newsletter and put it up online and must remember to put that on Edward's blog. Trying to encourage other members of the study to become more involved to keep the Newsletter going but they may not want one particularly. It is basically several people with German Kipp ancestry and this old colonial line of Hendrick Hendricksen Kip who arrived in New Amsterdam from Amsterdam The Netherlands in the latter part of the 1630s. A lot of Kip families are descendant of this line and it is nice that so many came together to establish a base line set of results for genealogical purposes. 

Breakfast completed, drinking my tea and Latin is next.

Cleaning day accomplished

 Always nice to have accomplished another cleaning day although I still have the basement today but it is greatly simplified. Sort of like how life simplifies when one becomes closer to 80. When my brother just a little older than me was struggling and in one of his last emails to me he said probably I am not going to write many more emails. I just felt that he was saying goodbye with that email. He lived seven hours away and my husband was very unwell so I did what I saw someone do when I was a child and I closed up the wagons around us because what was ahead was I thought a long period of being with my children's father and my husband as he worked his way along this struggle (it ended earlier than we thought but he knew what was ahead as well). I think I have come to think that when people want to stop communicating they do. I am probably like that. When you are old it is better to keep the circle small and you do not over extend yourself. I am very ready for that state of mind although do still send my emails out to family when great discoveries are made or something comes up that perplexes me. 

One of the last times I visited my grandfather as a child he explained to me that one of these days he would be gone to Heaven and I cried. But he said I should be happy for him because he would be with Bessie his wife and his parents and his siblings that had already passed and if he passed muster he would be with God (that was when he told me I was named after Bessie although I was given the full name of her mother Elizabeth whom my father remembered very well from his childhood). I was not quite eight years of age then. He said to be happy for him and so I wiped off the tears and we continued to converse as we always had; he told me stories about a country that I did not know but did finally visit and even walked the paths where he walked as a child. It was fun to do that and I shall be forever grateful to my cousin Ivan for making that possible. He too enjoyed the walk and I had no idea that two years later he would be gone. 

Right now my priorities are these books to get them off my plate and so I return to that tomorrow working away until I have accomplished that and try not to intrude or get distracted by anything because in reality God is there behind the veil waiting for us. So today is the basement and perhaps a little work on the books. I have not yet started to proofread the revision that I published. As I notice something I change it and that works. Then when the time comes I will read through it once again and then replace the copy online for downloading and I only submitted to a couple of repositories and I will ask to replace that copy if it is possible. I have no idea. At nearly 80 I will do my best to make sure the copies that are there are replaced with the corrected version. I shall apologize profusely but this is a limited book that just a few people really when you consider the population of the world are going to look at. I found mistakes in James Sanders book and fixed them so I feel satisfied that at least in this modern era one can correct after publishing if permitted. 

So forward and ahead to the day. Breakfast and then set the robot to work followed by Latin and the day and the week carries forward. Today is a warming trend  and there is to be rain.

Pershore Abbey in Worcestershire, The Abbey Church of the Holly Cross

 Absolutely stunning old Abbey in Worcestershire. The Britons have an amazing number of old Churches - the talent that went into building them was wonderful. 

The service was lovely and I felt very content to be able to attend a real All Saints Day Service if only online but at my age online is good. There are no commitments for me and to be in the company of Anglicans was a pleasant experience. 

Working on the Charting book and I am at page 138 - it has expanded somewhat as I found the letter size was maybe a bit small in some of them. Interesting I was actually shocked at the size of the type in the revised version that I published back in the winter last year. I now realize my eyes were really not up to doing that as I often thought the print was a bit small but in reality it is huge. That is part of the reason the book is so long. I suspect that the Blake and Pincombe books are also such larger type but I haven't looked at them since before the first surgery. Time just has flown by once I realized that I needed to do the Charting book for Siderfin. 

Lots of exercise yesterday through the day and it was a lovely quiet day. The sort of day that appealed to me when I was younger and wanting to read whatever it was I was reading. My teen years were spent doing a lot of reading. But also I was on a panel for one of the radio stations in London where I grew up. I can not remember the call sign although it might come to me. We discussed teenage thoughts and I think there was maybe six of us perhaps from different schools; I think it was a bit political I have forgotten now but we did talk about a lot of things. I did that for one year as I recalled with a friend that my grandmother had introduced me to. She is a lovely person and I last saw her at my uncle's funeral in 2003. Should have exchanged emails or something but mostly we were remembering my uncle and the time flew by and then we were on our way. Sort of one of those times in your life when you meet someone you knew in your teen years and by then I was 58 and I think her life had been busy as well but we enjoyed chatting; it was fun. Hard to believe that this loner did things like that when I think about it. 

Watched the news yesterday and still the Satanists of the world continue to threaten our desire for a peaceful existence. Strange really but then that is Satan; always causing trouble. It was interesting hearing that in Mecca the pilgrims stone Satan to rid Satan from their lives I guess. Without Satan we could truly have peace. 

Today the cleaning and it is the two floors so will be busy. I am getting more and more organized though and the time taken seems to be lessened. Basement on Tuesday.

 

All Saints Celebration

 One of my very favourite services is All Saints Day. I used to go when I still lived at home to the service even though it was during school time. It was and still is wonderful to hear the stories of the early Christians as they tried to follow Jesus' teachings to give everyone a better life. The online service today is an All Saints Day Service so will attend after breakfast. 

Yesterday was a day of thinking and working. I moved forward to page 117 in the Charting Book and slowly but surely it is coming to the end of the book but still another few days and then the need to continue the indexing and then proofreading and that should see the end of the book to completion. I will correct the original revision to eliminate my errors during my time of cataracts and then put them up on line. 

Then and only then I will move onto the Blake and Pincombe books once again. Today I need to work on the Kipp Newsletter. I just did not get to it yet. I am still thinking about what I want to say and it is more difficult because this is not my family line but it is the family line of my husband and children. The yDNA was what I generally worked on for the Kipp family and Edward did the autosomal DNA whilst I was and still am a co-administrator of the T2 mitochondrial haplogroup that is his and the Full T haplogroup.  Life has been busy for a while for me as I delved into yDNA and mtDNA. I was a slower comer to autosomal although did do all the testing. I just waited for quite a while as the matches flowed in before I really got into it. The Pincombe became the most interesting because so many of my cousins tested. Then so many Blake cousins tested that it to became quite interesting. I find my interest now lies more in the autosomal matches now then in the yDNA and mtDNA matches although these are also usual in research. I did manage to get a cousin to test our Pincombe line which has since been verified by a number of other testers. 

Daylight savings is over and I hope it is the last time that we move to daylight savings. I really prefer the brighter mornings and the dark evenings let me work away for hours and hours. But I am definitely a morning person mostly up every day at 6:00 a.m. just as I have been most of my life. It worked well for us when our children were small as Edward liked to stay up late and sleep in in the mornings. Although gradually he moved to going to bed earlier and getting up earlier which was nice and they do say it is healthier. I used to worry about his health staying up so late although didn't go on and on about it. Just kept it to myself. 

So my list for the day is breakfast first, then Church, then latin and then the newsletter and finally the Charting book. Mixed in will be my exercise routines and perhaps I will get into the backyard at least for fresh air. Although the air seems fresh enough inside as well to be honest. It is definitely hibernation time as there are fewer and fewer squirrels about. The chipmunks appear to have moved on with the new fence building although we will see if they return in the spring. Definitely the birds are gone with the feeders taken down now. Still see some birds but not so many. 

 

Saturday in God's World

Another beautiful Saturday. I loved Saturday as a child mostly because I didn't like going to school. I loved to learn and read everything I could manage. Saturdays were special. My father always got up early and made oatmeal porridge and I would go down from my attic solitude and he would fill a  bowl for me before he left for work. Sometimes we would chat a few minutes but then he was off. I just ate it like that; in the bowl without brown sugar and no adornments. Now I  make my own and it is cooked with raisins and cranberries and then blueberries are added at the end along with wheat germ, wheat bran and cocoa. Absolutely delicious and doesn't change from day to day to week to month to year. Possibly it could change but I doubt it. When I went out to work every day I did not make oatmeal. I usually had bran muffins that I cooked on Sunday to last the week. Love bran muffins and have not made any since Edward died. He liked them as well. So pretty soon time for breakfast but right now solitaire games, the daily Microsoft treat  on the computer. I also do the Weekly Challenge which gives me double the points once completed in the week. That is redone every week. It is just plain fun. 

When my children went to school I helped in the early years in the classroom once a week all year. I learned to appreciate the trials of a classroom teacher and understood much better why I was not happy in school. The lowest learner gets the prime amount of attention and in order to control the class you need rules that do not always fit for a student that is quite willing to move ahead and learn on their own. It is a challenge to have the slower students still working away on their arithmetic problems and a faster student reading because it looks like more fun to the slower students and they could become difficult in a classroom making the life of a teacher much harder. Interesting really what one learns as an adult. You do forget as you move along in school just how much you did learn in those early years. 

Yesterday was a busy day and I did a little work on the Siderfin family books. I will be glad to have them completed. Occasionally I mull around the thought - why ever did I do this, my Siderfin ancestor was my 3x great grandmother but it was the need to update James Sanders book that drove me. I am surprised no one did it until 110 years after he wrote it. He even in his Foreword emphasizes that his knowledge of genealogy is low and he hopes he will be forgiven for diving into this field of which he had low background. Myself, I should have realized how poorly my eyes were working. I had enough headaches to show that last year when I was working away at the text. So forward and onward and get this task completed so that I can get back to my parent's surnames and work on their books. 

It was nice to see the two big bags of raked up walnut leaves and stems go into the compost truck. There are more leaves and stems this year than last and the tree continues to grow at its usual miraculous rate of a walnut tree. They are basically a weed tree that grow in the woods but a squirrel must have planted a walnut in the backyard next door. It is too close to the fence and one day will take it out but not in my time. 

Now that fall is well into and the leaf cover is pretty much gone one can see the sky once again. The winter sky is beautiful. Usually bright blue and cold but you can see so much in the heavens wherein God dwells watching and waiting for us to do the right things. He gave all the instructions we just have to do it and live a better life on the uplifted plain of peace. It always seems within our grasp but Satan slithers in and takes it away (Russia and Iran you know who you are - Satan for sure). 

Onto the day and breakfast is next. Then Latin and another new week of Latin begins on Monday. I am getting to the end of the lessons. But I will continue to work away on practise sessions into next year and start to work on my French once again. I may eventually also bring my German up to scratch. It is just plain fun.