Continuing to work on the Siderfin Book

 Although not a lot of accomplishment yesterday, I did continue to move forward. I am nearly half way but it is Christmas and other items are definitely on my mind. Like where is the snow; we still have some but it is melting somewhat and it is very icy - not fit for skiing unfortunately. We are meant to get more snow and time will tell on that. It is going to be very cold and it does not snow much when it is very cold although the ice will built up. I wonder if the World's Longest Skating Rink will be open this year. Last year was the first time in memory that it did not open. 

The dog is barking outside; it is cold for him. Something must be upsetting him. I haven't been out in the back for a long time so haven't had a chat with him. I do hate to see dogs out in the minus 13 degree weather and it feels like minus 20 apparently. We are expecting snow showers but they will be rather dusty and not good solid snow when it is this cold.

Back to work and see how much I can accomplish today. Breakfast done.

Up to Page 61

I am up to Page 61 on this second last time through the Companion Charting Book. Not actually finding very much but will reread it one more time before publishing. The month of December has gone quickly as we are now at the 19th. 

Staying away from the news again for a bit; I know Ontario is in good hands with Premier Ford. I do think we might as well have a federal election and then a government would be in place for the next four years. I continue to feel that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did a great job during COVID except for the liberal habit of just throwing money at anything that they think might work without due diligence and we see that with all of the errors in people applying for money to which they were not entitled apparently and the need to have all of that refunded to the government. I think in general we remained a fairly calm people during COVID due to the calm and helping attitude of both our Public Health Officer (who was absolutely excellent) and the Prime Minister both of whom gave mostly daily accounts throughout the entire period of time. The distribution of vaccine was excellent and we enjoyed high rates of uptake which helped to get us all back to work once again (except me but I like to think I am working in retirement!). I actually got a great deal done during this time period and was absolutely not troubled by the shutdown. Went for food a couple of times a week and medicine for my husband and just generally kept to ourselves. 

I think there are enough cool heads in the Conservative Party to stay away from social conservative topics and manage the swollen public service to get it stabilized. I do not care what they do with school lunches, dental care or any of that - the present setup is inefficient (there are no school lunches served yet apparently but hopefully the news is wrong as so much has been spent already). Although there are comments that there is great uptake to the dental care I suspect that people can live with the loss of it but perhaps will prioritize their dental care so as not to become critical for them again. Perhaps some consideration will be given to removing the extra money from the over 75 year olds in the OAS and having the payout the same for all in that receiving group. Increase the GIS if people are in great need but I think that they should have to submit receipts to show value for money if received and CRA could add a couple of lines to the Income Tax reporting (i.e. dental care or medical drugs/care that is not covered).  Other than that I am ready to see the Conservatives in power once again hopefully doing what they have done in the past (fiscal conservatism and reducing the size of the public service using efficiency as the byword) until PM Harper mucked it up with reducing the GST and trying to balance the budget during a critical time when the method he used was harming LAC and Fisheries (and muzzling scientists which is unacceptable). Increase the GST to 7% or higher and I do dislike this GST holiday - it funds the government so that we do not have to have funding bills every couple of months like in my youth. All it does is increase the national debt.

Back to work and no more politics; I will try very hard to stay away from all of that. I must say though the idea of 13 new states continues to appeal to me. I love Canada - it is a great country but the world is changing and we need to protect our borders and could do it much more efficiently as a single entity as all of that border surveillance would become unnecessary allowing us to concentrate on the water borders which are in general somewhat easier to manage. If it isn't supposed to be there and it doesn't respond properly you just can just blow it out of the water or air. My grandfather used to say that about the English Channel and the North Sea when I was young - he did love England but he also loved Canada - after all his only child and grandchildren were all here and Canadians! We would be just one huge island with a small border to the south with Mexico which could be armed to the hilt if necessary and tunneling could be controlled with interesting methodology. Long live North America; God bless North America. Grandparents are interesting people I think. Definitely past their prime but always ready to help. 

Lots to do; busy day ahead.

13 new States as we are 10 provinces and 3 territories not the 51st State only

An interesting proposition to have one country north of Mexico for sure but we would be 13 new States. What would we gain if we keep this non-functional government that is taking us towards a welfare state?  This government absolutely never considers how to make new ideas work for themselves so they become self-supporting instead of increasing debt onto the next generation (no they just set up a new branch of government and hire thousands of people increasing the national debt). The Americans would want to have keen excited citizens (second class citizens have no say). So no, we need to be first class Americans not second class citizens. All that we would likely share as states would be policing, foreign affairs and other national level items and our military as your states appear to do now (along with tax collecting as that is how ours works with transfer payments to the provinces for health, for education, for national infrastructure and other negotiated items plus the Provincial taxes since the tax monies are all submitted to the CRA by us!). For our military to give up their present Canadian military status would be a big deal. We have stood tall amongst the allies during the First and Second World War and during the Cold War and that status is born on the blood of our youth (our losses in the First World War were huge (and we were a very small country much less than half of what we are now in population) and substantial enough in the Second World War). The Americans too stood tall as our allies in these conflicts and coming together is not a bad idea given the way that the world is moving; we already work together on many items. But to leave us as we are one unit in 51 would not benefit us. There needs to be a gain for us in becoming one huge country; one huge wealthy country - Canada is a very wealthy country in minerals, fresh uncontaminated water and so many other assets etc etc. But, of course, there must also be buy-in with our First Nations. Our medical system although short at the moment on physicians (that is the fault of the stingy government reducing Medical School enrollments in the 1990s knowing that the Baby Boomers were on their way to old age) is very effective and costs less overall than in a lot of countries (I worked there for 12 years). No Canadian is refused normal health care but you do have to pay for your own drugs unless you have a health plan but some of these are not covered so can be expensive for some.

As for the electricity that crosses into the United States; paying 25% tariffs to sell it is not practical. But everything is negotiable and that is the trademark of the incoming President-elect Donald Trump "to make a deal." One wonders what kind of deals will be offered. We are after all your good friend and neighbour.

On the other hand we could work on our provincial trade barriers and eliminate all of them making it easier to sell our goods between provinces if we face tariffs going south. Hopefully our government will soon be replaced with people interested in making government efficient. I really dislike the attitude of the present government towards Israel; they have a right to defend themselves. You can counter with "they can defend themselves" but that doesn't change what started it all. Israel was invaded by a foreign government that was elected by the people of Gaza - they and they alone are responsible for what is happening. When a bully attacks (Hamas supported by in this case Iran and the people of Gaza and here that cheered in our streets (they should have been arrested for their hate crime on the 8th of October last year and later)). We normally side with the person attacked whether they can defend themselves or not. Plus they continue to hold hostages to this day in inhuman conditions under ground including children, women and men (both old and young). The people of Gaza (they did after all elect Hamas) have not returned all the bodies of the people Hamas killed for proper burial. Free the hostages immediately.

Back to the book today. Cleaning all accomplished. Hopefully fresh snow on that crusty ice so that we can get some more skiing in. The first time out was great; difficult but great but I am going on 80 so not surprising. I haven't skied for a while for sure. 

Breakfast completed. Latin is next and then the book broken up with exercise routines throughout the day along with my 250 steps per hour for the FitBit.

The line at the passport office is very long

Went to renew my passport and the passport office was bulging at the doors with a row of people outside who might not get inside on the day. Amazing really. I will try again later in the week. I am not in a rush just renewing to have it on hand since it will expire if I do not. I was actually surprised as it is coming up on Christmas and thought it might be a quiet time. 

Basement cleaning accomplished and today the main and top floor to do. 

No work done otherwise; the day was busy with things that needed to be done although the passport did not happen but picking up a parcel did. When we went in on the weekend the line for the registers was very very long and they do not appear to use the bin at the Orleans store. 

Going out shopping on last Thursday the traffic was so heavy at 2:00 in the afternoon - doesn't anyone work anymore! The traffic has really increased in the daytime these days for some reason. Mind you I haven't been off my street hardly for nearly four months!

Must get back to the Companion Charting book as I want to finish it sooner rather than later. 

Apparently the Prime Minister says we are going to increase our defense spending by 3x by 2030. That would be truly amazing. 

Breakfast next.

Third Sunday in Advent

 A wonderful carol service at St Jude on the Hill, Hampstead in North London. Again I did not see this particular area except perhaps from the windows of a touring bus - no ideas on that. I did try to take note of where I was most of the time with my GPS but I missed many things I am sure. For each day I had a list of what I could see that wasn't included in the actual tour but in the area where our bus stayed for the night. Edward and I enjoyed many quick walks on arrival at the hotels and after dinner when it was possible to see what was available in the area. Since neither of us was really from most of the areas that we visited we did not miss anything actually that we wanted to see. Edward's Dissenters left England very very early in the 1600s to go to the American Colonies and his ancestral list there is legendary in actuality (Rogers Williams, Hannah Feake, John Bowne, Anne Winthrop,  Obadiah Holmes and the list goes on and on - all lost over time as the families moved west in the United States and north to Canada). So much lost in his lines as people moved north to Canada at various times (mostly settlers which included his Kipp line (his surname)). His mother's line appears to have had most of the Loyalists that he did have - Link, Parlee, Folkins, Burt and a number of others. Link (from New York) and the rest from the New England States and they went to the Maritimes (New Brunswick) although some of them had gone as colonists earlier than the Revolution and were called Planters. He unearthed them all in our many trips into the New England States and New York/Pennsylvania and then further west into Indiana, Wisconsin and Utah. I would have to look all of that up again as it is long ago gone from my mind as I settled into Blake and Pincombe my parent's lines. Mine of course came much later to Canada with my Blake coming from Upper Clatford, Hampshire (my father was born at Eastleigh where his father worked for the Southern Railway) but the Blake line he descended from traces back to the mid 1700s in Upper Clatford and before that Andover, Hampshire where Joseph Blake was born in 1730 moving to Upper Clatford to marry Joanna King ( and they were distant cousins as their mothers were second cousins likely). For my mother her line came from Bishops Nympton, Devon although her grandfather was born at Molland (Lower Gatcomb) and they came to Canada November 1850 arriving at the Port of New York 7 Jan 1851 and thence to Upper Canada in the spring but stopping to visit his uncle Robert Pincombe who lived at Genesee New York for the remainder of the winter. But that is just the two surnames (my Buller and my Rawlings/? have not yet begun in book form as that is a later project to do those two books). There is also the Routledge book to revise/update that George DeKay wrote initially back in 1976 and which we talked about updating but he passed away a couple of years ago and I guess that leaves me with that project which is our mutual Routledge family my earliest emigrant to what is now Canada in the late summer/early fall of 1818. These were my 3x great grandparents and from Cumberland which we did visit and came quite close to Bewcastle where they lived actually. There hasn't been an ambition for me to actually visit these places other than going with Ivan Kent my cousin in 2008 to Upper Clatford where my Blake line last was before Eastleigh and other areas where our mutual Knight family lived in Dorset (Turnworth, Winterborne Stickland, Winterborne Clenstone, Winterborne Whitchurch, and Milton Abbas). A lovely trip through the Winterborne Valley together was greatly enjoyed and then lunch at Blandford Forum on our way to Upper Clatford. 

Interesting article this morning on the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens connection. Our mutual results (my siblings and I) have 2% Neanderthal and 3% Denisovan which is 5% of our DNA coming from these earlier human groups. No idea on the Denisovan but suspect it is from our H11 ancestors in the mtDNA who wintered at Ukraina during the Last Glacial Maximum. Then, using the Blood of the Isles Database, appear in Scotland very early on in the Argyllshire/Ayrshire area whilst the yDNA of my Blake line was also an early arrival to the British Isles known as Deer-Hunters ( so hunter gatherer) . Amazing really what DNA tells us about our migrations. This article is leaning towards the idea that Homo sapiens exists because of inter-breeding with the Neanderthals permitting the passage of protective genes which enabled us to survive diseases prevalent at the times and with our more advanced ability to survive at the time of the Ice Ages when the Neanderthals succumbed to unknown but theorized causes. Must get back to my project of re-phasing my grandparents/great-grandparents as I have not completed that project for nearly four years now. My newest set of data (over 200 results) not yet fed into my database. 

Cleaning today and it is the basement to start. That only takes up part of the day so I shall continue work on the Charting Book. I thought it might be a little faster but this stubborn mind of mine insists on going over each and every page microscopically. Always fun though especially when I find something that needs further explanation. But I keep it short. 

Just 1 cm of snow on Wednesday which may not be enough to cover the ice to let me ski unfortunately. Although I loved our ski the other day it was pretty difficult for me. I do need a smooth/not icy surface to ski on in my old age!

Teatime and I am looking forward to a hot cup of green tea for sure this minus 9 degree morning. sunrise in a bit and the day begins. Thank you God for the beautiful world. Russia as always careless in how they manage has had an oil tanker split in half in the Kerch Strait causing a possible environmental catastrophe in the Black Sea which leads through the Bosphorus Straits into the Mediterranean and then the Ocean. Fortunately there are a lot of countries there that can help to corral the floating oil and remove it hopefully. Russia really is a very careless country - attacking their neighbour Ukraine over two years ago and continuing with that war in a brutal sadistic way for no reason other than a land grab and hatred of the Ukrainian people because they represent the earliest people in that area of Eastern Europe. At least it does look like that - pure jealousy and greed on the part of the Satanic Nazi Putin and his enablers. 

On to the day.