Cleaning day One

An ever repeating sequence in my life is cleaning days. I do not mind cleaning it reminds me of my grandmother teaching me how to clean and I do try to follow her clear instructions. Life has changed though and now at 80 I do do things somewhat differently. She was a fascinating person though and my memories of her are very strong and clear in my mind. She managed though to say only certain things about her families leaving one to wonder many times. I wonder if she visited the area of Bermondsey where her great grandfather Christopher Buller had his Slop Shop on Tooley Street in Bermondsey. We were on the tour bus when I was looking out the window as we drove across the Thames from London and I just happened to glance up at the right time to see the street marker with Tooley Street upon it. Generally I can not read those signs but it was a large sign and the bus was right beside it and of course one is sitting up higher in a tour bus with huge windows. That was our first trip to London in 2008 (my husband and I). I had been in London in 2001 with my oldest daughter when we did my pilgrimage to Rome and then a side trip to London on our way home to Canada.  I had asked Edward first if he would like to come but he declined although he regretted that after our Tour of Europe as he saw little of Italy compared to what I had seen with my older daughter. He always wanted to go back and do a trip of just Italy. But once he went and enjoyed it he wanted to go much more often than I did. I wanted to see everything that I could see so it took a good six months to prepare for each trip and so it was generally every second year that we went. 

My grandmother did mention all of her grandparents - the Taylor grandparents were shoe makers/shop keepers and the Buller grandmother lived with her children except not their family. Henry Christopher Buller, her grandfather, had died twenty six years before she was born. My grandmother attended her grandmother's funeral not long before her father died actually and she had met her father's sisters at that time. Both of her parents had come from fairly large families. But Buller is one of my challenging lines which I will have a longer look at after the Pincombe and Blake books are completed. 

 I worked on Chromosome 1 yesterday and managed to get through to the C's. The number of matches is huge so it will be a while getting through this chromosome. However, some of the dust has settled on the common area as I was able to prepare a good list of matches for Buller and Blake as well as Pincombe (my Rawlings matches are very few actually overall but the ones that I do have are close so good coverage). 

The start of the work week is always interesting and today it is minus 24 degrees celsius with a wind chill of minus 35 to minus 40 degrees celsius. So a very cold day out there and I believe I will just look at the snow from a distance whilst I clean. The desire to go out in that is pretty weak. I did put the skis away until March when I might ski again - time and the snow will decide that. 

On the first chromosome at the beginning there are quite a few matches (as many as 40 actually but I did not collect all of them) that are early Colonial American and in the Blake/Knight line. I am still trying to find a match that will reveal which of the two. There is also a length on this same chromosome that is definitely Blake and both ancient and  modern so again I wonder are these the descendants of the Sedgewick family where Joanna Blake married Robert Sedgewicke  the 6th of Jan 1634 (old style) at Andover St Marys in Hampshire, England. Earlier in the history of Ancestry DNA I did collect five or six matches that were small but traced back to Sedgewicke (I do need to pull them up as I saved them when Ancestry removed the very small matches from their database). I will spend some time looking at these matches when I am doing the genealogy charts. Some really good lengths of Buller on this chromosome especially with my two Buller cousins testing recently (descendants of Clement Charles Caswell Buller (brother to my Edwin Denner Buller) and I already have two other descendants of siblings of my great grandfather Edwin Denner Buller so an interesting length of this chromosome is known to me along with two descendants of the Welch family which was the mother of Edwin Denner Buller. Not quite as large but in a significant place which has aided the investigation quite a bit from an earlier time. But the addition of the last two was memorable as it solved the problem on Chromosome 3 for sure. I do have eighteen known matches but this is a very long chromosome and there are spots (particularly the common area where more Known matches would be nice). Although time is providing answers that weren't there earlier. 

 Time is moving onward and I must finish off my tea and do my solitaire puzzles before breakfast and then cleaning. Exercises completed and a snack to fortify me until breakfast. Another beautiful day on God's world. An interesting discussion on the location of Heaven which I found very thought consuming. The scientist who discussed it is a physicist. I loved studying physics because so many of the early scholars were very religious and constantly brought science and religion together. I have always felt that the examination of the atom revealed God to us as it is so perfect and designed in a fundamental way that does make one believe very deeply in the presence of God in our world. Randomness doesn't cut it with me mostly because randomness is chaotic and destructive and the atom is perfect because it follows a logical course that is beneficial not destructive like plants and animals where the best combination of DNA is always chosen. 

 

Continuing blog - I am verbose today

 The only time that I have gone to a neighbour's door for help in my life was my car was stuck. It wasn't stuck in terms of ice or anything but I was backing it out of the garage and I did not seem to be able to manage it for some odd reason. I must admit I was getting concerned about my eyes at that stage but they had said I didn't need cataract surgery yet, But it just seemed that I wasn't seeing as well as I had been. So I did knock/ring the bell on the door next door just the one time to get help with that and they did back my car out of the garage. Which I said thank you for their assistance. My husband knew them well and they helped each other out when they were away or we were. I really didn't know them at all until my husband passed and then I did start speaking to them as my life was very busy helping my daughter and my son in law stayed in my house for half of a week with our youngest grandson as he needed assistance with his Autism (a very expensive process) so I did ask them to take in the mail which they did when I wasn't there but it was a short period of time. But mostly I keep entirely to myself except when my family is with me or I am with them. My daughters and son in law and grandchildren take good care of me. 

I am finding though that the mail is very slow these days; some items I am expecting have not arrived. It seems really strange and it again makes me feel that virtual mailboxes would be so much better. All of these companies can produce electronic documents that the post office can distribute. It would be so much neater and no waste of paper. Even though my black bin was not emptied this week in two weeks it will barely have anymore than is in there now but with virtual I would have almost nothing and only need collecting every month or two. I simply do not use a lot of products. I never get parcels at the door as I do not buy anything except when family is here and we go shopping. But the Post Office would actually have a bigger business in parcel delivery if the mailboxes were virtual (especially in the country as well where everything could be delivered closer to home). Mind you I do not think the Post Office has to make money. It is a service to the public but it could be close to supporting itself with bulk mailing for business in a virtual way and delivery service for both government and mercantile. The number of in house workers and delivery van drivers would grow to offset the loss in jobs that a virtual system would entail. Running a virtual system requires management and workers along with AI.  

I am also trying to reduce the plastic waste and metal from cans. I seldom open a can so that isn't very much but when my daughter is here we do have more cans. Plastic is a slow process as there are meat containers but I am thinking of switching to a butcher that only uses butcher paper to wrap the meat and just go more often when I have someone with me. My daughter found this company that makes a product in a Canadian cardboard box with a thin plastic container that is larger than I used to buy and that reduces the plastic somewhat but still there. I guess we need to go to powders but still you need a container but if it is cardboard which we produce a lot of then that does reduce the waste of plastic. We switched to powder for clothes washing and that is in a tin container which recycles very well much better than plastic (such knowledge from my own days in Chemistry at University). I usually have very little in the blue container but it has increased since we recycle all of the plastic freezer bags now. 

I have had a large white plastic bag in my garbage for two weeks now and all it has in it is floss and it will take years to fill it with floss. The used kleenex is in a paper bag and goes out with the recycling along with the food waste which I put into used milk cartons (waxed cardboard) and freeze until the day of pickup. Again I only fill one of the 2 litre cartons once a week when I am on my own. When I have company I use the paper recycling bags not biodegradable plastic because we make the paper bags here in Canada. 

Interesting really where all of that is going. I am verbose today but that  happens when I am awake in the night contemplating how to solve whatever the current problem is. I may have a solution that I will work through over the next couple of days. I did find it inadequate to be told to just go to the store and set it up when I tried to set up a system online that I have used many times in the past but it took my money but did not set up the system I needed. I went through this call system that finally got me a person after two hours nearly the other day and was told that he couldn't do the work even though I had the charge number against my credit card for the government department. I find that weird really as everything is online and surely he could see that I had paid but not received the setup required. But maybe not. I didn't care for his solution which was to trek out to the store and set it up there. Why would I do that when I should be able to just easily set it up on line as I always have. But I do have a workaround in mind once my money comes back - no one is  made of money to waste randomly trying to set something up. Plus I did  not get a response to my filling in the forms where you mention the problem. 

Having to change your work direction happens in life as my own husband graduated as a PhD Chemist and went on to do a Postdoc in Chemical Engineering as he wanted to be a working scientist not just an educated one. But no jobs as it was the time of the draft dodgers and they came north and took all the  jobs for a bit and our PhD graduates taught high school (many in his PhD graduating class did that in that time period). So he did yet another degree masters in library science and got a job that he worked at happily for thirty years so I do not really have a lot of sympathy. Retrain and get a different job if your job disappears due to automation or political circumstance. Plus I do need a new vacuum cleaner and I want it to be all Canadian like they used to be; I will feel the same way if I am buying a fan or any other electrical device that is no longer made here and we import them from the companies in the United States that bought our companies out or simply out competed them and they closed during free trade. Those American companies in some cases made their products off shore eventually more cheaply in Asia and that is where some of them come from now first coming through the US to here. So retrain and lets get our industries back sooner rather than later. The shop vac works well but I would like a new Canadian vacuum cleaner and especially one that doesn't sound like a jet engine taking off. 

Well must get some work done before church and eat my breakfast. The day is moving onward. The exercise this morning was excellent and it was 56 minutes (4 minutes faster than usual), 49 cardio load and 326 calories, step count 3306 which is still a little high as I did lose count a couple of time.  Yesterday I walked nearly 17,000 steps. I get up and walk every hour for about ten to fifteen minutes which does bring that count up rapidly plus I ran for thirty minutes and did weight lifting for 22 minutes. 

 

 

Chromosome 1 progressing

Awake early and probably sleep again but decided to write my blog. Chromosome 1 went well and will continue with that later today. It is the longest chromosome and I inherited an all Blake/Knight chromosome from my father. Some of it is known and some of it I will see what I can find. 

Bought hand soap and detergent from a company in Montreal instead of the usual big plastic bottles of it. These come in a thin plastic dispenser inside of a cardboard box so decreasing the amount of plastic but still quite a bit of cardboard but the bonus there is that we make all those cardboard containers. Trying very hard to only buy Canadian but sometimes I do make mistakes like buying my Turbo Tax which I really like. But next year QFile will do the trick I am sure. The $27 for the Turbo Tax is well offset by what I paid for the huge containers of hand soap and detergent. I generally spend only on Canadian products in the stores but one has to read the labels very carefully as they are mentioning on the Television. Just thinking it is Canadian doesn't work. 

I did buy the shoveling for the remainder of the season from the company that does do my laneway but it didn't happen yesterday. We will see I may have to remind them as it isn't on the sign the person on the phone said but then it is set up until the 1st of April like the laneway. Generally I pay the extra to do the laneway in April just in case of heavy snows.  

 I do have a puzzle generally with Chromosome 1 as there is a set of matches in a common area which is either Blake or Buller or Rawlings or Pincombe. I have more or less got a list of matches so that I can separate them out readily but it doesn't always work and then I just assign them to the "too small" category file and do not use them. That file is going to be the largest I suspect in that this is a very common area for the British Isles and Northern Europe. 

Sunday and another service online from my Church. I do enjoy being able to attend in that way; it isn't exactly what God planned but at 80 years of age it works very well for me. The need to move is very strong in me I must admit. I do not want to wait too long but eventually this house will be too much for me even with the helpers that I purchase to assist me. I will have this company that does the laneways and porch/patio do the yards this year. That way there will be the cutting every second week I think which will make life easier. The exercise is good but sometimes it is also exhausting as it is a large yard. 

Sometimes when I look back at all of my years the amount of volunteer time that I have put in seems huge but all of that is also way back in the past. Although I did do some volunteer work with some healthcare projects during COVID and after and still do some. All online making life much easier - online is great really. But my girls are long grown and a lot of the volunteer work was with their groups or their schools.  

God is always with us in the wind and the rain, in the skies and the rich land around us. Thank you God for all that you have given to us. Help us to be better administrators of this land bringing peace to the world for all peoples so that everyone can live a good life in these lands. 

 Back to sleep and another day is dawning although not quite yet it is early at 3:40 a.m. 

H11 Newsletter on the website

 Accomplished yesterday and it is on the website awaiting approval from the support group. It is a time saver as it turns out. The process I used to use for the first newsletter of the year  for H11 took me about five or six hours of going through all the material but FT DNA's new mt tree is perfect and covers everything much better as it identifies the matches in common. So thank you to FT DNA for saving me some time as I move away from so much time on newsletters to working on my books. 

I continue to contemplate how nice it will be when I move from here. Yesterday the black recycling bin was not emptied by the collection people; possibly because I put it up on  top of the snowhill (as did others) and nothing was sticking out which seems a bit strange as I could see into it. It takes me a long time to fill the black bin. It will be so nice to be gone from all of that for sure. I am tired of dealing with people in my 80th year. I just want to work away on my books and have no one about me that isn't my family. Honesty for sure but then I have worked since I was twelve years old and except for a short period when my oldest was born and I was ill for a few years I have worked until I retired in 2008. A little sooner than I planned but I had tore my rotator cup and it needed rest and finally I decided just to retire. It was a good idea except my husband always had so many things he was doing and wanted me to help him and so I did but I managed to avoid getting involved beyond the event that he  needed help with or a trip that he and another fellow had put together and I would help with that but then quiet came for a while until Edward had something else he wanted to do. Me, I prefer just to stay at home and work on my projects. I am not a people person and even less so now that I am 80. My time that is for fun is spent with my family but they are very busy people and so I have all this lovely beautiful time to myself to work on my books. 

That recent event brought it to my notice how much the world is changing and all that waste of paper is too excessive delivering it door to door (it would take  me a month or two to accumulate a black box full of paper and as time passes it will take longer and longer. Have a stand somewhere in a mall where people can pick it up. I still  have stamps that I bought fifteen years ago (there are still three there) which tells you how much I use the Post Office. The Post office needs virtual mailboxes for people to receive their information (usually one is printing something and then putting it into an envelope and then mailing it but if one had access to a system that sent the item via the post office that would be perfect). Bulk mailing is done very well by the Post Office.  I would go for that as I do think the Post Office is an important part of government. I do see a value in the Post Office just not the current setup. That way one is always able to access their mail anywhere they  have an internet connection.  I agree with the opinion of the government that door to door delivery needs to disappear. 

I have been using computers for 60 years now and our young people are so good at managing computers starting even younger than my 20 years of age at the time. Lately in a discussion with a Chatbox trying to solve a problem the AI that I talked to could not get beyond simple sentences that a child would use and so could not understand what I was saying. It finally gave me a telephone number that I sat for nearly an hour listening to the excuses before looking up a number that did give me a person after 25 minutes.  AI needs a lot of work still. 

However in spite of the mishaps, I did complete Chromosome 2 and I will move on to Chromosome 1 today. I was pleased with the overall result of this chromosome. I rejected  ten matches because they were too small; that is the most so far. The file is now 3627 lines and by the time I have completed Chromosome 1 I estimate that will be over 4000 lines easily. Then the real work begins. Although I still have to check the databases for new matches which I will do first. 

 My usual exercises yesterday replacing weight lifting with rowing. I do like rowing and we canoed all over Northern Ontario in our young days my husband and I. It was fantastic and I highly recommend it. The rowing is a sort of strength training along with just the good cardio that goes with it. So for 400 rows, 23 minutes, 135 calories and a cardio load of 43. Today's morning exercise was 1 hour, 403 cal, and cardio load of 49. My steps were 3203 a little longer than usual but I was contemplating my blog and lost count a few times so just added 100 more. 

The FitBit wants me to slow down but it needs to continue to refine itself to work with me in my normal exercise routine (it is just six weeks old now!). It is getting better and better. My step count was 16,002 steps yesterday. 

Just the Kipp Newsletter to look at today and I will think about it. I only mention Y-DNA in the newsletter. 

Forgot to make my tea so must do that and solitaire games to play.  

 

 

H11 Newsletter in progress

I did work on the H11 project yesterday and all ungrouped members are now grouped. It is not of any value to do the statistics I used to do in this issue of the newsletter. In each individual member's page is all the information that I used to provide in an anonymous way which is now available to each person except they can see the matches. Thank you to FT DNA for doing such a great job in this upgrade. I can not publish the new mitogroups because that information is personal. So a small writeup on that in the Newsletter. I still have to have a look at the recent messaging online about H11 and see if there is anything other than my newsletters. 

H11 is an old haplogroup subclade which wintered in Ukraina during the last Ice Age. Presumably given the tracking of some of the members of this group it would appear that there were several paths to the west through central Europe and into southern England and through the Scandinavian Peninsula and into Scotland where my ancestor appears on the Blood of the Isles Database created by Bryan Sykes. The H11 also trekked east and south east and south west. The Blood of the Isles Database is a limited look as few markers are mentioned but the ones that are end up, in my case, being significant and it is likely that both of my lines y-DNA and mt-DNA were in the British Isles 8,000 to 12,000 years ago as Western Hunter Gatherers. Both of these signatures go extinct when my generation is gone and when the grandchildren generation is gone (y-DNA in my generation and mt-DNA in the grandchildren generation). I think sometimes it is hard to believe given that I have six siblings but there you go. However there are still, in my estimation, around half a million to a million holders of this mt-DNA and an unknown number for the y-DNA (there were fourteen matches on the Chromo2 test). This being an expensive test probably did not get as many testers as it might have. But I do know that the y-DNA is all over the British Commonwealth but not so sure of the United States as no one has tested there that matches. I do not know of any male Blake of Andover going to the United States. It became a very small family in the mid 1700s and most holders were still in England. Time will tell though and if DNA studies continue to interest people more will be available in the future. 

 Today finish up the H11 Newsletter and work on the Kipp Newsletter. I also hope to get back to the matches and there are 22 to finish off Chromosome 2 and then on to the last one - Chromosome 1 with its 250+ matches. That will take a bit of time. 

My new exercise routine now a few weeks old is going very well and I think it was time for a change to that type of longer exercise. I also ran for thirty minutes and lifted weights for 20 minutes. It gives me a good cardio load for the day and exercise level. At 80 one has to keep up the exercises as you lose the muscle tone very quickly. The balance also has to be part of the whole exercise story and I was amazed at how adding two sets of exercises that my daughter mentioned to my routine kept me from falling down readily whilst skiing. 

Started filling in my income tax with basic details and I do believe I will move to one of the Canadian manufactured income tax form programs. I suppose I knew it was American but I guess I thought maybe it was also Canadian but it is totally American owned. But at $27 for the basic form it isn't a lot but I will move to possibly UFile as it looks interesting, has a lovely Canadian flag in the corner and is downloaded to the computer which I prefer. It is sad though as I really like Turbo Tax. We were all happy I think with the status quo but time changes and life moves on and so must we. I do like what Prime Minister Carney is doing. One mustn't think of the deficit at this point; we need to think of increasing jobs and Canadian content of everything. 

Today the opening of the new Consulate in Nuuk, Greenland and the Governor General is there along with Minister Anand  and we are well represented there by many Canadian Inuit cousins and friends to support this new Consulate and it will bring us even closer as peoples. It isn't far from Baffin Island to Greenland and new trade routes are opening up in the Hudson Bay and we can all work together to make our lives more productive. 

Drinking tea and on to the Solitaire Puzzles. Still enjoying the Sudoku very much and do get a good laugh out of the Superstar label.  I do miss the sixteen games of Spider to achieve the Diamond level in that particular Solitaire game and perhaps I will return once my  eyes adjust to this sparkling as it tends to give me a headache. So move on from that; there are other games and Sudoku is great as a memory and brain game for sure.