The sadness remains

Sad watching the news today which I just finished doing. The little girl who was shot in the head and the neck remains in critical condition. How cruel for the parents to have raised their daughter to the age of twelve years and seen her be so successful to now have her so injured. Prayers continuing for the souls of the murdered and for all the other injured people from that dreadful day that will go down in history as we remember in particular those little murdered ones just into their teenage years. We quickly forget those who harm us but the ones lost because of that one act we never forget - in our hearts for ever.  Leaders of the parties (Prime Minister, Leader of the Opposition, Leader of the Green Party, and the others are invited and I do not know where that is at) are going to a vigil in memory of the lost in Tumbler Ridge, BC and praying for the injured. Dear God please keep the little murdered ones especially close wrapped in your loving arms. 

On with the day remembering the loss. I must say that I do find it annoying to have anyone ring my phone that I haven't asked to call  me or arranged to call me. These rude ignorant spammers probably trying to steal people's money should actually get a job and work and stop their ignorance of ringing a telephone randomly with a fake name. My pet peeve of the day. Basically I do not know anyone in the world that I want to talk to on my phone when I haven't arranged it in one way or another. That way is called email and my delete finger works very well. I do occasionally answer the phone when it is a number I recall attached to a name I recognize. But generally I leave it to go to voice mail. It is exhausting doing phone calls perhaps a hangover from my breakdown; no ideas on that. Everything is so much easier when it is written down. It is interesting that we seldom or never hear the names of dictators (except when mentioned with disgust) or tyrants or murderers who care nothing for their people once they have met their fate. If we do it is remembering them with hatred and disgust which they deserve for their sins.  

Good accomplishment yesterday and I am well into the Js now but still more than half to do. I also did the Hunter Gatherer thing and got food.  I had to buy a big plastic jug of white vinegar as I was all out. I am trying to keep these big jugs down though and it looks like vinegar, bleach and floor cleaner are the three left.

A big pile of brochures from restaurants, stores etc was in my mail box yesterday. They will go to the paper waste next week. I dream about having everything paper on line.  This is Collection Day and it is the recyclables. I have very little to put out once again but do try to do it weekly to keep that cleared away since I freeze the recycled food waste in my freezer until I put it out to the street. Keeps any odour down and the animals do not appear to try and get into the container. 

A couple of interesting matches yesterday that fitted so neatly into the Knight family. There are so many Knight matches due to the endogamy in this family in my lines going back. I wonder about these ancient Blake matches (do not appear to be Knight in a couple of lengths) in the Colonial United States descendants but Nicholas likely married his first cousin Margaret (daughter of his uncle Thomas) giving those descendants a double set of Blake and then Richard Blake married Jone Blake (second cousins)    just two generations later again boosting the level of Blake in this line so it is conceivable that particularly common areas might just be amplified by this marriage of cousins frequency. I am suspicious that I would see any sharing with cousins more than seventh cousins apart but having so many in two particular areas is very suspicious especially when their trees are so deep going back into Colonial America where the chances of marrying a closer relative would be much higher. All of these Blake lines would be descendant of Robert Blake of Enham who left his will in 1521. There is a John Blake in earlier records in the Andover area prior to 1521 (1300s actually) so it is finding information to link this earlier line with Robert. Finding a John Blake in the 1300s was rather fascinating as the Doomsday Books do not have a surname for anyone in this area of Andover in the latter part of the 1000s. By 1200 there are records for Blake in England but they tend to be in the London area or into East Anglia. My suspicion is that the John Blake of the 1300s was the first to use the Blake surname and married a daughter of Richard le Blak which would account for the relationship between the Blake family in Speen, Berkshire and Andover, Hampshire in the mid 1500s when no close cousinship is mentioned (the English people tend to recognize 1st cousins as close and 2nd cousins as some what distant according to my cousin Ivan). 

Tea drank and time to do solitaire puzzles. Exercise went very well but it is actually my older daughter that has given me all these new exercise hints as she, like my younger daughter, is very into exercise. It is important to do lots of exercise especially given our tendency to sit about so much. Both are very busy though but I do chat with my older daughter every night for about an hour. It is kind of her to take so much time out of her day but as she is an academic only and we have a lot in common discussing our books and such that we are into and occasionally I do have an idea for her. My younger daughter is very busy and I do not clutter up her phone with my book writing.  

 

 

 

Prayers continuing

Prayers continuing for the souls of the children and adults in Tumbler Ridge BC murdered and prayers for all those fighting for their lives in the hospital as well as those recovering in the hospital and at home from gun shot wounds. God bless and keep close to Him the young children whose lives were taken from them just entering into their teenage years. How heart-wrenching to have such a loss for the families, the community, the province, the country and the world. 

Interesting work on 6000 year old DNA in North Africa

 Reading an interesting post on 6000 year old DNA which was primarily 80% North African and 20% Mesopotamian. It is conjectured that movement out of Africa began 60,000 years ago but the numbers would have been small groups of hunter gatherers probably but we are also looking at a time when agriculture began in Mesopotamia. Fascinating research being done with DNA. I often wonder if the collected samples of Western Hunter Gatherers in the British Isles would get published one day. That being my Blake family line it is rather interesting to me. That my grandfather when he talked about his family described them as having been in the Andover for ever quite fascinating. When one looks at the yDNA in the area from Andover over to Basingstoke the frequency of Western Hunter Gatherer yDNA in the families is apparent. Why they would settle in this area is interesting but on our couple of trips in the area the land is very fertile and somewhat flat with good streams flowing through so one could see the attraction to stop and settle there. If indeed they were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel then there would have been a lot of peace in that area I suspect after all they went through in the south. I still am amazed at how much he talked about is there in writeups and discussed by genealogists regarding the work of Horatio Gates Somerby and the fraudulent histories of families that he produced for his American clients Blake being amongst them. But now in 2026 looking back on my childhood before my grandfather died in 1953 (although my father also, on occasion, did chat about it) and that is a period of 73 years ago that I sat and listened to my grandfather talk about the past. His stories went so far back because his great grandfather Charles Butt was still alive when he was a child and Charles was born in 1800. He talked and he talked and amazingly as I think back his stories do come to me as he repeated them so many times. It is amazing to have a feel for that much history in terms of times past. 

Finished the cleaning yesterday and another work week ahead of me with four days to do research. I did almost complete the matches up to the end of the G's yesterday but I am still scratching the surface. There are a lot of matches. I spent some time looking at my spam just to see if I had missed anything the last couple of weeks but no; no missing messages in there. I actually do not get that much spam compared to the mail that comes into my mailbox.  

Today will be a busy one and the sun is streaming through the window at the moment. I love it when the hot sun in the winter beats down on the back of the house. You can feel the heat that it sends in but it is just minus 9 degrees celsius today at 8:00 a.m. so the deep freeze is gone for a bit but could return; one never knows. The Polar Vortex has a mind of its own. 

I actually have results now for two of the four great grandparent lines in the common area which is good news. It is this common area where as much as one third of the matches sit and I have eliminated a number of them because I did not collect quite enough information when I was downloading from 23 and Me. At the beginning I did not always note the close matches to that match and I can no longer access my two brother's accounts because they are deceased and I just haven't jumped through the hoops to get that set up. It is a process but I should have brought them into my account but didn't realize it at the time so a lesson learned for sure. But mostly I have other matches with siblings that offset that loss. 

I still have to look at all the testing companies as I have not collected any new material for about six months. I have glanced and nothing huge came in but still some of the matches will likely be interesting. I do want to get started on the genealogical charts for the two books though and hope to do that early in April is the plan. 

First set of exercises completed and I must have done a lot of extra walking as the cardio load was 51 and the time 1 hour and four minutes. I will do weight lifting at some point and running for thirty minutes. Back to that normal set of exercises for the rest of the week where the weight lifting is interchanged with rowing generally and hopefully some yoga. The days pass so very quickly. 

Drinking tea and time to do the solitaire puzzles. I am now an Ace in the Sudoku puzzle set up. I wonder what is next.  

And the basement is cleaning day three

Prayers for the souls of the people murdered in Tumbler Ridge, BC. Information still coming. 

 Yesterday the cleaning went very well and was accomplished mostly before lunch which was good as the Fit Bit is now starting to recognize the cleaning and I am receiving reasonable numbers for this work.The duration 3 hours and 12 minutes, the cardio load 92 and the calories burned 1169. My last old Fit Bit had  higher numbers which I never really felt were correct. I am satisfied that this fits the effort that I put in. So today the basement and the robot will begin its task shortly. 

I continue to contemplate how to update Canada Post to virtual mailboxes as I consider Canada Post to be a valuable service which at the moment needs a redo I think in order to take up more of the possible package deliveries in particular (more money being received by the Post Office) and to help offset the cost to the government mailing items to us where there is a cost (all hard copies would have to be paid for both the printing and the cost of delivery). I think it would result in Canada Post being able to support itself. Plus it guarantees package mail delivery all over Canada without exception.  As mentioned yesterday the beginnings of virtual mailboxes are already there with the postal code which is in two parts - the area code the first three items ( a letter a number followed by a letter) and then the location code (a number, a letter, a number) which brings it down to a group of households in an area. This just has to be subdivided into individual units and a particular code chosen by the unit owner can be used for this third category that actually lets you into the mailbox and can be changed regularly to prevent fraud with two factor authentication with your phone and email just for extra layers. That gives it enormous flexibility into the future. Fascinating really but it will take time to implement although we should speed things up so that they are not so slow really. We need to speed ourselves up. I would suggest that the electronic flyers that would be distributed by Canada Post into the virtual mailboxes would carry the same cost as the current distribution of paper flyers by Canada Post. This system will be expensive to setup but the main attributes of the system are consistent across all departments of the Government and everyone will benefit particularly on a mercantile basis and that will help to ensure the Post Office being in the black rather than the red. Enough on the Post Office; just my thoughts at this time for whatever reason; sometimes I am just annoyed about something and being the person I am I begin to think of good solutions. 

Working on Chromosome 1 and yesterday I managed to complete the D's. A few good insights that solved some great grandparent lines and I will continue with that today. It is really the common area (common to Europe and the British Isles (and by extension a lot of the people in the Western Hemisphere except for the First Nations)) that is the most difficult to separate into the great grandparent line very often. But there are still probably 200 matches to go or more. I will count them when there are fewer. 

I have now organized the recycling that has been added to our collecting to put out to the street. I put all the small plastic items into one of the bread bags, another bread bag will hold the large pieces of plastic and I use very few cans and the  number of large plastic containers has almost completely disappeared with the purchase of the boxes of liquid hand cleaner and soap that I bought from a company in Montreal. I replaced the cleaning solution with a paper product that comes in a recyclable cardboard box. The amazing thing is that there is only floss in the garbage and it will takes months and months to fill that plastic bag in the garbage container. Amazing really and a good move forward having a private company take over the recycling collection. 

I want to start on the enormous set of excel files for the photo books so that I have created just the family part of it and then I can begin setting up the photo books. The other way was not working for me as I just felt sad about taking apart the History of his Life that Edward created. It will still be there in the scanned files along with the original indexes. One day a descendant might just pull that up and have a look at it; one never knows. But it was something Edward did not want to happen that he would be forgotten as he always felt his father was. Definitely our daughters will never forget their father; they loved him dearly and still do. 

Time to do the solitaire puzzles and I have forgotten my tea so must go and do that.  

Second Day of Cleaning

 First day of cleaning went very well but it is on these three days that I have to really work to get to my 12,000 steps per day (just over 13,000 yesterday) - I seldom go beyond that on a cleaning day. I primarily concentrate on my books when not working and getting them done. Whenever life becomes conflicting it does appear that I hide behind my books. The books will be published with a Creative Common License and free on my website. The Blake will be a shorter volume than the actual one that I will produce but I still feel strongly that I will not be adequately proving to my mind anything prior to 1521 and will not include that portion in the published online book but it will be in the book that I place in the Guild of one-name Studies Library where I am a member. I will get some of the material transcribed (it is all in Latin) but I do not have all of it and so I must leave it to a scholar in the future who finds the story of the Blake Family of Andover intriguing. Perhaps another descendant of that family will do that. I have a busy couple of months ahead of me of work although I do not plan to publish before January 2028. Once I complete Chromosome 1 then I will be changing how I am working and back into planned days for either Blake or Pincombe. It will be exciting and I will enjoy it. 

I continued yesterday to contemplate the Cosmic Horizon and Heaven. I do believe God is in the Heavens and the discussion was most interesting that I read yesterday. I do not believe I have ever heard it expressed in quite that way before (past Lecturer at Harvard, Dr. Michael Guillen, The Economic Times). It was absolutely beautiful and thank you to him for sharing it with the world. I still remember the first time I saw a print of an atom; it was just a flat image on a paper but I loved the look of it. It so appealed to me and drew me into Chemistry at a young age (about twelve as I was headed off to High School). I read Chemistry for years before I studied it and still find  it fascinating. The atom is the secret; it is the basis of all that we see around us including ourselves. DNA is built from atoms and in the creation of a life at every level DNA responds to the material it receives from each parent accepting the best presented and rejecting the inferior. That doesn't mean as we all know that everyone is born perfect. I myself had strabismus all my life until I was 78 years of age and then like a miracle I could see into the depths like I never did before. I could see without glasses and even more astounding I passed my driver's test without glasses. I notice that now nearly two years later I do not reach for my glasses first thing in the morning that did take a while. But it is all the mystery of the atom how our life flows and will we ever know when the atom first appeared in this universe. Genesis is a simple story of the beginning but I think that the atom is all part of that story. The secret of the Cosmos never to be revealed whilst one is living. But we can dream about it.

Another good day of morning exercise at 58 minutes, cardio load of 51 and 339 calories plus 2615 steps which is about right for that set of exercises. I injured my back in a fall in my mid-teen years and I got up and walked again so never really investigated it (I was one of seven children after all) but I still have to be careful with my back as it is easily put into difficulty without the proper exercise. I did finally in my 60s get some help with my back and some good exercise recommendations. That is one of the many reasons that I do do exercises every day to keep my back very strong. 

Still none of my expected  mail and mostly what I do receive is all brochures (and that could be virtual as well saving one's time looking for it online). Canada Post is particularly good at delivering bulk mail. Perhaps not a big deal getting my piece of awaited mail as I can just call the company; I already paid my premium (this is insurance for my burial so do like to keep it up to date). But I do like to have the paperwork. I dream of a virtual mail box and we are setup already with the filing system for it with the postal code (the two parts of that postal code were particularly ingenious). I actually did work for the Postal Service in one of the District Offices back when I was having a problem with miscarriage from being on my feet all my working day and needed to rest so I went to work at the Post Office and with my COBOL language did manage to secure an interesting position but I was taken ill after my daughter was born and had to leave my position. Having the postal code would make a very straightforward setup and we could move to it quickly. I have had so many different kinds of jobs in my life all emanating from the various trainings that I have had in school, in the workplace and just on my own usually online learning once that entered into our lives.  I do not know if there would be initial savings as the added computer setup, the electricity, the use of AI (still in training stages and will be awhile before it would be ready without a lot of human input). But the advantage is so huge and I believe it would increase the income earned by the Post Office because it would be a do it all delivery service for government and mercantile as they choose providing everything particularly delivery of parcels which they are quite excellent at providing (parcels would grow of course because of items that the government delivers to us which were once letter mail - for actual hard copy delivered perhaps we would pay for that in the future); but for the consumer/tax payer/business being able to handle your mail anywhere in the world is a plus. We have a bit of that already as you can get the post office to scan your mail and send it to you. That is an interesting mid step but for privacy the virtual mailbox wins out absolutely. 

At the District Office of the Post Office in the middle of the large room there on the second floor where I worked were maybe a dozen desks of men who had served in the Second World War and had been injured in various ways and they formed a work pool that we could get to do particular tasks and one in particular was very keen on computers and I got him to prepare the huge piles of computer pages by marking particular items for me. He became extremely good at it and fast. I admired those young men in the height of their youth (well I suppose in their 40s and 50s then) pushing themselves day after day to work and to learn. They could  have just sat back and given up but they did not and I will forever remember them for their courage to keep going and continue doing what they could do to support themselves and their families.  

Worked on Chromosome 1 yesterday and I am into the D's so not a great deal done yesterday. But some good sorting of the common area with lots of Relative lists attached to the files now. AI can do all that work for me eventually. But for the moment I must prepare my files removing any randomness so that the AI will do the best job that I can tell it to do with minimum junk coming out. 

Tea all drank and solitaire puzzles to do. I have one neat trick that I use when my back is a problem and that is to kneel at the computer and type and play solitaire puzzles. It does seem to strengthen the back.