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. 

 

 

 

H11 Newsletter is a complete redo of the site

 It will take me a while to do the H11 Newsletter as the mitogroups will necessitate a complete rework of the site. I am in the process of looking at that. The Kipp Newsletter only deals with the yDNA groups and will also have a look at that but again I am moving away from working on Kipp since I do not know the family and perhaps someone in the group will come forward and become involved. We will see how that goes; I will mention it in the next Newsletter.

Cleaning was slow as I decided to download my TurboTax which took me a bit to accomplish but everything  is working very very well. I do like using Turbo Tax to do my Income Tax. It is an American product but it will be difficult for me to change that unless I just do it. We will see in the future but this year it is TurboTax once again.

Cleaning completed although it was a dragged out session today as I kept on checking in on a couple of items.  That completes cleaning for the week except little everyday things. 

I did absolutely nothing on the matches as I decided to work on the Newsletters and will likely do that to a large extent today. Reworking the H11 viewing chart will be a large task with  517 members although some are only Family Finder and did not test their mitochondrial DNA at FT DNA (I am assuming that they did test it elsewhere which is why they are on the H11 site!). 

I will start out though with the matches as I am now down to  43 left to do (my guess of 40 was pretty close). Then there is just Chromosome 1 to add to the flat file and I am looking forward to that. This was a huge task as it turned out but I have now really looked at all of those matches after many years of not opening some of the files or just a brief glimpse. 

The bright sun out this morning does tell me that cold weather is coming since the clouds are not very prominent but then we are promised the Polar Vortex for a few days and it is  minus 16 degrees celsius at 7:44 a.m. EST. This is normal weather for us although we have had a mild winter or two in the last couple of years but a return to normal winter for Canada. Definitely we need all that snow to build up the water reserves on the land. 

The new consulate is being opening in Nuuk Greenland today by the Governor General. It is a nice feeling to realize that our Governor General is Inuit just as the people of Greenland have Inuit heritage. Long ago the Inuit people traveled across the Northern Pacific (estimated 5000 plus years ago) in some fashion we are still learning about that (our simple thought of an ice land bridge across the Bering Strait is being replaced by a very reasonable thought that the peoples moving across would have stayed close to the shore or on it but not necessarily go all the way north to the Bering Strait given that the winter would have provided lots of ice covered areas for travel. Our Inuit are very used to traveling about in Northern Canada during the winter and have built homes of ice for many thousands of years at stopping points. 

It is fascinating what DNA reveals to us about our heritage. I continue to marvel that my paternal grandfather talking about his family and saying they always lived in the Andover, Hampshire, England area (he always specified it like that as I was young and he wanted me to understand that this was a different place on this planet of ours). I am glad he did that and repeated it so many times (I loved to hear him talk and he could have said it every day and I would  have listened just as eagerly as I did as I loved being with him). But I am distracted my point in bringing up my grandfather was that the yDNA of our line is Western Hunter Gatherer and the particular haplogroup belongs to a lineage named the "Deer-Hunters" by Ethnoancestry. I tested my brother everywhere I could as he was so willing that I do so and the second brother I tested when he was willing just to have the two samples in the system. The Western Hunter Gatherers were said to be in England 8,000 to 12,000 years ago but I always wonder if they were there before the Ice Age and simply returned to the lands of their ancestors. The proof may lie way below the surface as there was a kilometre of ice on the British Isles at the height of the Ice Age.  

Tea all drank and must do my solitaire puzzles for the day. I was also doing a weekly challenge with Spider but had to give it up when my eyes discovered sparkling and it still overwhelms somewhat and tires them so I have stopped for a bit (I have done them every since that project was added to the site so do miss it on occasion but replaced with Sudoku) but perhaps I will return one day as I love doing Spider Solitaire Puzzles. The Sudoku has these levels gained as you are given points and I am now at Super Star having passed through a number of levels over the past couple of months. I take my time as I aim to have no errors and it is fun I must admit.