Snow on the ground

 Just a little snow on the ground; an appetizer for what is to come for sure. Since I have Worry Free cleaning the laneway I am not overly concerned at how much snow this year and they will also clear the walks making life so much easier for this 76 year old. All that is left to do is to clear the car and I only go out a couple of days a week so will not likely rush at that task either. 

Working on Chromosome 13 and I still do not like the last little bit of it. I have matches that almost reach to the end but not quite there is one last portion following a crossover where I am not entirely sure of the changes other than we all continue to half match each other after a full match where we are matching a known third cousin. Since that match ends just before the crossover I do not have a helper with this one. I may just leave it unfinished with the idea that once I have a match that helps me I will fill it in. It actually is not that long so not glaring on the eye when you see the omission! Besides I am 76 and the need to be absolutely perfect is dimming somewhat - nearly perfect works. 

I need to check all the matches to see that they have been put into DNA Painter and that I have not missed anything then on to Chromosome 12. Perhaps I will finish this task this year which will make it just under two years since I started the task. 

I will also start work on the Pincombe Newsletter. This is the start of a new volume and amazingly I am now at Volume 7. The Discussion point has already been selected - Who was the John Pincomb married to Grace Manning and what is known about that John Pincomb? The spelling of the name intrigued me for a bit until I remembered my mother saying that her Pincombe family had used the Pincomb spelling in England and that was true of the Bishop Nympton registers from the first mention of the Pincomb surname. Eventually I will look once again at the yDNA study for the Pincombe-Pinkham members and have a discussion perhaps the last issue of Volume 7 giving it another year to see if any new members join. 

Other than that I sent in a request for information to Algonquin College with respect to the Certified Autism Specialist course. I am now noting that there are ten weeks of placement (Monday to Friday, full days) broken into four weeks and six weeks. I have to consider whether at 76 years of age I am up to that sort of work load but perhaps they will let me audit the courses that are online so that I can at least glean that knowledge base as I move forward with this idea of being a help to my grandson as he moves through his life. Whenever the way is a lot of work I reminded my children and now my grandchildren that Marie Curie recrystalized radium 453 times to 0.17 g radium chloride (RaCl2) at 94% purity (the final product contains only 0.01 g of BaCl2 ). It was at great hazard to her in the long run unfortunately which I have not mentioned yet. Good things in research happening most often takes a lot of work. Even in my day science labs did not offer the protections that they have now but were better than in the days of Peter and Marie Curie. We visited the undergraduate labs at Western maybe six or seven years ago now I would have to look that up and the work is all done in fume hoods now rather than bench work that we did. There are extra precautions for radioactive material (which also existed in my days in the lab). Pure science though is still the most fascinating of all research I think but then I did study Chemistry (three years of Honours Chemistry) although I would have had to repeat my third year organic chemistry to go into fourth year Honours Chemistry so elected to take the pass degree by taking French and surprisingly a history course (next to science I loved history and especially ancient history which included an interest in my own surnames which extended far back into the past I had discovered)) to have the necessary credits although in total I had more than enough credits in science. I think there is a pass degree now in the sciences. I did consider repeating my third year Honours Organic Chemistry but decided at 20 that I would really like to work for a bit and did do some COBOL training courses that were most interesting and led to interesting jobs. Edward was working on his PhD in Chemistry and then a postdoc so the salary I was earning let us buy a house, travel a bit and do extra things. Any regrets, not really, I enjoyed my lab work and computer work over the next few years after we married before our first child arrived. I did look into doing my masters in Ottawa (and was accepted) but decided that it would not give me enough time with my little ones. So I did proofreading and copyediting for local printers in Ottawa at home for the next fifteen years which was most interesting and included the NRC journals - physics, environmental sciences and chemistry. One makes choices and I made what was the best choice for me at the time (my health was not strong and I felt that I needed to be with my children as much as possible when they were small).