The mind prepares us

I think our mind prepares us and we have to let it do that sometimes - as always we must have the most control over ourselves but sometimes the mind has a way of helping us to do that. I always play my solitaire games as soon as I am ready to take on the day. Before that I do my exercises and wake myself up. As a child I pretty much leapt out of bed and took on the day but now at 77 I notice my mind is just a little sluggish when I wake up although I am still keen to get on with the day. Exercises first and then the last exercise on my feet - touching my toes ten times but actually I can still put my hands flat on the floor about half way through the ten - a good sign. Probably I am starting to need coffee but I dislike coffee and always have. If my mind is sluggish then I will have a lovely two ounces of coca cola although green tea has the same effect but at 6:00 a.m. I am not necessarily going to go down and make a cup of tea although I may move to that but at the moment I drink a little coca cola. The onrush of stimulate in the drink is felt almost immediately on an empty stomach and I settle into  playing my solitaire games first thing. I think I should read my Bible Reading first but the games stimulate my mind and I get far more out of the Bible Reading as my alertness has probably improved 100% or more after the games. 

Today we have John the Baptist at the Jordan River in Bethany where he is baptizing people and being queried as to who he is and he said those infamous words that probably stick in some of our minds from our Sunday School days - "I am only someone shouting in the desert, 'Get the road ready for the Lord!' " And the next day, John saw Jesus coming toward him and the rest is history - a beautiful history that has traveled through time with us for over two thousand years. A gift of God - just as every child is a gift of God (mind you I fully support a woman's right to choose but would say think about it carefully; do what is best in the long run for you and your unborn child); His greatest gift to us was His son Jesus. I do love this Bible Reading from John 1:19-34. 

Yesterday I cleaned and for dinner enjoyed my leftover salmon from Sunday which I made into a salmon fish cake - a very favourite meal  from childhood - along with fresh guacamole and some leaves of Boston lettuce grown in Ontario and a slice of wholewheat and seven other grains bread made in a local bakery. A really delightful meal after a day of cleaning. Not much work done other than that as life was just too busy - I had several phone calls in a row that all dealt with mostly the same thing but all done now which is great news. 

Edward had an email from RCMP which I am assuming concerns the renewal of his gun license (why else would they send him an email!). I notified RCMP by phone that he had passed away in late April 2021 and I still had one of his long guns and needed to know the process to surrender this last one. Edward had surrendered three of his long guns to the Ottawa Police a couple of months before he passed away but had kept his grandfather's muzzle loader and accoutrements. They really belonged in a museum but COVID restrictions were in full swing and I did not get an answer to my query from the museum. I called RCMP and was told that this was a provincial matter and that calling Ottawa Police to come and get this final long gun would end his license and I didn't have to do anything. Well that didn't happen it would appear as the long gun was picked up in July 2021 but now just a few months before his license would renew there is an email in an account for which I do not have the login or password (Edward left me with at least three or four hundred logins and passwords for his various accounts). So I emailed RCMP but was told to call. I would really prefer to do this all by email so that I have a paper trail to refer to just in case. There are likely a few million long gun licenses and I can understand the problems with co-ordinating everything although it should be easier with computers as one simply enters in that this person is now deceased and the guns are being turned into the local police as requested. I had all the paperwork completed including a death certificate to submit to RCMP but was told that I needed to deal with the local police. At 77, these things are just too much work and there needs to be an easier way. So hopefully, my emails to RCMP yesterday along with the case number at the Ottawa Police Services will solve this quickly without my having to call and be told that they can not release the contents of the email to me without jumping through a lot of hoops to get that done - at 77 one is too old to jump through hoops (and probably driving somewhere on the highway). So we will wait and see how that goes. Too bad the gun did not go to the museum as it belonged to the father of Edward's grandfather so is fairly ancient and was in perfect condition (the cherry wood handle was magnificent) - a real piece of workmanship plus the extra pieces for preparing the shot and a bag to hold the powder all in perfect condition. Time will tell.

On to the day and cleaning the first floor plus I would like to work on the last two sets of cluster data that My Heritage prepared. Strange that my sets are so much larger than my siblings - coincidence is an amazing thing as I inherited quite differently from my siblings which means that with the five sets of data I have except for a tiny piece on one chromosome a perfect picture of all our grandparent's DNA. In particular the Pincombe set of data and the Blake set of data are especially interesting with many cousins matching on good lengths as well as the Rawling data which is most complete. You really do need second cousins or greater to do a good job of phasing. I do not have any first cousins anyway but they are too close to distinguish when you are sharing actual grandparents and not just siblings of those ancestors. 

It would be nice if Russia would leave the nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia as they are creating a real hazard for all the peoples of the Old World - the nuclear haze from a disaster there would hang over all those countries from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast; from the Arctic Ocean to the Indian Ocean and we would also have the effects here in the Western Hemisphere. It would be a mortal sin for them to do any more damage there. Glory to Ukraine and God grant them peace on their terms as they have suffered in these nine months from such sins against them perpetrated by Putin and his enablers in the name of Russia. Do not let them do this to you O Russia, rise up against Putin and his enablers and cast them out. Have a better life; put those nuclear weapons under international control so that they can never be used except to protect the planet from external threat.