I will clock my life by my routine I rather think and yet I am not really a routine person but do like things to be orderly if possible. But I can also live with chaos although it is perhaps not the preferred state for many. At the moment I am working on my two books although yesterday no accomplishment on Pencombe I was too busy cleaning.
I think I will make today a Pencombe day and there are still three days left in the week after that so should work well just a tiny bit out of synch. I am still looking at North Molton to see what I can discover about the village in that time period when Pencombe was arriving with la Zouch just after the reign of Henry VII begins in 1485. I have ordered one document and will hear about that in the next few weeks or sooner depending on their workload. I will continue seeking out information on the Pencombe family of Herefordshire because that is the next planned chapter. So the day is planned.
I realized after I got off the phone yesterday dealing with the cataract business that I had been offered an appointment in March but we didn't clarify my telephone number so will investigate that. Not sure what happened to the secretary that called me in December to offer me an appointment to see the ophthalmologist with respect to the cataract surgery but no surgery until too late in January for my care but I am assuming he is still the secretary so will give him a day or so to recover from whatever kept him from his task yesterday and call back to verify the numbers. This is a private health care company I think and I am opposed to private health care in Canada but the public system did not work very well because of my need for 100% care perhaps for only a couple of days at most but one does have to take care of oneself it would appear to protect that time that works best. If I never get cataract surgery then so be it. My eyes are still working quite well actually although I do note that my distant vision is perhaps not quite as strong as it was in terms of recognizing birds at 20 metres away unless they are large enough (I can of course recognize them with binoculars). But in terms of doing my work no problems. We will see how this goes. If it doesn't work out I will wait until next January and go to an optometrist and get referred as that appears to be the only way to acquire an ophthalmologist these days for routine care. Then I can move forward once again with my cataract surgery. I think I would prefer the Montfort or the Riverside at this stage as they have large cataract clinics. But I know my daughters would like me to get this done so we will give it a go. But I do dislike the idea of private care although I certainly spent the first twenty years of life with private care being the only way here and it worked well at the time except there was a part of society that did not have good health care and that can be dangerous for all of us - COVID is a good example. I have tried to stay in the public system but it is overloaded and I do want answers to my questions (I really just have the one question - does the more advanced lens present problems for my non-working eye?). It does really just bring me to the necessity to hire our own students first and it is absolutely paramount in medicine; no foreign doctors who have not fully retrained here except perhaps our own students who had to go to foreign countries to get into medical school; a good oral examination would probably determine if they are as well trained as they are here. If they do not know the answer to my question (this is a new lens and I can understand that I do have a lot of experience in research but do not choose to spend hours reading the Ophthalmology literature that may or may not have the answer but I am not a guinea pig type for this sort of life changing experience). I would choose the simple lens obviously I do not want headache caused by an eye suddenly deciding to try to work after 78 plus years of doing nothing basically. If my eyes are tired then the strabismus makes itself apparent very quickly and I do use my eyes a lot. My father's eyes were the same as mine are and he had excellent luck with his cataract surgery fourty years ago! He could still do his crossword puzzles in the newspaper; I just want the same ability actually! except I am transcribing ancient documents although cross word puzzles are something that I also do on occasion if I do not have my computer.
Of course I am not actually working; this is my retirement. My retirement began in January 2008 and our first trip together to the British Isles was in April of that year. What a fabulous trip it was actually. We met up first with my cousins (Blake) and did a lovely couple of days of travel in southern England to visit our mutual ancestral areas and a trip to the Atlantic which was pretty much solely my ancestors on my mother's side but we came back by way of Beamister where my cousin had taught for many years at a school for boys with learning difficulties. He wanted to show that to me and we discovered the gravestone of Edward's 9x great grandparents who had left from Weymouth to go to the American Colonies in the early 1630s. That was truly an occasion for Edward as he had not thought to see anything of his rather small percentage of English ancestors (all Dissenters about 5% of his ethnicity) who had come to the American colonies in the 1630s/1640s. As it turned out we had a number of such events throughout our travels much to his surprise I think as his ancestry is primarily Dutch/German/French to New Amsterdam (now New York) and other parts of New Holland (including Albany). These ancestors came in the 1620s to America.
So another work day but I begin my work with my Latin lessons and I am getting perhaps 45 minutes to an hour a day of both new lessons and practice. It is working very well and I shall transcribe Robert Blake's will (1521) on the next Blake day. It is primarily in Latin with one sentence in English at the end where he gives his land at Enham to his son Richard (I think perhaps he is his oldest son).Robert also has a son Thomas (and I need to verify Andrew and William as being his sons). It is interesting that it is Richard at Enham because the widow Jone Blake in her will (1527) does not name her husband other than Mr Blake but she is at Enham. No where does one find that the father of her children Robert, Nicholas and Elizabeth is named Richard but it does seem like a step not too far to say that the Jone Blake, widow at Enham was likely married to Richard Blake who inherited his father Robert's farm at Enham in 1521 and her will is 1527 and Richard's will is 1522 and he mentions his brother Thomas). Because of the charts that have been produced for this Blake family I am extra cautious as I work my way through all of this material.
Must get my tea, usually I do that before I write my blog. On to the day.
While I prepared my tea I got to thinking about the public health system. I am a great believer in it actually. I wasn't at the beginning back in the 60s when Public Health Care first came in. But an encounter on my way home from working at the hospital chanced my meeting a young woman and her son. The son needed medical care for his foot and was limping; he was a little sweetheart for sure. Children should not be wandering around needing health care and that sold me on the public system. Public and private can not operate in the same hospitals and we are not building private hospitals and if they go under if built they must be donated back to the system - we should not buy them and nor should anyone outside the country be able to buy it. If that sounds like socialism so be it but I think of health care like fire protection - absolutely necessary and we need to find a way to provide it that works (but there is also a responsibility not to abuse the system; take care of yourselves to limit the need). I did work in the hospital before retiring for twelve years and I think the system can work it just needs some tweaking to increase the presence of family doctors in the system during this time of the baby boomers aging. Myself I hardly ever go to a doctor but I do have the luxury of a lot of training by my godmother (an excellent nurse) via my mother and, knock wood, good health. One would not have anticipated that I would have such good health in my old age but I do take care of myself; I neither drink nor smoke and other than drinking a limited amount of red wine until I heard Ed's diagnosis very little alcohol in my life. I occasionally do have wine still but it is rare.I am tight with money and spending it on luxury items is not really my way although did enjoy the trips that we took but I had saved my money through the years to do that traveling. It was persuading Edward to fly across the ocean. It took actually 38 years to persuade him; he was a stubborn person for sure. So my good health thus far is a product of good eating (I seldom indulge in foods that are less healthy), no smoking, no drinking and lots of exercise. But it does surprise me because the prognosis when I was 30 was not good. As the doctor said I must rest and rest a good deal to survive. He was right. When the baby slept so did I! On to the day; lots to do these books will not write themselves.
Latin first.
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