The UN Criminal Court of Justice told Hamas to release the hostages immediately unconditionally and they have not done so. The people of Israel want all of their people home as would any country being held hostage by Hamas as they continue to keep hostage over one hundred Israelis (old and infirm men, young children, mothers, women and men) for more than four months in inhumane conditions underground without proper food, ventilation or changes of clothing. Release the hostages Hamas; Hamas is the problem as they continue to disobey the UN Criminal Court of Justice.
Cleaning all accomplished yesterday and today the basement. A very small amount of work done on Blake mostly because there was a post on our Guild of one-name studies group mail site that delved into medieval families and how to trace back into the period before parish registers effectively. It was an interesting discussion that guaranteed my rest periods from cleaning. Sometimes I keep at it too long.
The discussion on medieval records yesterday was most interesting but did not reveal any new sources for me to look at. I have a path and will just gradually follow it as I acquire all the records that I have not yet acquired to put the books together. It does make for a rather busy retirement that is for sure. Sometimes I do wonder if I have taken too much on but the days pass and winter is here and my favourite thing to do in the winter is research.
Minus 6 degrees celsius today; winter has truly returned.
Funny how the memory of my jumper came back to me yesterday. It was maybe six months before my younger sister was born. My mother didn't realize she was pregnant; she thought she was going through menopause my grandmother told me. I remember her menopause very clearly as she had it all: hot flashes, drowning in sweat, (being pregnant with five young children). I think in all she was ten years going through menopause if I remember my grandmother correctly. Apparently it was very like what happened to her paternal grandmother who died at 47 and I expect it was rather frightening. I was just a child of eight years at the time. She was very surprised to be pregnant apparently - I didn't actually know we were having a new baby until much later, I think when school finished that year actually and it was my grandmother who told me accidentally. I think it was because a neighbor visited her when I was with her one Saturday and they were talking about the new baby coming. When my mother told us I acted surprised because I didn't want Grandma to get into trouble. The wisdom of an eight year old. As it turned out my menopause was very uneventful - no hot flashes and much later. Funny really. I saw the article on menopause and it made me think of my mother who really struggled with menopause way back in the 1950s and early 60s. But she did live to be nearly 86 and never had dementia but probably she did not have hormonal imbalance but who knows. She was clear thinking right to the end of her life. We went to see her when she was hospitalized and I spent the entire day with her and that was lucky because two weeks later she developed sepsis and was gone very quickly; actually no one told me or my daughter who had just moved there and for both of us it was a very sad moment not to be with her when she passed. My older daughter was so very close to her grandmother; they used to sit on a chair laughing together when she was young and they talked in French as she was in French Immersion and my mother remembered her French from High School. It was the cutest thing to see them together. She was a perfect grandmother. My daughter was the only baby for eight years after her three older cousins (who were 6, 7 and 11 years older than her) and the next child was my second daughter and then the other four arrived two years apart one after the other. My younger daughter never really got to know her grandmother like my older daughter did; there were too many babies all at once!
My great grandmother (my mother's paternal grandmother) had a rather sad life in some ways. Her two older sisters died in childbirth before she married, her younger sister died of dropsy not long after my great grandmother married and only her youngest sibling, her brother, survived to live a long life. It must have been frightening back in the 1870s when my grandfather was born; one baby had already been stillborn and then he arrived living and both survived. Two more children followed but one died at 6 months and the other at 13 years about a year after her mother. His mother died from an abdominal complaint according to her son which was diagnosed as cancer 12 months on the death certificate but I still wonder if she had an ectopic pregnancy or a pregnancy outside the womb that wasn't detected at the time. He (my maternal grandfather) told my maternal grandmother that his mother had felt movement (this would have been, if I am correct, her fifth pregnancy and I definitely felt movement by 10 weeks with my later pregnancies) which was strange to my young ears. She died in 1886. I suppose it was such things that inclined me towards medicine but working in Africa was something I wanted to do as a medical missionary where I could make a difference because they didn't have enough doctors. I think hearing such things as a child was something that frightened my mother in retrospect but once through menopause I would say her health improved remarkably and she was a very hale and hearty 50, 60, 70, and 80 year old.
Must get to the cleaning.
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