Another successful cleaning day with the basement completed yesterday. Today the main floor and will begin that in a little while. Yesterday I also went out and collected up all the wood that has come off the big maple tree at the back. This year quite a bit came down actually. I wonder if I should get it trimmed but last year I couldn't see any dead branches. Will watch once the budding goes to leaves. The same with the front tree. They are both enormous trees now. The one at the front is 47 years old I think and the one at the back is 44 years old (my daughter grew it from a maple key and tenderly cared for the sapling until Edward and she transplanted it to the back of the yard. She was so proud of her tree (my eldest daughter) but equally proud was my younger daughter as she too joined in with the planting of the tree although pretty young then.
The hedge back there is at least ten feet tall and hasn't been trimmed since before COVID. Should think about having the tops clipped to keep it bushing out. I think I will get a lawn company to cut the lawns this year. Just looking at them and will call this one that looks particularly interesting and closeby.
Today I will work on Paul Reed's articles about the Somerby frauds and add them in to the chapter. Then a short set of thoughts on my part at the end and that chapter will be complete. Still working on the Latin wills and translating them into English which is a slow process but I was pretty close my first time through translating them as it turns out.
Then a little more work on the matches and probably at the same time I will start to work on the Genealogical Chart. I still believe I will put Robert Blake who left his will in 1521 at the top followed by his sons Richard and Thomas and then come down from those two. Although Enham was around 1000 acres, I still find it hard to believe that all these Blake individuals who left their wills living in Enham were not related. For a while I toyed with the idea that there could have been two William Blakes but the reality is that the only record that referred to two Williams in the 1580s was looking at a father and son (William Senior who died in 1582 and William Junior his son). I think having spent time looking at that and realizing that there simply was not a reason to think that these families were not related; I should move ahead a put to paper so to speak my thoughts because in the future others will have the opportunity to debate what I have written and perhaps with even greater availability and transcription of old records new snipits will inspire thoughts which generate probabilities and will continue to assist in understanding the Blake family of Andover.
Although I keep referring back to new matches I am not finding anything significant that would change any thoughts on the phasing of the grand parents and I will return to phasing the great grandparents although not truly phasing because I am using data that phased grandparents and simply moving back in a direct line to the two individuals who produced each of those grandparents and doing a split as seems reasonable given the data.
Hard to believe we are into the third week of April and soon May. The year is passing rather quickly for me actually. As usual the change in the direction that the sun's rays hit the earth from late March to early May always affects my eyes somewhat and it does take a while for me to adjust to the change in the light as the sun works its way northward to give us summer. Perhaps it is my tendency to be inside far more than outside but I think at 80 that is not going to change. Working in an attic without windows was actually lovely when I was a child and I did spend hours at that. Do I ever regret destroying all my writing from those years before I married? Not really; it was inconsequential to how I lived the rest of my life. It was just the thoughts of a child raised in a family of seven children as the middle child. I was the one that looked after the little ones and I enjoyed it well enough. But I was never really close to my siblings other than my brothers when we were all young but we moved away from each other as I caught up to them and perhaps that made them feel somewhat uncomfortable. Doug did say that later in life that my catching up made him feel uncomfortable. Funny really thinking about that now.
I have to admit that I do not think that the Prime Minister is supporting Iran; I can not agree with John Ivison's thoughts on that. The reality is that Iran is caught in a muddle and they need help getting out of that muddle to stay intact. No one is helping them and perhaps as a Canadian I least of all think that they deserve help in a way (they did after all shoot down our civilian airplane with many many children, men and women murdered in a second) and yet I can sense God's words tugging away at my thoughts and saying they need an out but they are not finding it. Perhaps they could consider asking a neutral country to assist them in solving at least one of the problems which is the nuclear enriched uranium. At this time and in this place it does not serve them and is a block to moving ahead. Consider asking one of these neutral countries that they could be comfortable with (and I am sure they can find one such country in France in Germany in Canada (it does need to be a neutral country that can support the containment of the nuclear enriched uranium). We do not support Iran's export of terrorism to annihilate Israel but in our neutrality we could take in this pile of material and keep it safe for another day when peace is shinning forward like a huge sun and all the world lives together without bombs. The UN Security Council should guarantee the safety of this material in the hands of a neutral nation (in particular Europe has proven itself to be a neutral set of nations looking for peace and I consider my own country of Canada to be the same). The future never reveals itself to us until the time comes for that day to show itself. This material is worth a lot of money and Iran has spent a lot of money producing it (money better spent for sure giving their people a better life). I hope that Iran can move to a plain where peace is part of their living process and if asking someone to care for something you consider to be important then I hope that Iran will do that. It would serve them well and eliminate the reason for the latest problems in the Hormuz Strait. Although nuclear energy is and will be a marvelous new tool in our tool box; it is a very dangerous substance as well when other uses that are not peaceful make use of this material.
The middle of the night saw me write in my blog and I did not realize it was so early. Amazing how a piece of lovely banana bread can put one back to sleep once again. Must get my tea made and do my solitaire puzzles.
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