Monday, October 30, 2017

I Have All The Best Words

I have been struggling through a book written by the brother of one of my friends while recovering from the 'flu.  The author is a Doctor of Divinity and the book is about the Pauline epistles.  I confess that I am struggling with it; it was obviously written for scholars, not lay readers with an interest in the early Christian Church and I have had to haul out both my dictionary and my bible.

I would like to make clear at this point that my preferred deity is the invisible pink unicorn.  That is actually not an official religion and in the last Australian Census I had to opt for being a member of the Pastafarian church which has, as their deity, the flying spaghetti monster.  This is a registered religion in USA so it is official.

My interest in religion goes back to my school days when I first started to read the Bible critically and realised that the stories being fed to us were the Sunday School version and not based on anything much found in the King James Bible.  My interest has primarily been the historic basis of the Old Testament but I own a book called "Who Wrote the New Testament" so I have some basis for understanding the book I am reading at the moment.  I'll give Doctor Harding a plug here  -  it is called "The Pastoral Epistles?".

The new best word in my vocabulary now is 'parousia' which was totally new to me and never used when I was at school.

I have had a bad week what with the 'flu but there has been one very positive outcome.  On Wednesday morning I found that Poppy, my girl-cat, had ripped one of her claws and it was hanging by a thread.  I took her to the Vet thinking that I would have to fast her overnight and take her back first thing on Thursday morning to have the toe amputated.  However, it was just the claw and there was no infection so the Vet said that surgery that morning was just finishing and that she could sedate her and remove the claw immediately.  

That was good and I took her home with some pain relief to be given with her food.  When we got home I realised that I had a completely different cat to the grumpy, hissing and spitting cat I had known and loved for the last six years.  Gone were the hissy fits whenever her brother approached, gone was the low growling when he tried to curl up with her in bed and it occurred to me  -  knowing that she had arthritis in the right front leg, that she had been in chronic pain.  So when we went back to check the claw I mentioned this amazing change in her and the outcome is that she will be on long-term pain relief which goes on her food and which she loves the taste of so it is very easy to administer.

And we now have peace in our time.

Friday, October 20, 2017

Cousins and Forebears

Last night a first cousin once removed telephoned me at the instigation of one of my first cousins to further my researches into my father's family.  G.C. is only five years older than me although he is a different generation but he doesn't have a computer so telephone and snail-mail are going to be the only way to communicate.  I have only ever met him once many, many years ago but remember it, probably because he was near my own age and that is important to a teenager.  Anyway, he has contacted another of our cousins and obtained her email address for me so that I can clarify her siblings  -  a big gap in my contemporary tree.

I now have the bit firmly between my teeth and have discovered, in the 1851 census, the family of my great great great great grandfather, his wife and his children including my great great great grandmother.  She stayed behind in England after her marriage and followed her husband to South Australia about five years later; in the census she is shown with her married name in her father's house so I know that it is the right family of Smiths (her maiden name).  Yeah!

I have had no luck tracing her husband's family back further than his father; there are too many people in England with the same name and I have no idea where in England they lived.  But more and more information is coming online all the time  -  I didn't think that I would ever be able to find Benjamin Smith in the whole of England and I did.

This research back into the mists of time doesn't affect the two cousins whom I met last week.  Our family trees meet with my great grandmother and I am now researching my great grandfather's forebears but whereas my W. cousins have researched the distaff side no-one seems to have researched the male line and what actually is already in Ancestry.com is wrong and very muddled, so it is worthless to me.  It is worrying that Ancestry.com allows so much mis-information from unchecked sources.  That may be why the erroneous tree is no longer active and I cannot access the owner to correct his/her information.

Today is Opening Day at the RFBYC which I overlook from my apartment and the yachts are gathering.  The weather forecast is for gale-force winds and thunder.  At the moment it is dead calm, hot and humid; it certainly feels ominous.  I have a birds-eye view and will be watching the proceedings with interest.

Friday, October 13, 2017

My black furballs turned six last Thursday

I find it hard to believe that I have been in this apartment for over six years.  The cats were born on 12th October 2011, an easy date to remember because it was my parents' wedding anniversary.  I collected them on 2nd January 2012 when they were 10 weeks old.

Yesterday I met up with my two Wilson third cousins and we talked none-stop for four hours.  It was a lot of fun  -  they are great people and both interested in our mutual roots.  I have spent the last couple of weeks gleaning as much information as I could from all my Wilson cousins descended from Matthew Wilson,  my paternal grandmother's family.  To clarify that last sentence  -  I have some other Wilson cousins who, as far as I know are a different family altogether. I have not been able to get a complete descendant line  -  there are some gaps to fill in still and I am hopeful but not at all confident that I will get all the information I would like.

It is easy going back since there is a lot of information online from people researching their ancestors but not as easy to cover contemporary relatives.  There is nothing in the archived newspapers and the BMD CDs only work with 32 bit computers and only go to about 1930 anyway.  I used to have the whole set and squeezed them dry before disposing of them when I moved.  I realise that they might still have worked on my Win 7 laptop but they didn't have the information I want anyway.

My latest COTA client has cancelled his last two lessons.  I can't say that I blame him, the computers which we use are on their last legs and last week there was no internet connection.  After two weeks of exhorting him to click on the Microsoft button to find out which version of windows he has it is quite possible that he discovered that he has a Apple Mac.  Anyway, unless COTA manages to dredge up another client is looks as though I will be able to sleep in on Thursdays for the rest of the year.  My plan is to go to the Christmas party and then resign  -  or resign and then go to the Christmas party.

We are having weird weather at the moment  -  hot days, cold winds, storms  -  totally unpredictable and my asthma is bad and I am currently taking cortisone which is great for my poor sore arthritic thumbs but extremely painful when I stop taking it so I should be taking advantage and getting back to spinning but I have spent a great deal of time trying to kill off two infants, Michael [--?--] and Daniel [--?--] children of a cousin with a nameless husband.  Michael and Daniel were duplicated and even FTM should have realised that but didn't.  so I deleted the repeats which returned with alarming regularity and eventually I had to kill off their mother and reinsert her.  I haven't tried putting the boys back but maybe one day ...

Thursday, October 5, 2017

I have received a 'Top Comment' accolade from Facebook




This is a one-off event and I feel that I must record it for posterity because the original has sunk way down the page and may never be seen again.

The comment was in response to a number of American politicians who passed a bill making abortion more difficult.  After the Las Vegas shooting all that the 
republican politicians seemed to say was "My thoughts and prayers go out to you."
My posted comment was "My thoughts and prayers go out to all those American women who accidentally become pregnant. My though and prayer is "Thank God I live in Australia".

Parsifal loves the TV and is convinced that if he could only find his way in or through the screen he would be able to meet and greet all the people in there.  He walks backwards and forwards across the front of the screen and twice in the last couple of weeks he has trodden on the remote and switched it on.  I am not looking forward to the day he puts two and two together and turns it on whenever he is feeling lonely.

The internet was down today at COTA and since I was intending to teach word processing I thought that is wouldn’t matter but was unable to use the computer I usually use as it refused to load so I moved over to the one which Himself uses and discovered that there was no way to get a big enough block of text to use.  I usually go  online to  my webpage to get a text document and have one saved on the desktop but, with no internet, I was unable to do this today.  I am getting very tired of the never-ending battle with the COTA computers and am seriously considering resigning at the end of the year.  I enjoy teaching and meeting new people but the computers are dying and I am tired of carrying two computers with me every week just in case I need them.

Next Friday I am having morning tea with two long-unknown cousins.  One, KH and I have been in contact for several years as she is a serious genealogist but I had no idea that there was another cousin from the same branch over here in the West.  The family settled in South Australia and KH is a
South Australian as am I but so far I have no idea where SC is from.

I have been busy contacting cousins to obtain as much family information as I can so that I can print off a  descending descendants’ report from our common ancestor and there is only one gap  -  the son and daughter of a great aunt  -  and the only person likely to know is an 83-year old recluse who doesn’t own a computer but who is reputed to be a genealogist so maybe he researches at SAGHS and the Mortlock Library.  I have his phone number and will try phoning him but I am not holding my breath.