Such are the Dreams of the Everyday Housewife

Prompted by the example of D2 who borrowed from me a book called "The New Natural Cat  -  a guide for caring owners" I decided to gradually change my cats' daily treat over to something more healthy than commercial soft food.  So I headed out to Farmer Jack and bought some lean beef mince with the idea of introducing a bit at a time, adding other ingredients as I increased the fresh and replaced the supermarket mushy stuff.

On Day 1 I added about a level teaspoon of the mince to each of the feeding bowls along with their usual soft food.  They thought that this was a great treat and scoffed it down.  I happily went off to do my daily yoga practice only to find, when I went into the bedroom to change back into my clothes, that Poppy had neatly brought up the whole lot in the middle of my duvet.

Thank goodness for clothes dryers.  I bundled the duvet into the washing machine and put it through a couple of cycles in the dryer and it was back onto my bed by bedtime.  We are now back to commercial soft treats but a better, more expensive sort from New Zealand where they seem to do most things better or best.

My genealogy research is now focused on my one and only Irish forebear and there I have run into another brick wall.  I gather that the Irish archives were burnt down along with most of the BMD records and people seem to be second guessing their ancestors and then actually putting their trees onto Ancestry.com where they are copied by other researchers.  I can trace the ancestor who came to Australia as he is in the record of assisted immigrants who arrived in Sydney in February 1842, along with his age (19), his brother and his occupation.  

It would be so easy to copy from other trees and give names to his parents but I contacted a cousin researching the same family and he doesn't know either.  He is, like me, insistent on sources before recording information -  something which got me into hassles researching the Mendus family.  I had help with the Davies branch of the Davies family and that is well sourced.  David Davies married Charlotta Mendus which is how the Mendus family connects with the Davies forebears.

My Irish forebear married in Sydney a few years after he arrived but his wife died, probably in childbirth, two years into the marriage.  He then moved to South Australia where he married my something-great grandmother and between them they produced 12 children.  She died with the twelfth child so I assume that it was all too much for her.  By our standards she was not very old.  Thems were the days!

I am trying to edit out most of the commas in this blog.  Reading news reporting from USA I sometimes find the reports confusing due to a liberal scattering of inappropriate commas.

The last of the sudokus:

Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.