The Countdown Begins
I am experiencing the impending end dates for two events in my life and afterwards will need to adapt to life without them. I now have a date for my “Old Person/Baby Boomer” major personal carpentry. The other is the end of my subscription to a genealogical database and the loss of convenient searching, albeit at a pretty basic level. The major reason for reactivating my blog is that my brain needs a bit of a tune up. I find writing helpful in doing that. I have developed a surge of energy since acquiring my walking stick and have reacquired some capacity to be a bit creative. While the need for personal carpentry has put an end to my previous ability to travel and the source of previous interesting blog topics, here is a new beginning of general musings and hopefully a chance to share some of the family history I have been acquiring.
Relaxed sunbaking Jessie
The critical countdown is the one for surgery. With that in mind and the fact that Jessie, in gentle clawing on one of her outside beds has made holes through two layers of covers on both sides of the mattress so the need for urgent claw clipping was upon us. After having a bad night on Wednesday night and hence missing my exercise class I took advantage of my free
time, the good weather and bundled the dogs in the car headed to the wonderful people at Dogs Best Friend where they have a free walk in claw clipping service. The clipping was done with a minimum of time and fuss and we were soon ready to head off again. I’d parked near a park and thought I’d let the dogs wander around a bit and enjoy new aromas. I’d made the mistake of taking my stick and while I knew it was not a good idea with two dogs on leads, considered it manageable. It was that part of human nature where we’d advise someone else against it but consider that personally we could manage to get away with.
Anyway, I did get away with it although the dogs, leads and I were constantly tangled up. Am sure I’ve seen a very old cartoon where something similar was depicted. Seems that the advent of the stick has allowed a critical bone to shift slightly and I’m now more stable on my feet, fortunately. We must have amused a few people because two older men said “hello” as they walked past. It didn’t take too long before I’d had enough, both mentally and physically and considering that luck can only triumph over stupidity for a certain time headed the spectacle to the car and home. The dogs enjoyed their sniffing expedition.
I'm a distinguished old gentleman. Don't you dare click that thing at me
Sleeping Babes
I was able tick off another long overdue job today. Normally I clean Floyd’s aviary around spring and autumn. I haven’t felt up to it this year and meanwhile the need increased. Somehow the stars aligned and I did it this afternoon. He didn’t get his usual Deluxe Version as it’s too cold to spray water but I’m happy with what we did achieve. The weather was good and I was also able to pace myself to limit consequences. My back has been residing against a warm chair since I finished and so far so
good.
Floyd or is it Floyde?
Floyd’s perches are composed from pieces of tree long ago removed from a friend’s garden. Being a galah Floyd likes to whittle” away on his perches. While this is acceptable and normal, Floyd always chooses the root end responsible for creating the fine balance essential to having perches instead of lumps of wood on the bottom of a cage. Every few months he whittles away enough of a critical section of perch infrastructure that it no longer exists to balance on the wall bracket and it
all crashes. This has happened so many times that I’m running out of stable balancing options. The presence of an ungainly human trying to clean and a frightened bird flying around crying “eek” didn’t enhance the stability of the perches and we had a few close shaves with potentially falling wood. When the avairy was clean, or as clean as I’m going to get it this time, I tried restablising the perches and rebonding with a frightened bird. The rebonding went very well. We haven’t been very close
since I went to China. He bit Son Number 2 who was critter feeder while I was away and he bit me a couple of times when
I returned. While we have had chats, whistles and a certain level of touch I haven’t had the mental and physical energy to re-establish full trust. Today, despite all of the cleaning upset and confusion he was happy to sidle along the perch while I was busy trying to work out a suitable balancing act for it and to do so without looking like he wanted to taste blood. We had lots of pats and scratches and he didn’t get upset when I introduced some tools to fix the perch. . Think he’s whittled too much away for me to feel confident that the perches will continue to balance in their usual manner unaided. The final solution involved a brick and tying the end of the perch to the bracket with some electrical wire I found in my tool box. I hope he doesn’t decide the wire is a tasty new treat. Guess I’ll find out tomorrow and if so will need to create a Plan C.
This year I had planned to visit the ancestral haunts overseas. First I had to discover the location of those haunts as at that stage knowledge was pretty well limited to country and occasionally county. We’d grown up fairly deficient in relatives and geographically isolated from the few we did know about. We have been fortunate in having some simple family trees created by two members of the previous generation and also in having information provided by a distant cousin who’d found us a few years ago. That provided some names and a general idea of what to look for. Along the way I’ve found additional trees
online and a friend and Big Sister have provided very useful snippets of research. It’s a big help knowing who and where to look as we don’t realize names are so common until faced with multiple thousands the same. We have two great great grandfather’s with unusual names. I was looking forward to finding their records fairly speedily. However, things are rarely as simple as we’d like. For one of them, there are multiple people, seemingly from the same generation with the same names. I have winkled out a few people I think belong in our direct genealogy but have a long way to go before getting to the bottom of it. Believe I’ve found the origin of one of the names; being the surname of a marriage partner. I’ve discovered that was a fairly common occurrence in the past and fortunately does crop up at times in our ancestor’s names. Big sister phoned me just after
I’d made another breakthrough in that line and I told her we should exhibit patience and be merry as we have an ancestor by that name. No idea where that name came from as I then transferred my search to another section of the family. She was born quite a while after the period of the Puritan Movement but I guess the name may have been derived from then or
a section of the family may have been Quakers or nonconformists. Maybe I’ll have time and ability to unravel it one day. Right now I am concentrating on acquiring names without too much emphasis on the social history and geography surrounding them.
I went to a talk on genealogy at a local library during the week. The talk was well organized and the speaker was very happy to answer questions and provide a few tips on unraveling a few little problems. I have a great grandfather who appears in the 1841 census as the youngest child, seemingly reappears (correct locality/names/age/birth location) in the next census as the head of the house with a woman recorded as mother-in-law and a tribe of kids who don’t appear to be his. I have wandered though census returns and found lots of people who are probably connected to him through blood and marriage but have yet to find the connections I want. One day I’ll fossick again and hopefully find what I need. He turned up in Victoria a few years later and married a woman whose family had the good sense to give her a family name as her second Christian name.
As a bonus, a library employee sitting in on the talk struck me as looking familiar. Eventually I realized I’d met her years ago as she is the sister of a kind friend who reminds me of the Energiser Bunny on speed and tranquillisers; always on the go, capable, fast, efficient and oh so calm and patient. We had a lovely chat at the end while other attendees were seeking
answers to their own questions.
A few days ago I found the army records of a great uncle who fought in France in 1916. He’d enlisted under an assumed name and while I’d previously checked army records for possible names hadn’t found him. His burial record gave his army number and that of his brother killed in action in France. Trove gave me a newspaper funeral notice identifying his army name. It was easy to find his army records with name and number. He’d received a shell wound to his right shoulder which, according to medical records, wasn’t dressed for three days, required removal of the top section of arm bone and being in the days prior to antibiotics required about a year’s treatment to fight infection, stop drainage and heal. He was discharged with a pension. I have no idea how the disability and war experience affected him. He never married and lived for an additional 25 years.
This was supposed to have been posted yesterday but I had a few “technical problems” for which I’m well known in some circles.
Update: Floyd doesn’t appear to have developed a new food source and apart from a preference to do nothing today have no ill effects from the aviary cleaning.