{"id":1560,"date":"2014-07-06T16:32:55","date_gmt":"2014-07-06T08:32:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/?p=1560"},"modified":"2014-07-09T23:54:02","modified_gmt":"2014-07-09T13:54:02","slug":"the-countdown-begins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/?p=1560","title":{"rendered":"The Countdown Begins"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

The Countdown Begins<\/p>\n

I am experiencing the impending end dates for two events in my life and afterwards will need to adapt to life without them.\u00a0 I now have a date for my \u201cOld Person\/Baby Boomer\u201d major personal carpentry.\u00a0 The other is the end of my subscription to a genealogical database and the loss of convenient searching, albeit at a pretty basic level. \u00a0The major reason for reactivating my blog is that my brain needs a bit of a tune up. \u00a0I find writing helpful in doing that.\u00a0 I have developed a surge of energy since acquiring my walking stick and have reacquired some capacity to be a bit creative.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Relaxed sunbaking Jessie<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The critical countdown is the one for surgery.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 After having a bad night on Wednesday night and hence missing my exercise class I took advantage of my free
\ntime, 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.\u00a0 The clipping was done with a minimum of time and fuss and we were soon ready to head off again.\u00a0 I\u2019d parked near a park and thought I\u2019d let the dogs wander around a bit and enjoy new aromas.\u00a0 I\u2019d 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.\u00a0 It was that part of human nature where we\u2019d advise someone else against it but consider that personally we could manage to get away with.
\nAnyway, I did get away with it although the dogs, leads and I were constantly tangled up.\u00a0 Am sure I\u2019ve seen a very old cartoon where something similar was depicted.\u00a0 Seems that the advent of the stick has allowed a critical bone to shift slightly and I\u2019m now more stable on my feet, fortunately.\u00a0\u00a0We must have amused a few people because two older men said \u201chello\u201d as they walked past. \u00a0It didn\u2019t take too long before I\u2019d 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.\u00a0 The dogs enjoyed their sniffing expedition.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

I'm a distinguished old gentleman. Don't you dare click that thing at me<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Sleeping Babes<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I was able tick off another long overdue job today.\u00a0 Normally I clean Floyd\u2019s aviary around spring and autumn.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t felt up to it this year and meanwhile the need increased. Somehow the stars aligned and I did it this afternoon.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t get his usual Deluxe Version as it\u2019s too cold to spray water but I\u2019m happy with what we did achieve.\u00a0 The weather was good and I was also able to pace myself to limit consequences.\u00a0 My back has been residing against a warm chair since I finished and so far so
\ngood.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Floyd or is it Floyde?<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Floyd\u2019s perches are composed from pieces of tree long ago removed from a friend\u2019s garden.\u00a0 Being a galah Floyd likes to whittle\u201d 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\u00a0 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
\nall crashes.\u00a0 This has happened so many times that I\u2019m running out of stable balancing options. \u00a0The presence of an ungainly human trying to clean and a frightened bird flying around crying \u201ceek\u201d didn\u2019t enhance the stability of the perches and we had a few close shaves with potentially falling wood.\u00a0 When the avairy was clean, or as clean as I\u2019m going to get it this time, I tried restablising the perches and rebonding with a frightened bird.\u00a0 The rebonding went very well.\u00a0 We haven\u2019t been very close
\nsince I went to China.\u00a0 He bit Son Number 2 who was critter feeder while I was away and he bit me a couple of times when
\nI returned.\u00a0 While we have had chats, whistles and a certain level of touch I haven\u2019t had the mental and physical energy to re-establish full trust.\u00a0 \u00a0Today, 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.\u00a0 We had lots of pats and scratches and he didn\u2019t get upset when I introduced some tools to fix the perch. .\u00a0 Think he\u2019s whittled too much away for me to feel confident that the perches will continue to balance in their usual manner unaided.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I hope he doesn\u2019t decide the wire is a tasty new treat. Guess I\u2019ll find out tomorrow and if so will need to create a Plan C.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This year I had planned to visit the ancestral haunts overseas.\u00a0 First I had to discover the location of those haunts as at that stage knowledge was pretty well limited to country and occasionally county.\u00a0 We\u2019d grown up fairly deficient in relatives and geographically isolated from the few we did know about.\u00a0 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\u2019d found us a few years ago.\u00a0 That provided some names and a general idea of what to look for.\u00a0 Along the way I\u2019ve found additional trees
\nonline and a friend and Big Sister have provided very useful snippets of research.\u00a0 It\u2019s a big help knowing who and where to look as we don\u2019t realize names are so common until faced with multiple thousands the same.\u00a0 We have two great great\u00a0 grandfather\u2019s with unusual names. I was looking forward to finding their records fairly speedily.\u00a0 However, things are rarely as simple as we\u2019d like. \u00a0\u00a0For one of them, there are multiple people, seemingly from the same generation with the same names.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Believe I\u2019ve found the origin of one of the names; being the surname of a marriage partner.\u00a0 I\u2019ve discovered that was a fairly common occurrence in the past and fortunately does crop up at times in our ancestor\u2019s names.\u00a0 Big sister phoned me just after
\nI\u2019d 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.\u00a0 No idea where that name came from as I then transferred my search to another section of the family.\u00a0 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
\na section of the family may have been Quakers or nonconformists.\u00a0 Maybe I\u2019ll have time and ability to unravel it one day.\u00a0\u00a0 Right now I am concentrating on acquiring names without too much emphasis on the social history and geography surrounding them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I went to a talk on genealogy at a local library during the week.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019t 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.\u00a0 One day I\u2019ll fossick again and hopefully find what I need.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

As a bonus, a library employee sitting in on the talk struck me as looking familiar.\u00a0 Eventually I realized I\u2019d 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
\nanswers to their own questions.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A few days ago I found the army records of a great uncle who fought in France in 1916.\u00a0 He\u2019d enlisted under an assumed name and while I\u2019d previously checked army records for possible names hadn\u2019t found him.\u00a0 His burial record gave his army number and that of his brother killed in action in France.\u00a0 Trove gave me a newspaper funeral notice identifying his army name.\u00a0 It was easy to find his army records with name and number.\u00a0 He\u2019d received a shell wound to his right shoulder which, according to medical records, wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s treatment to fight infection, stop drainage and heal. \u00a0He was discharged with a pension. \u00a0I have no idea how the disability and war experience affected him.\u00a0 He never married and lived for an additional 25 years.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This was supposed to have been posted yesterday but I had a few \u201ctechnical problems\u201d for which I\u2019m well known in some circles.<\/p>\n

Update: Floyd doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 I now have a date for my \u201cOld Person\/Baby Boomer\u201d major personal carpentry.\u00a0 The other is the end of my subscription to a genealogical database and the loss of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[87,86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animals-2","category-family-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1560"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1573,"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1560\/revisions\/1573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}