OK, it’s winter, the daylight is weak and short-lived, and the weather is generally gloomy. Actually, the so-called summer weather has been generally gloomy in England for the last two years, but that’s another issue. Added to this, a large amount of hatched, matched an dispatched data, together with census results from 1841 (our first census) to 1901 (the most recent one made public), is now available online. So, one of our relatively new-found pastimes with which to wile away a few uninspiring hours every now and then is genealogy: the gentle art of rummaging around in the family closets rattling a skeleton or two investigating our roots. After all, one can now achieve a lot from the comfort of one’s own computer without all that previous inconvenience of having to drag oneself around countless, frequently distant record offices.

Just prior to Thanksgiving, UK, I had discovered a “Curd Family Genealogical Forum” web site which, to my surprise, held a post requesting details of my great grandfather. The post was old, dating from 2003. Nonetheless I posted a response. My surprise increased as, the very next day, I was contacted by the submitter of the original post. He turned out to be married to another descendent of my great grandfather; his wife is my 2nd cousin. Surprise increased yet again when he managed to furnish me with a wonderfully historic photograph of my great grandfather, rejoicing in the name of Spencer Curd, born 1848. I was just a little gobsmacked when this hitherto complete stranger also sent me an atmospheric sepia-tinted photograph of my very own parents’ wedding. [Surprise #1.]

This was quite exciting and, as I said, just in time for Thanksgiving UK when we were joined by, amongst others, my mother and her companion Tony. Having just been given a photograph of my mother by someone unknown, I was anxious to show her. She recognized the picture, which she has herself, but cannot think how a copy of it might have come to be in the hands of this previously unknown branch of my father’s family.

After the UK Thanksgivers had done justice to half our bronzed, hickory-smoked turkey, Carol began explaining some of the genealogical investigations to Tony, who had expressed an interest. His surname, Hodsden, is also quite unusual. Carol had soon tracked down his grandfather and young father in the 1901 census living in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire. According to the census, his family also had a lodger, one James Pearce, age 65, a sawyer. Alarm bells rang in my head. My mother’s maiden name is Pearce. Her family came from Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, and I remembered having documented a James Pearce, a sawyer, born in 1836. This was my mother’s great granduncle. 1901 – 65 = 1836. Yikes, yes, it was the same James Pearce! His wife died in 1894 and he had clearly moved into lodgings. It seems that, utterly unknown to them, the association between my mother’s and Tony’s bloodlines goes back over a hundred years. [Surprise #2]

I want more census information to be released, it’s a goldmine. Never mind protecting peoples’ privacy.

Technorati Tags: genealogy

Since we are destined to be away house sitting over the Christmas period this year, we decided to adopt the warm-up festival of America: Thanksgiving. Other reasons include a forlorn attempt to replace that most horrendous "festival" of Halloween with something that’s actually enjoyable. Also, since we now have most of our money back from the grabbing, incompetent hands of the blasted Icelandic financial industry, we actually did feel like giving thanks.

So, a family gathering was called including both our mothers together with my cousin Mark and his partner Linda. Naturally, my mother’s companion, Tony, came along too. The only thing one can really do for a Thanksgiving dinner is smoke a turkey. Time to splash out and extract some wonderful, hand-imported Kingsford charcoal. Since this stuff is so precious, I think long and hard before using it. After a good deal of internal turmoil (hickory or mesquite, mesquite or hickory) I finally settled on hickory smoke. Game on! Linda pitched in to the spirit of things by making a splendid key lime pie so, apart from deflecting distractions to fix Carol’s far too successful attempt at destroying her Manfrotto tripod head, all I had to do was concentrate on a main course.

After about two and a half hours, a wonderfully bronzed, hickory smoked turkey jumped from the Weber shouting, "eat me, eat me". This, of course, we dutifully did and gave thanks for that most wonderful of American inventions, the Weber grill (a.k.a. barbecue, in the civilized world). Naturally, to keep the American theme relatively authentic, we had some sweet potatoes, though we avoiding adding extra sugar, choosing to roast them instead. Everything was washed down with sufficient wine, including the key lime pie which went very well with a white sticky graciously provided by my cousin Mark.

This is more fun than Christmas, mainly because there are no crowds clogging the shops – well, no more than is normal in England, anyway. Picking up a turkey for Thanksgiving may cause a few raised eyebrows (you’re doing what?) but it’s much more civilized than the scrums that one has to fight through for Christmas and Easter. I will stop celebrating our usual festivals and go for something less strenuous in future. I commend this approach to the house.

Ramadan next!

It’s been a while but now there’s something to write about.

While we were in America watching the American financial system drag the rest of the so-called civilized world down with it, one casualty was a small financial establishment in the frozen north of the Atlantic, and Icelandic bank called Landsbanki. Regrettably, a serious chunk of our retirement cash was lodged in a few accounts with Landsbanki through their Internet banking operation, Icesave. We had Internet access while house-sitting in California but couldn’t have done anything about the crisis anyway since the bulk of the money was in a fixed term you-can’t-touch-it-yet account. So, it wasn’t just Iceland that got frozen but our retirement cash, as well.

I must say that I didn’t expect Carol to remain as calm as she did. We were above the guarantee limit placed by the British Financial Services Compensation Scheme so there was a real chance that some serious cash would simply be lost. Nonetheless, she remained philosophically calm. Compensation didn’t used to matter in the old world – banks don’t go bust – but we are now in a brave new world where they clearly can do just that. There are several banking and financial mandarins that really should be stood against a wall and shot. They are supposed to be professionals that understand money and finances, for Heaven’s sake.

Anyway, Lord bless the British government for stepping up to the plate and guaranteeing all private investors money from the collapsed Landsbanki. Bless them also for having set up what appears to be a very efficient way of making the payments. They are phasing payments by sending people emails but essentially the process is to log on to the Icesave web site and simply initiate a transfer of one’s funds to the associated current account (in another bank).

Last week Carol got her email and I am very relieved to report that she’s got the cash back that was in her name. Yeah! 🙂 That amounts to about 98% of what we had there.  I am still waiting for my email so that I can reclaim my relatively paltry amount, the remaining 2%, but it’s looking good.

Now the question is, where to put it that’s safe? (Though maybe, since our government has set a precedent by guaranteeing all private deposits in one collapsed bank, where does that leave the idea of a guarantee limit?)

No "hanging chads" this time; absolutely no debate about who won this one.

Until now, I’d never been so interested in the political process of another country. Heavens, for the most part I have trouble getting interested in that of my own. However, the legacy of the previous disastrous eight years of American administration coupled with some of the choice offered the voting public in this week’s US election, that all changed. Quite clearly given the turnout, those things had the same effect on many of the American people.

I’ve been quite keenly watching our Channel 4 news programme, particularly reports from the States by our very own Jon Snow on the run-up to the presidential election. One particular memory will remain with me forever. Being interviewed by Jon Snow, one man said:

I have voted Republican all my life until now but I’m going to have to vote Democrat this time because Sarah Palin scares the hell out of me.

 

It’s a common theme; many people whose opinion I have heard were similarly concerned about Sarah Palin. I certainly am. So, as well as congratulations, I’d like to extend a thank you to America for managing to avoid forcing the "wicked witch of the north" upon the rest of the world – this time, at least. It’ll take a while to make amends for George W., of course, but it’s a start.

Good luck Mr. Obama.

On Sunday evening we both seemed to be quite tired so retired disturbingly early – about 9:30 PM. Probably for reasons of addiction, I tried one last email check on my computer to be met by “page load errors” and a suggestion to “work offline” by my favourite browser (Mozilla Firefox). Que? Everything was fine late that afternoon. A brief glance at our Belkin modem router showed a disturbing lack of lights – nada, nichts, nothing. I remembered having my feet on the 8-gang power-surge protector (it’s under my desk) earlier in the day so I thought I’d check for a disturbed plug connection. The router’s plug did, indeed, seem to very disturbed in that it was running almost red hot. Not good – a problem to sort out for Monday.

I can’t help but process issues such as this in background overnight. It often gets to be foreground processing and keeps me awake. I wondered if the router was fine and if it was just the power supply that had burned itself out. Carol had spotted a multi-volt adapter for sale in Argos so I started investigating voltages and amperes. The router’s supply was 12V/1.25A (aka 1250mA).

In the hope that a new power supply might be the solution rather than further expense and a whole new installation, we started looking at all our other portable devices with outrageously heavy, clunky transformer-laden power adapting plugs – all those things that add up to make your small, neat, portable device much less portable!:

Nokia phone:	3.7V/355mA
Motorola phone:	4.8V/350mA
beard-trimmer:	3V/1A
DAB radio:	9V/800mA
land line phone:	6V/300mA
Carol’s lap top:	19V/3.42A

Good grief, what a set of baggage-weight-limit-exceeding variations to tote around the world (not the land line phone, of course 😉 ).

Then Carol remembered that our neighbour also has a Belkin modem router so I waited until 9:00 AM before popping next door to check that out for debugging services. No go; a very similar though not identical device by the same supplier but this one running at 15V/1A. I was stunned.

The Argos-supplied adapter was apparently capable of 3, 4.5, 5, 6, 9 and 12V at 1.2A (1200mA). I figured that 1.2mA would be close enough to 1.25mA so, for £10, I embarked upon the 5-mile round trip walk avec rucksack to the local Argos to procure one. Having got it home it proved to be more complex than one might hope. I knew it would have 7 interchangeable plug ends but none of them seemed exactly the same shape as that on our router. There was also the unadvertized issue of polarity: apparently it was necessary not only to select the correct adaptor plug but also to attach it in the correct orientation depending upon the target device’s positive or negative polarity requirement. Strewth!

I was quietly fretting about this when it all became entirely academic: another unadvertized feature of the multi-volt adaptor was that the 1.2A (1200mA) output was available only at the lower voltage settings (3, 4.5, 5) and not at my required 12V setting. Blast! There was nothing for it but a new Belkin modem router which, happily, Argos also had available and at £10 off.

A second trip to Argos secured both a refund on the multi-volt adaptor (it doesn’t do what I want) and their last Belkin modem router which is now, as you can see, up and running. What a relief to be back in touch with the world once again. How easily one becomes reliant upon technology. Just look at all those folks wandering around with a mobile phone surgically attached to their ear. Oh well, maybe the router fried the power supply, anyway.

Our new router is Belkin’s third power variation: 12V/1A! 😐

Technorati Tags: Voltage,Amperes,power adaptors,routers

As reported in a previous Traveblog posting (Fiscal Freeze), whenever we try to get together with Carol’s niece, LIsa, and family, snow tends to happen causing the required 100-mile(ish) drive to get questioned.

Carol’s normal pastime on a Wednesday (when we’re at home) is to go doing good works as a volunteer for the Greensand Trust. This Wednesday however, her usual activity has been put on hold because of a planned visit by Carol’s niece, Lisa. So, what do we wake up to this morning? Exactly, you guessed it: snow. OK, it’s not actually snowing now but some fell over night and a sprinkling remains on the grass and on our conservatory roof. The neighbourhood wheelie bins are standing at the roadside ready for collection and they look quite festive, too, with their tiny white caps of snow. It’s not even November, for Lord’s sake. We’re not even past that most horrendous of American imports, Halloween, yet.

The Lisa Effect is absolutely uncanny.