I'm a day late, but I fell asleep watching the Olympics last night.
1) There's been a dove sleeping right up against my sliding glass door onto the balcony overnight. It's -25F wind chill and snowing on and off, and the poor thing looks half frozen. I am wondering if it's one of the ones that hatched out there last Spring. I put some seeds (flax, chia, oatmeal, sunflower hearts, etc.) that I found in scrounging through the pantry into a little dish and set it out for the poor dear. The bird flew away, of course, when I opened the door. Daughter says she's seen it out there every now and then recently, so hopefully it will come back and eat. Put the dish in a low box, so it should help with being out of the wind a bit, too. If it comes back. This kind of weather is so brutal on the critters. The snow has not melted at all, and tonight is to be colder still, they say. Usually the balcony is sheltered, but there's snow blowing into it today.
2) Cold. The new furnace is splendid. Some combination of the new furnace and putting plastic up on all the windows has cut my natural gas heating usage in roughly half from this billing period last year. It's still going to cost more than last year, as will the electric, because of the supply and other charges, but it ticks the "it's an improvement" box.
3) Still studying French. Also looking at the Netherlands. No sooner than Spring of 2027 for a departure unless things turn much worse. As long as the daughter's work keeps extending her contract periodically (which they keep doing, while telling her they can't extend it again each time), she can't be considered my dependent, so I can't get her into an EU country to live with me. Apparently France has no "digital nomad" provisions, and I'm willing to bet that if they did and the kid went over on one THEN her work would end the contract and she'd be screwed. I need to look at Spain again, I guess. If we stayed to the north we might beat the heat. I'm even thinking Mexico, but apparently gringos are becoming quite unwelcome there - for justifiable reasons - and we'd have to locate literally right on the ocean to beat the heat. Ah, well. Maybe things will work out and I can just spend the rest of my days here in the library or puttering in my garden. I'm too old to keep having to pull up stakes every few years.
4) I do genealogy as a hobby. I have been looking, for over 40 years, for a great-aunt and a great-uncle for whom there were no records. They were just a rumor traded among the older members of the family. Then I found one did exist, and a name. A few years ago I found the other one's name. All I could find initially was the baptism record of the older child. Looking backwards from census docs, I wrote to the RC Churches for that area of NYC and asked if they had records for the family (I was able to give them a 4 year time window). Miraculously, one found a baptism. From that info, and a stroke of luck in finding matching address info on a census mortality schedule for 1880 I had a death month/year for the older child. I have been writing to cemeteries - many cemeteries - over the years trying to find her. I had tried to get a NYC death certificate years ago, but without the birth date I couldn't get one. With the month/year on the mortality schedule I tried again now that the records are online and there was only one showing the right name, the right area, and the correct month. NYC sent me the certificate. It named the cemetery where they were buried. With that I wrote to the cemetery asking if they had, by any chance, them both buried there. They just returned my SASE with a letter that says they both are there, and the exact location of the grave in which they are both resting. I need to get to the LDS library to see if they have a microfilm of the daybooks - sometimes there will be notes written in the entry for each burial - to see if they have any other info that the cemetery otherwise cannot release. I'll be trying to visit the grave in the spring. It'll be over 140 years since anyone probably has, but still.... Calvary Cemetery in Queens, by the way, is absolutely huge. There are millions of people in it now. It was rural farmland when the kids were buried there. (Diphtheria, as toddlers.) Why bother? Nobody deserves to be forgotten, no matter how long they were able to be with us.
5) The subscription here ends tomorrow morning. Apparently it's not possible to freeload, as it was back in the earlier days - you have to pay to subscribe, which involves a record of payment, potentially removing any anonymity my VPN has given me. So I may or may not be back. If not, I wish all of you the very best. I still remember most of our time in the UK fondly, and miss that tremendously. I hope Brexit and the insanity coming down the pipeline treats you kindly in the future. Take care, stay safe, be well.
