Thus only a few weeks ago I had a major breakthrough when I found that the 1901 census was finally online.

I hadn’t expected this to add an awful lot of information to my records as the 1911 census did. That one filled in a lot of detail about branches of the family and completed locations for me. I wasn’t expecting much from this one as everyone on the 1911 census would be on the 1901 census and I’d locations nailed down at 1896 so wasn’t expecting any big changes there.

However, there was one key thing on it: the family weren’t in the same house in 1901 as they were in 1896 and 1906. This has quite a big impact as my grandfather was born in 1899 which means that I can now get his birth certificate when previously it wasn’t found on the traces (because of the incorrect address).

Interestingly, it also confirms that my grandmothers name was Jane and not Jean/Jeannie as everyone thought. That difference seems to be down to the Ulster Scots pronunciation: she was always “ginnie” which younger folk in the family took to mean Jeannie when in fact it was the familiar form in Ulster Scots of Jane.

First up was the weekend of American Independence Day which, as always, creates a flurry of vaguely American themed activities to coincide with it. Thus we had a Hubble event on the Friday, the Ulster-American Folk park (obviously!) and several other places besides which could claim some kind of American link. In amongst all that was the final “normal” Saturday with both the Kumon and football coaching.

The coming week seems quieter and should let me get time to have a much needed catch-up with various bits of administration that didn’t get done over the last month. However, that’s merely a lull in activity as I’m off to Nottingham at the end of the following week and have various bits of preparation for that which haven’t got done either.

Perhaps the week after we’ll have our rest.

Though you can find things like natural depression treatments on the shelves these days there’s two problems with them. First “natural” doesn’t mean either effective or better than a non-natural treatment. Secondly, treatment by way of pills doesn’t tackle the underlying cause of the depression and merely alleviates the symptoms.

Naturally the way out of the depression is through tackling the underlying reason or reasons for it although doing that may be far from easy.

Quite how anybody with more than a couple of kids copes at this time of year I don’t know. Well, I suppose I do – they just don’t go to all the events because they can’t fit everything in. That’s a shame as it disappoints the kids but when you’ve a school that tries to pack so much into just a couple of weeks, what else can you do?

The final day ended up fairly hectic too as the school closes at noon and there’s quite a heap of last minute things that need done that morning.

Oh well, we’ve a couple of months to rest before it all starts again. Or, rather, we don’t as there’s the summer events to fit in too with the first raft of them starting tonight with the July 1st Somme parade, then a heap of things over the weekend mainly with an American independence theme.

In the online world there are untold numbers of sites offering discount codes like buy.com coupons or similar ones for just about every online shop that you come across. They’re slightly different in that they can be much more targeted so it’s sometimes a bit hit and miss as to whether there’s a discount coupon for the thing that you’re about to buy.

It’s still worth looking though as some of the discounts are pretty substantial.

Oddly though it’s largely been down to a relatively small number of things that have eaten up an unbelievably large chunk of the day between them.

To begin with my Mum needed to go to the physiotherapist. Sounded easy except that it wasn’t one appointment but two or three a week over almost three months. All right in the middle of the morning too so in effect the entire morning was eaten up by each one of them and often part of the afternoon. Losing two or three days out of your week like that makes a big difference to what you can do over the course of a week.

Then Wendy got what seemed a nice little job as temporary dinner lady in the kids’ school. Only an hour a day so not much pay but boy was that an awkward job! For one thing, when added to Mum’s appointments it meant that quite frequently we’d to drive over town, drop Mum, back to drop Wendy, wait for Wendy, race to collect Mum and then race back to get the kids which meant getting on for two hours driving those days for no  apparent benefit.

With just those two things taking up surprisingly large chunks of the day there was a knock-on effect on everything else with massive delays in getting things done. Thus our bathroom which should have been totally redone about two months ago is still sitting ready to be done  and with the holidays coming up next week it may be sitting like that for another month or two.

Well, perhaps not neglected so much as nagged when we miss some match or other. Despite modern technology making it really easy to record said matches, that’s no good as it just has to be live. Even the time delay feature ain’t a runner: fully live or nothing.

Tonight’s the first big match (America vs England) that she’s missed the first half of so I’m in the dog house at the moment.

Surely there can’t be that many people that would search out a shopping channel on the same channel number as, say, a kids channel? I can understand  people watching some of these shopping channels, but when they’re on a normal shopping channel slot. And yet, the habit seems to be extending to more and more channels.

OK, I guess it doesn’t cost much to broadcast one of these channels these days. It’s just that it seems totally pointless.

It looks like extensive lobbying on the part of the various airlines has brought forward the time by which they’ll be permitted to fly once more. However, the question is whether people will opt for those flights or choose to go with land/sea based transport.

It’s a difficult call. Test flights can only test so much airspace. They certainly can’t test all the different concentrations of ash and dust that the planes might encounter. After all, there are tens of thousands of flights to be taken when things do get back to normal compared to a very small number of test flights taken up to that time. That means that, in effect, each commercial flight will become part of the test programme and I’m not so sure that’s a flight that I’d like to be on.

Yes, it’s a major hassle for all concerned but given a week or two it would be possible to get everyone back to where they should be without requiring all those flights.

Well, yes you can print all kinds of cards on your printer but there’s two problems with that. The first is that they’re not necessarily cheaper than when you get them professionally done. Secondly, there’s the problem of the printing ink and the paper that are used as neither one are going to be as good quality as when you get them done professionally.

That’s not so bad when you’re doing a run of the mill thing but if you’re doing something special like baby shower invitations you’re usually better to go down the professional route. Don’t forget that these are things that people may well cherish for years and, in some cases, for generations so you don’t want to have el cheapo productions, do you?