Updates

Sorry to leave you all hanging like this. But it's reassuring to know that there are people out there who will complain if I don't write something inconsequential every night and publish it for the world to see. So here's some sequels to things I've been writing about recently:

Abraham Stapleton, I find after some extensive detective work, was my great-great-grandmother's half-brother. It's confusing, but in brief - Jane Pridmore has an illegitimate daughter, Eliza, then marries William Stapleton and produces Abraham, then William dies and Jane marries Thomas Fowler. The Fowlers bring up Abraham in Pickworth, Rutland, and later take in Eliza's own illegitimate offspring, William Pridmore. Those Pridmore farm women really didn't have much time for the sanctity of marriage...

I've now got two bikes. One cheap second-hand one and one free second-hand one courtesy of Andy at work. Neither are exactly superbikes, but they get me from A to B as long as A is home and B is my office down the road.

I still haven't quit my job, although I'm still thinking of it. I really would enjoy a holiday in Vegas around now. But I've decided to plan something in advance for once and arranged another trip to Pittsburgh in June. Just watch now, a big memory competition will be scheduled for the same weekend. It's bound to happen.

I've let the memory training slide a bit lately, what with all the family-treeing, but when I have done a little bit of memorising, it's been very successful. Hopefully this weekend I can force myself to do some marathons.

I've got a thing with my eye, that I'm having to go and see an optician about. I bet you it ends up with me wearing an eyepatch. Even if there's nothing wrong with it, actually, I might wear an eyepatch anyway. It'll make me look cool and piratical.

I've had some fun with Parcelforce lately - I was sending some toys to a friend in America, and decided to do the new-fangled doing-all-the-paperwork-and-paying-on-the-internet-and-then-conveniently-dropping-the-parcel-off-at-your-local-post-office thing. It turned out to be less easy than the website made it sound. I suppose I can't complain too much about the post office people pointing out that the parcel was 30 grams heavier than I'd said it was, but then even after I'd opened it up, thrown out some unnecessary packaging and re-parcelled it, it took four or five people clustering around a terminal to work out which buttons to press to scan the parcel in. Next time, I'll do it the old-fashioned way.

And then the following day, I came home to a card saying that Parcelforce had tried to deliver a parcel to me, and had taken it back to the same post office I'd spent a lot of time in the day before. I confidently expected it to be the same parcel again, but actually it was some comics I'd bought on eBay, and my parcel is winging its way to Georgia (hopefully the American one, not the former Soviet one) as we speak.

Great comics, by the way - Transformers!