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.

The reasons behind the differences are basically down to attitude, exercise and supplementary things that somehow get missed out on in the stories. Rarely is it the case that a simple diet will lose massive amounts of weight for anyone: you just have to factor in some kind of exercise. What you’ll not hear about in the stories are the small amounts of exercise that can make radical differences to the effectiveness of a diet plan. They’ll not talk about the fact that they started using the stairs rather than the elevator or that they parked their car at the farthest end of the car park but little things like that add up over a period of months.

Similarly, you’ll hear about the diet plan but you won’t hear about all of the things that they don’t eat any more. Even simple things like changing from taking orange juice in the mornings to taking water will make a considerable difference over a period of months.

Finally, you aren’t them. You aren’t starting out from the same point as them nor have you put on weight for the same reasons. Thus a diet for you may well be entirely different from one for anyone else.

Despite years of trying with our little guy he still gets eczema here yet generally doesn’t when we’re in our place in France. Now, you might think that there would be oodles of difference between here and there but in reality there aren’t. Yes, he’s out more over the year there but then he’s out just as much over the summer here. The food that we eat isn’t all that different either.

Yet still he gets it here a lot but only rarely there.

Of course, it’s almost always never as easy as that in reality which is why there are appetite suppressants these days. What these do is to reduce the urge for you to eat quite so much as you generally do and thereby lose weight fairly naturally.

They’re not the quick-fix of some diet pill approaches but because they act more gradually the chances are that you’ll keep the weight off when you do lose it. Moreover, you should get used to eating smaller portions too so eventually you’ll not need to take the pills.

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.

They don’t have to do that though and usually it’s much more effective to put a meaningful phrase in the “click here” link but seemingly they can’t be bothered to put that extra little bit of effort into their marketing. That’s a shame really as search engines generally look at the information within the link and “click here” doesn’t give them anything to work with.

Obviously it’s not always possible to put a truly meaningful phrase in the link but, usually, it is.

Thus something like acnepril seems long overdue.

Whether it works for you is something that you’ll only find out by trying it out as it comes under the heading of cosmetic treatments rather than medical ones so hasn’t been fully tested (though the ingredients seem fine).

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.

Are they worth doing though? Well, at the outset I’d have said that it was a definite “no”. After all, there’s quite a bit of work to be done before you get any benefit from such a system. Whilst it’s clearly a good idea to be able to find things and certainly handy to be able to pull up the documents onscreen rather than hunting through a whole bunch of files to find something, there’s quite an effort to go through before you reach that stage. For one thing, it takes time to enter a document into the system with a minute or two to scan documents and adding all the meta-information in the form of dates, titles, keywords and so on.

Moreover there’s the problem that you don’t get any of the advantages for a few months (how long the delay is depends on your business) so you’re plugging away for ages before you can really see why. Sure, you could process all the historical documents and get the advantages sooner but few people have the time, money or inclination to do that.

Once you get over that hump you soon wonder how you did without the system. The only problem then is that it becomes increasingly difficult to find documents that predate the system which for many means a period of a few months more ’til those historical documents cease to be quite so relevant.

So, very worthwhile doing but put some thought into how you’ll motivate staff to enter details for the several months it takes before the system becomes one of those “can’t do without it” systems.