BOCA INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING COMPANY

3:37 a.m., December 22nd, 2011

I have already been up for an hour and I feel pretty good. I dashed off a few email replies and thought about my new website. I have not figured out how to make things all happen here yet so bare with me. There are titles that are looking for words but I do not know what to do with them to make them work yet. I still forget to go to the Blog Page to make an entry. I have to photo section worked out so that's good. Otherwise everything is "learn as you go."

My daughter won't let me put her 13-week belly photo on the website...heck, she roams around in bikinis all summer, what is the difference? I have a pot and it does not bother me....I just let it all hang out....well, for another ten days and then, CHOP CHOP!

I am trying to figure out how this website works so I can make full use of it. I want to start a page called TWIGS of the family tree. It is a series of family stories that I have been telling everyone in the family, a result of my research over the years. We have a very fascinating history that I think you would enjoy reading. It connect to Prime Ministers of Canada, famous photographers, the British hierarchy, the builders of Glasgow, the London Stock Exchange, and the London Docks. It cover the period of the Border Reivers, the days of the old sailing ships and early development of the Swedish parts of Finland.

My military historical research will take you back to WWII and it will look at both sides of the war. It will talk about the many people who I interview over the years and tell you their stories. There are some very unique photos and histories you might want to know about. Internet friends all over the world have helped me with this one and I am proud to call them friends. That is all coming down the road so bare with me for a bit.

Well, it is almost four a.m. and time for me to get back to my book editing for a couple of hours so I will leave you here and wish you a fun day of shopping and a last minute of work....after all, we have to do a bit of that too.

December 21st, 2011

Hey folks, it is about 3:30 in the wee hours of the morning and I am at it again. I slept for about 3 hours, watched a Netflix show called BONES which is a series I have been working my way through. Then I started to do some more book editing. I can only do about 15 to 20 pages at a time because it is very concentrated work. This book is about 55% completed so I am making good time at it. My editor went through it as well and I am doing the final run.  I spent most of the day working around the apartment trying to get my spring cleaning started early. This way, I will be finished by June 2012. I am also thinking about doing a painting related to the Mayan Calendar and the fact that 2012 is the scheduled end of the world according to their plans. I don't believe it.

My daughter just sent me a photo of her baby bump. Either she is eating too much or she really is pregnant. I am waiting for her to tell me it is okay to publish it. She is a very successful real estate agent in Victoria and each year gets better. She will certainly have her hands full with a baby (or two as some suggest.) Twins run in the family. Her cousin is a twin as are her second cousins.

The Carswell history goes back to about the 1600s as far as I have been able to confirm. History has it that a family known as Carswell settled in a farm known at Duncarnock in the Parish of Mearns around 1650 renting the property. Fifty years later they actually purchased the farm and it is recorded as being the Carswell-owned farm in the 1791 first Statistical Account of Scotland. What confused my research for years was the fact that my great great great grandfather and his brother and two sisters were born in Symington, Ayrshire. James Carswell 1771-1856 and his older brother William 1764-1852 learned their trade most likely apprenticed to their oldest sister's husband, Alexander Gulliland of Kilmarnoock. His wife, Katherine 1751-18?? was the eldest daughter. Their other sister, Agnes, born in 1760 was a spinster from what I have been able to determine. Then it also dawned on me that Ayrshire was just down the road from the Parish of Mearns so it really was not that far away, except in the church books.

So as the story goes, the two brothers,  my ancestor James who did the design and ran the company and his older brother William, who did the hands on work at the building sites, arrived in a blooming Glasgow at just the exact right time. It was 1790 and over the next forty years the population of the city would double. First working as joiners, the guys who connected wood to brick without any nails, they eventually set up on their own and by the 1830s had amassed a fortune in wealth and in respect. They employed 75 men in their company so it was not a small venture. The last of the family-owned holdings that came down our line was sold by my grandfather to provide his spinster sister with an income. My grandfather was that Carswell who had brought the family name to Canada in 1908. 

I always like to say that "we all eventually leave the farm" which in our family happened to be in the late 1700s. It is because of that opportunity so early in our family, that we became educated and continued to educate our young. While none of my father or his two brothers earned a university degree because their education came from WWII, they did attend university courses after the war and were qualified accountants like their uncle and his father before him.

With the birth of my grandchild this coming June, it will signal the start of the next generation in our family. My only hope is that I live long enough to be remembered.

It's 4:23 a.m. Tuesday morning and here I am again. The website is coming together slowly and will continue to grow as the days go by. I have been thinking about my godfather and his role in WWII. He was a highly respected man in the Essential Oil business throughout his life and certainly had a rough one. Few people knew that he was in a camp for suspected spies throughout WWII while my father was in England and Scotland or flying over Germany with the RAF. They met after the war and became fast friends. My father always felt bad about what the general public of Germany had to go through because of Hitler, the SS and the Gestapo. At the same time he was a fair man and only judged an individual on his individual worth and not the roots he was born into. You see, my godfather came to Canada in 1928 from Germany at the insistance of his own father. His father was one of the industrialists with I G Farben, the largest accumulation of Chemical Companies in the world. His role with the corporation created in 1925 grew as the Nazi government took hold in the 1930s and the war began. Had he survived the war he would have been one of the many war criminals of the Nuremberg Trials of war supporters. From what I have read though,  they were all released and no further charges were made against them. Fortunately for him, he died in 1943. It is interesting how the world unfolds around you over time. My uncle was a Squadron Leader in Intelligence for the RCAF and set up the Ottawa war rooms, one of many difficult tasks assigned to him. He also had to take a team into the Bergen Belsen camp tokwards the end of the war. My other uncle, who just died in Bermuda where he lived since the late 1940s also went to war as a Lieutenant in the tank corps. He returned to Canada in 1943. My own father was among the first to go and had the Canadian Army gone to Europe, he would have likely been among the casualties. However, he had originally applied to the RCAF and was rejected because he did not have a university degree and there were only 240 aircraft in the Canadian air force in 1939 while they had tens of thousands of applicants. Joining the Non Permanent Active Militia (NPAM) hoping that would make his transfer to the RCAF easier, he next found himself in the mobalized Canadian Army Signal Corps. The NPAM or as they referred to themselves the "Not Particularly Anxious Men" became the first contingent of the Canadian Armed Service Force (CASF) and Dad found himself heading for the UK in January 1940. I will tell you more about his most unusual military history during the war in a later Blog. In the meantime, go wrap some presents, Christmas is only five days away.    

Monday, December 19th, 2011

It may be Monday to you, to me it is 4 a.m. That seems to be the time I wake up and start my day. I usually have a cup of Earl Grey tea and sit down at the computer. So, after a peanut butter and raspberry jam sandwich, here I am. I probably slept for 3-1/2 hours or so, it seems to be the norm. I will eventually go back to bed and do it all over again. Among the many things I deal with is Sleep Apnea and my problem seems to be not having the ability to get into that REM portion of the sleep cycle, the time when you are truly asleep. I use a mask and I have a strong stream of air pushing at my face, so much so that I wake with a very dry mouth and desparate for some water.

Twelve days from now I begin a life-altering diet....no promises but I am going to make the effort. I want to lose a hundred and fifty pounds so that I take the pressure off my body. Funny, my blood pressure is normal so where is the pressure. Well, I would say it is hanging around the belly and the butt but then I don't want to give you a bad image of me....it's a combination of eating too much fattening food for too long, having a love for things made of sugar and I am sure a whole bunch of genetic things that make me the big stocky guy that I am. I was running 10k races at 225 pounds so maybe a hundred and fifty is too much weight to lose but I am going to give it a try, a pound at a time, after New Years. So, I am going to peg my weight right now at 345 pounds and I will give you a regular report after Christmas on my weight loss. Maybe that will encourage me enough to keep the diet going. I shouldn't call it a diet because I am really just changing what I cook and how I eat to make better use of my organs. Wish me luck! HAVE A GREAT DAY!

December 18th, 2011

Another year is about to come to a close and since I have been sitting around for the past five years watching my body heal from a number of sicknesses and operations, I have put on a lot of weight and I am looking forward to being taking it off in the coming year. This blog will help me do that by keeping me busy during the day and away from the fridge. I have a lot of opinions, thoughts and ideas  that I think you will find interesting. I also like to tell stories so this is a perfect vehicle for just exactly that.

In the meantime as I get ready for Christmas I hope you and yours all have a most enjoyable festive season regardless of what religion you follow or what festive event you celebrate. After all, we are all in this together and we won't get out alive!