No Slow Slide Into The Later Autumn This Year!

 Our beautiful start to the autumn lasted about a week to ten days this year.  Sigh....winter is coming, so I guess it is time to admit I am aware of that.  

Within about a 48 hour period I went from wearing sleeveless tops to sleeveless tops with a sweater to short sleeved tops with a sweater or light jacket.  In fact, this afternoon right here in the house I put a thick sweater on over my elbow length blouse sleeves.  Yikes!  That was a quick transition!!  In another week I will probably be wearing long sleeved turtlenecked tees....under sweaters! 

When I woke up at 5:45am today the outside temperature was +2C and by mid week it is going to be 0 degrees.  Before then we are going to have to empty the plant pots and compost the contents. It is time to dig up the potatoes that are growing in a large flower pot on the back deck.  It is time to check the last handful of tomatoes growing out there and make sure they are far enough along to bring into the house to finish ripening. I am SO going to miss having fresh tomatoes over the winter.

Every evening it seems to get darker much earlier than the evening before it.  We have gone from complete darkness by 10:30pm to complete darkness by 7pm....I realize it took a few weeks for that transition to happen, but I didn't notice the change that much until a week ago, when it hit me like a baseball bat to the stomach.  Right now it is 8:30pm and it has been totally dark since 7pm....time to add that to my list of dreaded winter woes:

1. Ice

2. Freezing winds

3. -25C to -45C

4. Late sunrises and early sunsets

5. Snow accummulation

6. Driving anywhere once the snow falls and the ice forms

How my husband and I both wish we could afford to move to the west coast or somewhere a bit farther south where winter is the exception rather than the rule....although with climate change wreaking havoc with the weather world wide there are no longer any absolutely safe places to go. Places that used to appeal to us are now subject to flooding!! Gadzooks!!! 

So, winter is nearly upon us once again....rather than attempting to ignore the fact like I usually do, I am going to face my concerns BEFORE it arrives and be better prepared to deal with the issues when they get here.  It is almost itme to have the snowtires put back on the car. I am watching the longer term forecasts with interest so I can have them installed before the giant crush of people who wait too long and get trapped skidding about on the first ice of the season because they still have summer or all weather tires on their cars.  God bless my studded tires!

This will be a more interesting winter than some though: preparing for a move in the new year sometime, maybe even a couple of months before our lease expires, tossing and pitching and generally getting rid of all manner of things we simply don't need any more regardless of what kind of place we move into. Trying to decide what kind of place to move into will occupy quite a lot of time and effort.  I will buy a new car once we are moved so lots of research and decisions about such a purchase. We will do our best to be able to time things so we can go to New York next May as hoped.  That is also something to distract us from winter's chill.

Yes....I will try to zone in on this positive idea of having a reason to look ahead to winter's end sometime in 2024!  Good plan!

I Have My Chair!!!! Hallelujah!

After a lovely walk around the lake this morning with my friend, which ended with us getting a tad damp from light rain toward the end, my husband and I loaded up our bag of wrap straps and headed to the furniture warehouse in the then pouring rain to pick up my chair! Yay!! 

I had no trouble being reimbursed for the delivery charges so that was wonderful. The people on staff today seemed to know exactly what they were doing....what a nice change!! The fellow at the loading dock was friendly and helpful. AND, mercy of mercies, my husband was able to help him wrestle the chair into the back of our vehicle, out of the rain. It fit perfectly, no wrap straps required. When we brought it home my husband was able to carry the chair on his back, across the lawn, up the back steps and into the house. Not bad for an old guy! He hasn’t lost all his strength. 

Now I am sitting in the living room, feet up, back fully supported, last night’s football game playing on tv, tummy full of lunch, iPad in hand.....I am so very grateful that after yearning for a recliner chair for the last thirty years but never feeling free to justify the expense just for myself, I finally just went and got one!! My husband is proud of me too. He has been after me for years to “just go and BUY YOURSELF A CHAIR for heaven’s sake!!!!!”. 

So, now I finally have. I will know better than to shop at that store again, but in the end I have my chair, I have my delivery charge back, it has worked out just fine.

Water Water Everywhere!

This morning I was most happy to be awakened by my buzzing phone just before 6am. It was a text from my son letting me know he is ok in the midst of the terrifying flash floods that hit New York City yesterday. We had a good round of text exchanges and I’m relieved the flooding only affected him slightly as he pedalled home from his studio trying to keep ahead of the floodwaters. While his part of the city was among the hardest hit and the basement of his elderly Art Deco apartment building flooded, all the tenants are safe. Phew! This is the second or third time he has had to deal with flooding there. Apparently the aging infrastructure of the city cannot handle the deluges of water that have been accompanying tropical storms that have hugged the east coast on their way northward in recent years. He tends to take weather conditions in his stride after growing up on the storm bound Canadian prairies, but flooding has been something new to him.

Thank you Lord for keeping him and so many others safe from the floods!

Definitely Happier Days Ahead! YAY!

I have finally discovered one source of my over the top stress reactions of late: caffeine!!!  

With my osteoporosis, drinking something with caffeine is something I can only do about once a week or less...a cup of coffee or tea with a friend, a diet cola with a restaurant meal, that sort of thing.  However, after tracing back several months through these blog posts and comparing them with my daily diet journal entries I am seeing a clear pattern emerging.  For approximately 24 to 48 hours post caffeine ingestion, I become an emotional basket case.  Most of my more extreme upsets have correlated directly to that time period after drinking something with caffeine in it. So, I am off caffeine entirely now, with high hopes that it will help me not to freak out every time something goes wrong.  Yes, ongoing long term stress and OCD are also involved in those reactions, but the caffeine has become a definite factor as well and one I have control over. Anything I can do to get my emotional act more together, I am willing to do.  I will see what my "charting" activities show over the next couple of months, if any change for the better is beginning to occur. I am hopeful.

My husband and I were both kind of dreading our bank appointment this morning, with our dibbled Financial Advisor...and I use that title loosely in this case.  It went SO WELL!!!  When we walked into his office, his supervisor was sitting there and asked us if we were okay with her staying in the meeting. OK????  OK??? More like FANTASIC!!!!!!  So, it was a great meeting.  She had to step in several times to guide him into better explanations, into what computer icons to press to get the exact paperwork required for us to make the changes we wanted to make, to get him to backtrack and re-explain a few of the options we were interested in exploring.  Now, we are quite a bit more confident that the FA will NOT be showing up on our doorstepagain, in a panic, with more papers to sign that he missed in the initial and even subsequent meeting(s).  Perhaps I shouldn't be quite so trusting after all that has gone on since we moved to this bank, but this woman was wonderful and certainly got a good glimpse into the FA's struggles with his job.  Thank the Lord!!  

As we were driving home from the bank I was wondering if we had missed the automated call from the local furniture warehouse regarding my missing chair.  Having tried to return a call to that number during the first "fiasco" attempt to get my chair to my own fair city, I wasn't looking forward to fussing about with automated messages all over again. However, I was relieved when we arrived home and discovered no phone calls had come in.  Less than 30 seconds after expressing our relief, the phone rang and it was the awaited automated call from the warehouse.  The chair is here and we can pick it up tomorrow.  Thanking God in advance, in hope and at least some degree of trust, (Lord, help thou mine unbelief), that there won't be any more big problems arising when we get there tomorrow.  YES!!!!  What perfect timing it was to arrive home only seconds prior to the call. Thank you Lord.

..................................................................................................

We just received a phone call regarding a legal situation in another province that appears, after more than two years, to have been resolved today!  There will be some paperwork and other contacts for us to take care of in the next week or two and then it will all be over.  Unless something screws up between now and next Monday morning, all should be completed and we will be free of that stress as well.  For those of you who are aware of the details and how it will effect where we can live next year, who have been praying for us, thank you, thank you, thank you!  2024 should be a much brighter year for us as pertains to this legal situation than the past couple have been. Again, all I can say is:Thank you Lord!

I am very much looking forward to seeing my walking partner tomorrow morning.  We haven't had a chance to get together for awhile and lots has happened in both our lives since the last walk around the park.  This has been such a blessed week socially for me and I am very, very grateful.  Tomorrow evening I will pull up my Big Girl Panties and head off to the event I thought God was going to allow me to miss, hahaha...I should have known better, right?  Sunday church, an afternoon of board games with friends, being a personal shopper next week for a good friend....there is much to look forward to and if I can do it without a reaction to caffeine, it should be a very good week indeed.

I Can Laugh About It Now, Thankfully!

Tomorrow my husband and I should be able to pick up my new chair.....although I am not counting on it. We have another type of appointment in the morning that will keep my mind occupied until I hear from the local warehouse that the chair has arrived from the warehouse in Saskatoon. As some other long term stresses have been resolved over the last couple of days, I am less focused on my disappointment over the furniture store mix up and feeling more prepared to handle any more mix ups with that company with graceful determination rather than dissolving into a puddle of tears in front of the employees. For someone who is generally not a crier, tears have certainly threatened many times over the past few months. None have actually cascaded down my face, but my vision has gotten severely blurry quite a number of times. 

I have also been made aware of my gratitude that I am not facing the tragedies other friends have had to face this week. A dear friend lost her sister recently. Two days before the funeral my friend’s husband got a call that one of his most beloved relatives and long time coworker had taken his own life. The day after the funeral they received word that a nephew in his 20’s, struggling to adjust to being a quadriplegic as the result of a car accident, has opted to undergo the M.A.I.D. procedure a few days from now.  

As for me, I am ticked off because of a mixup over a chair. Yeeeeeaaaaaaahhhhh....not such a big deal.....

Perspective is everything, isn’t it? 

Sigh....WHY Is Nothing Simple Ever Actually Simple??

 I have been waiting with great anticipation all day for the delivery of my recliner chair from Ashley Furniture....all for nought I am afraid.

I finally got an automated call about the chair early this afternoon, no way to contact an actual person, telling me that my chair would be arriving on Wednesday....at an address in Saskatoon, where I do not live!  So, I found an 800 number related to the store, called it, went through another series of automated messages, but eventually found a number to press that connected me with a human being.

Short version, the woman who sold me the chair did absolutely everything wrong.  Instead of my chair being delivered to me today, it is sitting in the warehouse 3 hours north of  here (the address given on the automated service call) waiting for ME to come pick it up myself tomorrow.  She charged me a delivery fee and now I am unable to have it delivered even if it arrives here in the Regina warehouse 3 days from now like I THINK it is supposed to be.  I was told by the head office employee on the phone today that they would refund me my delivery fee, but I am guessing that since I didn't use a credit card to pay for the chair I am going to have a difficult time getting either cash or a cheque from the store/local warehouse.  Also they will not be delivering to me at any date in future, so my husband and I, not knowing one single person in this town with a truck, will have to jury rig something to the top of our own vehicle to go and get it ourselves.  We are supposed to get a call from the warehouse the day it is supposed to arrive back in Regina to tell us it is ready for pick up.  Sigh....I am not happy, BUT I will relax and get over it.  

By now I realize I should be expecting that retail businesses here no longer train their sales staff properly.  I should expect shoddy service from a lot of our local retailers because that is how it has been here for the past few years.  No doubt other cities suffer from devolving retail services, but I am pretty disgusted by what is going on here in Regina.  I have been going along accepting shoddy tradeswork, shoddy restaurant meals and service, shoddy hair styling etc. etc. etc. ever since I moved to this province over 20 years ago, but I admit the general low expectations and refusal to even consider attempts at excellence by so many businesses in this province is starting to get to me.  It hasn't only been in Regina that I have gone through this nonsense.

I am not angry, but I am extremely disappointed that, once again......sigh......guess once I get my chair, if I ever do, I will have to strike Ashely Furniture off my list as a place to shop. Should have stuck with Madison's I guess.  My bad.......live and learn.

Unsafe Space???

 My husband just shocked me by sending a positive RSVP to an invitation for next weekend that I thought we were going to just ignore. Sigh....now I have to decide if it is best for me to remain at home and let him go to the event by himself because I know it is not a safe space for us to enter, OR is God telling me to just put on my Big Girl Panties and go with him?  Sigh again...

I have about 5 days to decide if I am going to take the risk.  On the one hand I still feel a need to protect him from some nasty pieces of work who are responsible by their treatment of him over a period of a few years for a sharp decline in his health. On the other hand he seems to be pretty much over it now. Is it just me who still gets freaked out when I have to enter this space?  I know my husband struggled for several years over what happened, even though we are now fully reconciled with the main offender.  But.....some of the henchmen are still there, still in that space, still completely unrepentent for their actions. They will be at the event. Do they still hate him or have they moved on to other things in the intervening years?  God forgive me if they have changed for the positive more than I am giving them credit for.

Lord, I am asking seriously what to do now that my husband has done the completely unexpected, rather unthinkable (to me) act of accepting this invitation.  Hmmmm.....Lord, what do YOU want?  I am assuming that once I spend the next few days getting over my surprise I will likely put those Panties on and also put on my pastor's wife gracious attitude, hoping that attitude will be completely sincere by the time the event starts....and that the Panties stay up!!

Hmmmm....I admit I have been thrown for a bit of a loop.  God, can you weigh in on this for me?  Forgiveness has been established, I do not feel unforgiving.  However, I still don't feel safe and I feel my husband is even more unsafe.  I hate this feeling of being all at sea over one small event.  Why does it feel like such a big deal after so much time has passed?  Good grief!  A week from now it will be over, so is it too ridiculous of me to want to avoid a couple of hours in this formerly dangerous space?  Aaaaaargh!

Another Serendipity For My Husband! PS I Finished Cleaning!! YAY!

The Lord continues to give my husband the encouragement he needs to get rid, get rid, get rid, of old "stuff" that he or we have been hanging onto for years, but not making use of.

Our old vinyl record albums have been one of the big bugaboos.  We have hauled about a hundred of the darned things from house to suite to storage unit to townhouse for the past nearly 24 years and have not had the chance until the past couple of years go listen to any of them....no turn table, no tuner, no speakers.  When my husband retired from the diocese office the Bishop asked him what he wanted for a retirement gift and he told him he wanted an inexpensive system to play our records on while he recorded them onto computer files.  Hence.....

Now they are all recorded and here we sit once again with a couple of huge boxes of albums and a an audio system we won't have any use for, so it is a chance to discard all of these things.  We are done dragging all that stuff from place to place, we are assuming a huge downsizing is in the works for our next move, so my husband boxed everything up some time ago to get them ready to go.....somewhere. Although a relative took the Beatles albums, there are MANY other albums left. My husband decided last week he would just donate them to a second hand record store here, for them to either sell or discard as they saw fit. He doesn't want any money for anything and neither do it.  Selling online is a big hassle for us that we just don't need.  Somehow, however, my husband just didn't ever have the strength to make the delivery and now we are so happy he didn't!

This morning was to be the morning to drop everything off at the store, but when my husband realized I was starting to clean house, he decided he needed to get a wiggle on and do his part of the house. Bless him!  So glad he made that decision for more than one reason.

Just after lunch a friend from out of town stopped in to have a cup of tea between some appointments here in the city. Somehow the subject of these albums and audio system came up and our friend was appalled that we would just donate sellable albums to a store.  He said that if he had some kind of audio system to play them on, once he found out which albums we have, he would be happy to take them off our hands. SOOOOO, my husband said, "Guess what?  We have an audio system you can have too."  Our friend could hardly believe it, so my husband took him to look at the system.  Sometime in the next week or so we will be driving the whole works to our friend's house so he can have fun going through all those albums.  He can keep them, or sell them to generate some much needed income for himself and his family. There are albums left over from when our son was tiny that our friend's wee grandson could enjoy.

As usual, knowing that something he has clung to for so long, and has had trouble relinquishing, is going to a new and happy, welcoming home, has made my husband really happy he wasn't able to take those things to the second hand store after all.  His friend can benefit from the enjoyment and maybe some substantial funds from selling the albums and we can be free of hauling these things around the countryside again.  Everyone wins!

Coordinated Efforts!

 On this warm, sunny, blue-skied day with only a light breeze, things are going well around here.  My husband and I both have a full day free to clean this suite.  He has both his rooms done and I have completed the upstairs.  I will have all afternoon to complete the downstairs.  I don't remember the last time we were able to coordinate our efforts so that the entire suite would be freshly cleaned at the same time!!  YAY!!

I have a huge prayer request for Cee and nan!  For the past couple of years they have been waiting for an opportunity to purchase a condo they have had their eye on, afraid to even dare to hope it would ever be possible to purchase it as it has had renters in it for a long time.  Long story short, in the past 24 hours they have had opportunity to contact the many and various parties involved in the unit and it appears quite possible the present owner would be willing to sell it.  Oh please, please, please ask god along with them to make it possible for them to purchase it, should it be even remotely in the will of God to do so.  The unit even already has the walk in shower that Cee needs to have.  It is in the perfect location for them within the building.  It is manageable for space and size.  They have been praying for so long for the near miracle required to purchase this exact unit and now it appears it could be happening.  Please pray that for once something really good could work out smoothly for them. They have had a horrible seven or so years with illness and health issues for other close family members, the passing of close family, issues with their own house that they have spent a lot of money and time resolving.  Just for once I would so like to see them be on the receiving end of something wonderful.  Thanks for praying for them.  they know that God is still in it even if they can't get this suite, but oh wow, it has been a dream of theirs for so long now.  There are also friends in the building that would be a great support to nan.  Thanks again for praying. coordinated efforts with the real estate agent, condo owner and board, etc. have moved this process along already at lightning speed.

Okay, time to get back to the housework project. I need to get it all done today so I can get to all my coffee klatches and personal shopping assignments for friends for the rest of this week.

Wonderful News That Destroys The Remains Of Any Snarkies!!

 Tonight our Ukrainian refugee neighbours came over to tell us some wonderful news: SHE has a job!!  HE has had a trades job since they arrived, but for a family of 6 the pay  just covers the basic necessities, leaving nothing for extras.  The other day she told us about an office assistant manager position she had applied for, but would need Canadian references.  My husband was going to fill out the company's online reference form but didn't think it left room to include the things he wanted most to express to her potential employer about her abilities, so he called the company and talked to the interviewer in person.  Tonight the wonderful news is that she begins that position next week.  Thank you Lord!  They have worked so hard, they have persevered with learning English, with getting their older kids into good schools where they can have assistance while they learn English for their courses and they have persevered getting the youngest kids into proper day care facitilies.  They are not the kind of people who sit around waiting for others to help them out.  After they told us her news, we were all beaming with joy.  The last of those sneaky snarkies evaporated and we have had a wonderful evening.

We also received word from the family members we are unable to help out in the way that they requested and they completely understand why it isn't possible for us. No damage done....thank you Lord.  They have other ideas they can pursue to get the help they need.  

After such a confusing and melancholy, disturbed day, the end of the day has brought peace once again.  Amen!

Fast Food....A Cure For The Snarkies!! Hahaha!!

Around 5pm my husband came wandering into the living room looking all snarky and forlorn, asking me if we could go out for cheap burgers at Carl’s Jr. “I don’t want a fancy sit down meal where I have to get dressed up and waste half the evening in a restaurant! Snark, snark....”, so, I hauled my dirty clothes out of the laundry basket, threw a coat over top so the wrinkles wouldn’t show, off we went and it was fun. The Carl’s Jr. combo is only $7.99, the burger has lots of salad veggies and we can get fries without salt there. They have a cold water dispenser so my husband is not stuck with either soda, which he detests, or no drink at all. We were out of the restaurant in 30 minutes, feeling refreshed and much happier. The clouds are so heavy and dark tonight that we are hoping for rain so the sun can shine again tomorrow, but getting out briefly really helped our mood today! My husband is now quite cheerfully reviewing the prayers he wrote for church tomorrow and I am going to spend the evening reorganizing some computer files. Nice to be feeling better! Aaaand, tomorrow for church I will put on clean clothes! Hohoho!! 

Snark! Snark! Snark!

I feel absolutely snarky this afternoon...grrrrrr.....blahhh.....I hate feeling this way so hopefully it will pass soon.

This time of the year, this time of seasonal change from summer to fall, with the horror of another prairie winter lurking in the back of my mind, is the time of year when I get the most crabby, the most wanting to move to another place, another planet if necessary, to get away from the winter doldrums.  This too shall pass. It does every year, particularly when the first snowfall reveals the beauty of the snowflakes and the power of the wind.  For now though I am not a happy woman.  

My walk around the lake with my friend this morning was a lot of fun, lots of chatting and laughter as we wandered along under the tree branches with the remains of the autumn leaves in their yellow and red and gold glory.  The overcast sky and the cool wind blasting us occasionally on our route were forgotten during the wonderful visit....and then I came home.  hahahaha  Yup, there sat my husband who is as snarky and seasonally depressed as I am.  He has his usual no energy, no motivation, no desire to do a single thing going on, despite winning his latest battle with CFS.  We both go through this near the end of September each year.  As I mentioned though, this shall pass.

It is mid afternoon and I am not sure what to do with myself. I am caught up on the latest sumo tournament coverage.  I am tired of tv. There is housework that needs doing, but I have set aside two days early next week to do it "all at once", my preferred method of cleaning this suite.  It is too late to start doing laundry.  I am tired of reading books and articles.  I admit I am dreading the start of the adult Sunday School class at church tomorrow....not because the course on Isaiah, being presented by one of our favourite retired OT professors, won't be an amazing learning experience, but because it means I have to start getting out of bed on Sunday mornings far earlier than I want to!  Now, isn't that just a huge problem, eh? hahahahahaha  I LOVE the couple of weeks in early September when the church services move back to 11am from 10am and the Sunday School classes for adults have not yet begun.  When the depths of winter move in I am always even more grateful for that later start time for the church service.  9:30am SS classes ruin it every winter!  hahaha  Since my husband missed out on some of the Isaiah classes he wanted to take in seminary, he will be anxious to attend. Perhaps while we still have pre-winter walking weather, he can drive himself to church for the class and then I can walk over later on for the service, when I am ready to get dressed and moving.  We shall see.

My other reason for the blahs today specifically is that we had to let down a family member who was hoping we could help her and her husband...and we can't do it. They moved away from here recently and their house has not sold yet, despite a huge drop in price. The housing market here right now is pretty much at death's door.  Hopefully by spring it will change. There are new houses being put up for sale here every day, but there are far too few buyers and the available buyers are able to be extremely picky about what they want to have....a real buyer's market right now.  Our relatives called last night to ask us if we would consider breaking our lease here next month to move into their "for sale" house...they would take it off the market until next spring....and look after it for them. They were hoping my husband could repair or at least supervise repairs needed to improve the selling possibilities.  Unfortunately we just can't do it.  It is beyond our ability to move twice in six or so months, we have no guarantee we would be able to get out of the lease here even if we wanted to. My husband isn't in sufficiently good shape to be doing any sort of carpentry projects or hiring and supervising contractors to do those projects.   So, we have had to say "sorry, but no" and that is very difficult for us.  We really would like to help out family members, but it isn't feasible just now.  

I am tired of tomato sandwiches....even with bacon!  Several of our large beefsteak style tomatoes ripened at the same time and it seems everyone here that we know has their own tomato plants, so we have been eating tomatoes for lunch and dinner almost every day for the past 10. I bought some lower fat and salt bacon strips to make the sandwiches a bit more interesting, but still  I am tired of tomatoes.  To be honest, I don't actually like tomatoes very much in the first place but I have cheerfully eaten them anyway.  As tomatoes go, these ones are not so bad for flavour.  Tonight I could thaw some thinly sliced steak pieces and we could make a stir fry or curry, but neither of us is in the mood to put forth the effort.  Maybe I will get dressed in some clean clothes in awhile and to pick up some burgers from Carl's Jr. for dinner.  Oh yeah, that will really help my blood sugar and weight loss plan. hahaha

Fool that I am, I promised a very senior friend that I would go and buy her some clothes, as she is not able to get out herself to go shopping.  I am looking forward to it on the one hand as I like helping her out, but on the other hand, what if I screw up?  I will go over to her place in a couple of days to measure her, arrange payment options and then start looking for the things she is hoping to get.  I have researched a couple of stores that may carry what she is after, so that is encouraging. They are places to start anyway.  This is a slight stress I have willingly taken on, but I hope it goes well and doesn't take a lot of time.  I pray that what I THINK she will like will be what she ACTUALLY likes and I won't have to make a lot of returns.  Anyway....that can all go on next week.  She has family coming to visit the following week so I would like to get her new clothes to her before they arrive. She would really perk up I think if she could greet them in brand new clothes.  There is a lot of fun involved in this process, so I can only pray it remains that way!  Why do I agree to these requests? Why? Why? Why?  I know such things stress me out! However, I want to help my friend. She is worth the tiny bit of effort expended on my part.  She is a good friend, the best sort of friend, a quality person.  I can do this!!!

So, at this moment I don't know how I really feel about anything for the rest of today!  hahaha  I am scrambling to know what to do to fill my time between now and bedtime; no task is leaping out at me just at the moment. 

I suppose I will have to go and read another book....yawn.....but life could be SO much worse!  Grateful that "snarky" is the worst feeling I have today.  Hallelujah! I will be feeling better in another week or two, I am certain!

In His Happy Place, The Happy Camper!

My husband's friend sent along a couple of photos from their camping trip at Diefenbaker Lake a couple of weekends ago.  The look of total contentment on my husband's face says it all! 

Good Food On The Grill!

Forest Accommodation!

It isn't MY happy place by any stretch of the imagination, but the great outdoors is where my husband relaxes and de-stresses and falls in love with life again.  I can do that in a hotel in a new city with great shopping.  We both have our happy places and we both got to visit them this summer.  Yay!

September Sports

We are enjoying very much the September sumo tournament! There have been many surprising upsets and turnarounds, making it one of the most interesting tournaments this year!! Go go Takayasu!! Really hoping it is finally your turn to win the Emperor’s Cup!! Wish Hokotofuji was doing better after his near win at the July tournament.

Canadian football is heating up now as we get closer to eliminating the bottom ranked teams and moving on to the playoff games. I suspect my husband is starting to lose interest just a bit after two or three years of not missing a game for the first time in his life. Not sure what sparked his interest in pro football after a lifetime of poo pooing it, but he has certainly enjoyed it recently and had a blast at his first in person game this summer. 

I admit it is kind of nice to have these sports distractions during stressful times.

More Losses, Some Of Our Own Making....Sigh......

 My old friend with MS that I visited in the summer and was appalled by how badly her condition had deteriorated, passed away early this morning.  She was only 59.  She has been suffering for over ten years and has been in a care facility for the past seven or eight years.  She leaves a husband, two adult children, a grandchild and two amazing sisters.  I feel badly for all her family.  It is so difficult to lose a spouse, parent and sibling.  

The other loss is more personal and was discovered this morning when I opened the car door with the intention of going shopping. The front seats were covered with the contents of both glove compartments, the storage spaces inside the doors and the compartment between the seats. Someone paid our car a visit last night sometime and.....thanks to our own forgetfulness.....that person found the doors unlocked, so proceeded to help themselves to several items.  The only real "loss" was a vial with about ten or fifteen dollars in loonies and toonies we keep in one of the cubbies out of sight for using at the car wash and parking meters.  Unfortunately, now that our car has been discovered to contain such a thing, we will be unable to return to storing change anywhere in the car as whoever took the money is bound to come looking again sometime in the near future.  I can only pray they don't decide to do a forced entry break in if they come around again because it will ruin our car door for nothing with there no longer being money in there to find.  

This was the news I had to convey to my husband when he arrived home from his weekly men's meeting.  He felt terrible because he was the one who forgot to lock the car when we returned from our errands a couple of days ago. I also felt terrible because, knowing his poor memory, I almost always remember to check if the car is locked if he is the last person out of the car. Duh for BOTH of us this time. He remembers thinking he should tell me I needed me to lock the car as his hands were full of items, but also remembers he didn't say it out loud. I remember thinking I should check to see if the doors were locked and I also remember not doing it!! NOW we remember! Duh again! Well, live and learn, right?  All we could do was praise God together that our loss was minimal and that, living in this neighbourhood, this is the first time we have had anything stolen out of our car!!  This neighbourhood has become the nearest area for the houseless and people struggling with mental health and addiction issues to gravitate to as they become forced out of the downtown core for various reasons.  This is another reason we need to move next spring.  It is no longer very safe around here. Just the other day we watched the city police taking down and cuffing someone in the court beside our own.  Their presence has become more noticeable around here, so that is another clue that things are going downhill. Sigh....we truly have enjoyed this location, even if our own suite has been less than wonderful, so we will miss it when we leave.  

On a happier note, the reason I discovered the theft from our car this morning is because I was heading out to Ashley Furniture to purchase a recliner chair.  My goodness, the size of reclining chairs seems to be expanding! They are wider than they are tall!  I have been looking at various stores and many of the chairs are so huge they would never fit in our suite and/or they are covered with "pleather" or bonded leather or some other leather substitute. The prices for these monstrosities are quite ridiculous, but they are quite large so....  I found one at Ashley today that I like. The size is right, the colour is right, it arrived yesterday with the rest of the out of  season/style clearance stock so I got it for two hundred dollars off.  It will be delivered early next week.  Yay me for being so brave as to pick out a chair all by myself.  I am hoping that by having a more comfortable chair to sit in when I watch tv in the late evening, I can have less pain around my hip hardware and sleep better during the night.  I know I will be in less pain, but my question is whether or not the pain will recur sleeping on my current mattress. Rather than replace both at once I decided to purchase the less expensive of the two items first and see if or at least now much it helps.  I love my living room sofa and chairs, but with the onset of more arthritis in that hip they are giving my leg enought support, so I have to make some changes until the pain and level of arthritis are deemed bad enough to get me onto a waiting list with my favourite surgeon for hip replacement surgery.  Even then it could still be a three year wait, so might as well make myself as comfortable as possible in the meantime.  I am delighted that the chair will be the very one I actually sat in and will be delivered so soon. Thank you Lord!  

So, a couple of sad events and one very happy one today.  This afternoon I will attend my regular women's prayer meeting and it will be nice to see those women after having a two week break away doing other things.

Jesus I am Resting, Resting...Remember That Old Hymn?

 I was just looking at the lyrics for the hymn.  I am guessing it has been nearly 30 years since I last had an opportunity to sing it.  Sometimes the old hymns evoke more emotions and praise from me than any new spiritual song, no matter how well written or musically constructed it may be.

ANYWAY:  this week I am taking occasion to rest my sore hip, thigh and ankle and their surgically implanted hardware.  I exhausted myself completely last week and over the weekend, walking all over the city as I was struck with the realizations that a) winter is coming and b) I HAVE to lose at least ten to fifteen pounds as soon as possible!  Aaaaargh!!

This is not to say that I have been inactive, nope, not me, but I have curtailed my long walks for the first half of this week.  My hip and thigh and ankle are recovering nicely as a result.  No more extreme aching and discomfort, so that is a relief.  I have managed to get comfortable enough in bed to sleep several consecutive hours for the past couple of nights and that is a treat after not being so fortunate on the weekend.  My appetite seems to have been curtailed for the past week as well....a near miracle after three years of lack of exercise coupled with stress eating and subsequent weight gain.  YAY!  Seems I am getting back on track at last. Thank you God!!

Yesterday afternoon I decided to stop dithering about ironing a few items of fall and winter clothing each day and tackled the last three days' worth all at once.  In two and a half hours everything was done and being on my feet for that long, even without the exercise of walking, was good for me.  My husband and I spent this morning running errands....taking in all the recycling, taking clothing to the thrift store, picking up a couple of food items at the Lebanese grocery, refilling our drinking water jugs, filling the car with gasoline at the reserve station that is always at least six cents a litre less expensive than elsewhere....AND we ended up our chores with lunch at Birmingham's.  I ordered their taco salad, as I usually do and it was the same as I remember it....although with the new plating it seemed like there was more of it than there used to be.....however, I must confess I found it rather bland in comparison to the taco salad with its bbq, pulled beef at Agave.  There was nothing wrong with this salad, but the spicy beef was barely spicy, there was no guacamole, not so much as a few avocado slices like they used to serve, so I guess my new baseline for the quality of taco salads is Agave now.  I always enjoyed the extremely spicy taco salad at The Rock Tavern, but it is off the menu at the moment.  It was almost too spicy for me, but I still really enjoyed it.  When I was a teenager and very NOT able to enjoy any sort of vegetable, had someone told me quite seriously that in my old age I would turn myself into a connoisseur of taco salads I would have scoffed heartily at you! hahahaha  Come to think of it, when I was a teenager I don't think restaurants in western Canada actually served taco salads.......nope, I am quite certain they did not.  So not only have I changed over the years, so have restaurant salad offerings. Salads...."Rabbit food!!", my Irish grandfather used to declare..."I am not eating that!" hahaha

Now it is late afternoon.  In two hours food will loom on my horizon once again.  Do we slice up the leftover round steaks and stir fry them with some carrots and beans and onions, OR should we cave in to laziness and have (once again) toasted tomato and bacon sandwiches that require little preparation beyond picking a tomato off our plant outside, slicing it up and tossing a couple of slices of low fat and salt bacon into the frying pan?  Those steaks would freeze nicely for a couple of weeks so.......

The autumn weather is hitting us today with a cool wind and a significant drop in daytime temperature that is to continue for the rest of this week.  That high will still hover at about +20C, but after so many weeks of  +28C to +33C with warm breezes and sunny skies, today's smokey, cloudy sky that has dropped short showers of rain on us, along with the stiff cool breeze, it seems very cold indeed!

So Happy To See The Middle Canada Rellies!

We had a very happy day with the relatives today.  It went better than I dared to hope.  I was afraid they would be too tired to enjoy themselves when I heard about their trip, crammed with activities and friends.  They brought us chicken dinners from Beaks Chicken and wow....that is the ONLY place we will ever buy take out chicken in future.  I had so called chicken strips that were each the size of a super plump half breast of chicken.  I have had full chicken breasts that were smaller than just one of these "strips". It was excellent quality meat too!!  What a fun dinner and what a great time we had.  We assumed that since the cousins are leaving to return to Ontario tomorrow they would take off right after dinner.  However, they stayed until nearly 9:30pm.  It was SO MUCH FUN watching my husband's face all lit up with joy because he was so excited to see them.  It could be years before we see them again, so today turned out to be a very special treat for us both.

The Weight Of Shame

My husband and I had a good discussion the other day about the concept/issue of shame and what it can actually mean when we refuse to let go of it even after we have gone to God to ask for forgiveness for whatever it is we have said or done that has likely given us good reason to feel that shame.

I struggle with shame often when I see how my actions as a parent failed my son when he was growing up; how those unintentional parental disasters continue to negatively effect him to this day. Occasionally that sense of shame still rises up so overwhelmingly that I feel like I can't bear the weight of it any more.  

After a recent episode of struggle my husband decided we needed to more thoroughly discuss my problems of letting go of shame and guilt over this situation. We eventually came up with an idea that has helped me get my emotions and thoughts back in line with reality:  not letting go of those feelings of shame and guilt, beside letting God know that his forgiveness is apparently not sufficient for me, (throwing his forgiveness back in his face actually), continuing to wallow in feelings of shame and guilt are making ME the centre of the situation.  Instead of God being the centre of the situation, where I am accepting his forgiveness and asking for his restoration in my son's life for the ways I did him wrong when he was a child and moving forward in a new and better direction in my interactions with my son, I am focusing all my attention on my own guilt and shame. I am focusing on ME instead of God....how subtle that is, right?  It creeps up at some point and I didn't realize that was a huge problem I have been creating for myself and in my relationship with God.  I am also effectively telling God that he is unable to heal and restore my son.  My self-centered feelings of shame and guilt are placing myself instead of God and his total forgiveness at the centre of my personal universe.

My husband's idea certainly got my attention. I spent several very serious hours with God after that discussion and I feel like I have good spiritual armor now to deal with those feelings when they attempt to resurface and take over my life again.  God bless my husband. What a gift he is to me! 

The Aborted Canoe Trip!

 I had a bit of a surprise today when I got home from church!  My husband told me that after all our work to secure the canoe to the car the other day and get it battened down appropriately, he and his friend never did get the canoe out on the lake!!  Yikes!  To say I was surprised was an understatement.  As we unloaded the heavy old thing and got it back into its storage place, I asked my husband what had happened.  Turned out there were a few issues that prevented the canoeing and fishing aspect of the trip:  the wind was horrendous, BUT the worst thing was that the lake water was SO low that there was a half a mile of sand that the men would have had to drag the canoe across to even put it into the water.  They were too tired to risk dragging our heavy canoe across that distance with the wind being likely strong enough to make fishing impossible anyway.  This morning they were up early on the off chance that they would feel like going through the process of getting the boat into the water briefly before my husband had to be at home to greet his cousins, but decided they preferred to enjoy a leisurely breakfast around the campfire instead.  My husband made it home in plenty of time to greet his arriving relatives. He feels well; is not exhausted from pushing a canoe across a desert of sand, then forcing himself to paddle in the strong gusts of wind.

I was afraid my husband would be highly disappointed to have missed out on his only canoeing weekend of the entire summer, but he wasn't at all. Whew!!  He said he and his friend had such a wonderful, relaxed time of hiking about through the autumn leaves on the thick stands of trees, eating their campfire meals and discussing life and philosophy and religion and family, that the time away was "idyllic!!".  That was good news to me. I quit fussing about the work of hauling the canoe around and now I am extremely grateful that my husband had such a great weekend after all.

Now, back to the visiting cousins from Ontario!

"Shop 'Til You Drop" Is More Than A Trite Saying Around Here!!!!

 Up early this morning to help my husband load the camp gear and food for his little outing that has now become an overnight gig.  The guys got away so much later than orignally planned this morning due to them cooking breakfast together before they even got into the car to leave town, that they didn't even get looking to put the canoe on the lake until close to 2pm!!  Talk about a relaxed get away!!  hahahaha  SO, they will stay overnight, have a quick paddle once again in the morning and leave for home in time for my husband to get back to see his visiting relatives.  I have rescheduled our game night for the first weekend of October....as I told our friends when I cancelled out for tomorrow, "We have reached Ludicrous Speed" on this event!  (thank you Space Balls)

The weather is wonderful today....a tad windier than I like, but warm and sunny with the smoke dissipating more by the hour. 

I had a marvellous morning! After taking my sweet time getting ready to go out, I enjoyed walking downtown!  The good thing about there being a bit of a stiff breeze is that it tends to blow the wasps away from me after a quick checking out of my purse and glasses and medical bracelet.  YAY!!  The trees are swiftly turning yellow and some of them are already down on the ground, but there are still enough leaves ont the trees, some of them even still green, that Regina hasn't completely achieved that tired, frazzled, ugly, frayed around the edges look that ushers in the autumn season each year. Walking through a small neighbourhood park along my route I discovered a large flower bed still filled with blooming plants in red and purple and pink and yellow.  It was lovely enough to warrant a brief stop, just long enough to enjoy the colours before wending my way along my circuitous route to the downtown core.

I spent a long time wandering about the downtown, but eventually found all but one of the items I was wanting to purchase.  This year I will have a few different colours than usual in my winter wardrobe.  No one but myself will notice or care, but I will be happy!!  More ironing of course after carring my purchases home in a shopping bag, all wadded up in a heap. I should have stopped at a bench seat downtown long enough to take everything out of the bag and refold the items that the store clerks made such a blobby mess of, but the one bench I found was surrounded by wasps because someone had spilled a cola on the ground earlier on that attracted them.  Since I am not ironing all my old winter clothes at the same time, it is no big deal to add in some more ironing.  I have time to iron a few things today, but I am too pooped after being on my feet for 3 of the 4 hours I was away from home.  

My original plan for lunch today was to eat at the Zam Zam Wraps in Cornwall Centre. By the time I was finished shopping I was famished and could barely wait to get to their little stall. What a horrible surprise to discover they are closed today....while there were still coolers and a logo sign behind the barred doors, I am wondering if that location has closed permanently for some reason.  I do hope not!  I love that food.  I had my mouth poised for a chicken shawarma salad...what a disappointment not to have that. So, I settled on the Copper Kettle just down the block from Cornwall Centre.  The burger and salad were average but fine, the side of avgolemono soup fabulous, but the chair bottoms are all stoved in. The padding and stuffing are worn out, which is what happens to chairs that are initially pretty inexpensive and cheaply made.  I remembered after I sat down having that same issue a couple of months ago when my husband and I had lunch there after church one Sunday.  We told the proprietors at the time that we couldn't come back until the chairs were replaced, but our words were obviously falling on deaf ears.  Having forgotten that former experience, I went through it again today. It was both uncomfortable and unpleasant. That will have to be my last visit until those chairs are gone. My hip hardware can't handle the discomfort of me sitting with my behind in a sagging hole that is lightly covered with the remains of the upholstery, while the frame of the chair seat cuts into my underthighs.  Yeeeouch!!!  Never again I am afraid.

It was fun coming home and taking the tags off my purchases so I could get them hung on hangers and into the ironing pile.  I am going to have so much fun next week getting  them ready to be hung on the clothes rack!  New clothes this winter!  How blessed am I to have such things??? Thank you Lord!  Now I think I had better go crash out on the sofa and let the tv lull me to sleep.  I can hardly stand up and walk at all after my long and tiring, (but exciting!) journey.  I truly did shop until I dropped!  YAY!!!!!!  Just because I'm Old doesn't mean I have to look totally horrid!! At least I hope I won't! hahaha  

One Smokey Night!!

 Wow, it is smoky outside tonight!!  When we walked our half hour over to a friend's place for dinner earlier this evening, there wasn't more than a slight higher altitude haze, but walking home at 9:30pm....a different story.  The smoke was, and still is, hanging thickly in the air, drifting around under the street lights, so my asthma really kicked up before we travelled more than a few blocks.  Thankfully I took a claritin early this afternoon to help me cope with the two beautiful cats at our friend's place, so I hate to think how difficult it would have been to breathe walking home tonight had i not taken that medication!!  It is nice sitting here and thinking about the fun visit and delicious meal we ate, while I am waiting for my asthma to calm down to a point where it is safe to fall asleep without worrying that I will wake up choking. That is highly unlikely, but old tapes from my childhood night time asthma traumas continue to play.  Hopefully the smoke will have receded sufficiently by tomorrow morning for me to keep my commitment to myself to walk downtown!

I had fun this morning running around the city with my husband,  picking up some new tent pegs and groceries for his canoe trip tomorrow.  It is always a blast running errands together for some reason.  around noon we drove out to where his canoe is stored and got it loaded up onto the top of the car, strapped down and all set for his drive in the morning.  He is very excited and I hope he can sleep tonight so he isn't too exhausted tomorrow.  He seemed to be feeling badly about leaving me alone for a whole day, so he took me to Darbar very unexpectedly for a delicious coconut chicken curry lunch. YUM, yum, yum!  The food tasted even better than ever because going there was so unexpected.  

We are supposed to be going to the home of good friends on Sunday afternoon for some board game fun, but very late this evening we received word that relatives from ontario are going to be here on Sunday afternoon and really want to see us. Sigh....this game afternoon with our friends has been pending for about a month and finally we thought we had a time to do it, but how could we say no to seeing my husband's relatives, who we likely won't see again for a number of years?  We couldn't of course. So in the morning I will have to contact our friends and postpone our game time once again.  Aaaaaaaaargh!!!  Unbelievable that our relatives ended up here THIS weekend!  We are very excited to see them, elated in fact, just feeling badly about having to cancel out on our friends.

I am very happy that the temperatures this weekend are supposed to be quite summery, although there is a strong wind forecast for the morning that will make my downtown excursion a bit dicey. That is okay. Must lose weight, ergo, must walk while the weather permits!!!  

Guess I better get to bed and give sleeping a try.  My lungs are not heaving any more and if I fall asleep sitting up that will give me a good start on getting some actual shut eye!!  I have to get up very early in the morning to help my husband load the last of his camping gear and food, but that is just fine. He was pretty pooped by the time we arrived home at 10pm, a good 90 minutes later than originally planned....but the visit was such fun we weren't ready to leave so early.  you know how it goes.....fun and fellowship over common sense...even for we oldy moldys who should know better. teehee

Rosh Hashanah Starts Tomorrow! Time For A New Start!

 For our Jewish friends and family:

 

Shanah tovah umetukah שָׁנָה טוֹבָה וּמְתוּקָה‎

For Yom Teruah. 
Wishing you a Good and Sweet New year!

Sorry not to be with you to hear (and blow) the shofar this year.
And taste apples and honey.

But  here are a couple of music videos to mark the occasion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlF8SZFs44I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BtgeiIdl7U

Shalom!

Dunder And Blitzen!

It is just after 11pm. Deep, rolling thunder awakened me after being asleep for a only few minutes, which probably means I will now be awake for the next couple of hours, but that is ok. 

When I first heard the thunder and opened my eyes to the flashing of thunder bolts my first thought was, “Oh, no!! It is teeming rain outside! Is our basement flooding?? I had better get up and check it!” I tiptoed out of bed and down two flights of stairs to the basement only to discover my husband already down there checking the siphoning systems he installed where the walls were unable to be properly patched and putting down towels on the floor in those two areas. God bless him!!!!! I didn’t even realize he had slipped out of bed before I woke up and tried to be so sneaky getting to the basement. What a waste of stealth! 

Dear God, if it is possible that next spring we could move somewhere that has no leaking basement, I would be forever grateful. Really God, that is my only request. (Hmmmm, well....,maybe a garage too? Oh, and no neighbours sharing our walls....yeah, that would be awesome as well. Such small requests, right?) And I pray that the concept of  “seek and ye shall find” could be in operation next spring.....yeah, that would be amazing! Here’s hoping, amen! 

Title Block!

 I can't even think of a creative title for this post....sad, eh?  Creativity seems to be deserting me of late.  Oh well....

It has been a good week thus far.  I got through my little OCD episode last week, avoided triggering myself the day of the race by picking a walking route to church that kept me away from the race route for all but two blocks in total.  Now my emotions have settled down and life is back to its usual "whatever happens next, happens next", state of affairs. Feels good!

Yesterday my husband and I were feeling rather confined after spending all day working at home, so we went out for dinner at Agave.  I was craving the bbq beef taco salad there.  Yum, yum....it was as delicious as always.  We enjoyed getting out of here and enjoyed the food. The ambience of restaurants in general attracts us when we are feeling kind of lacklustre about daily life.  Lately it seems we yearn nearly every day to go out to eat either lunch or dinner, but have restrained ourselves for the most part.  Tonight we are having cheesy scrambled eggs and tomato sandwiches, featuring the meaty tomatoes we are growing on our back deck.  There is mostly meat and there are very few seeds, so they are perfect tomatoes for sandwiches.  My husband made a delicious batch of lemon lentil soup over the weekend and we have eaten so much of it that we decided to freeze the rest so we don't get tired of it.  I have steaks thawing for tomorrow evening's dinner, so will bake some potatoes and mash up some carrots to go with.  That takes care of tomorrow's dinner....since we have a meeting early in the afternoon we will have something simple like hummus and crackers with green olives and dried mango for lunch.  There, that takes care of meals for tomorrow. Then I just need to come up with something creative for the following day.  On the weekend I will look after myself for meals while my husband is out canoeing and camping. YAY!

I opened the rest of my winter clothes tubs yesterday.  I found four pair of pants I have been wearing for at least the past 5 winters and they are starting to look like it: a bit of pilling, thin cuffs that are about ready to start fraying....time for them to go.  My fun task for myself on the weekend while my husband is gone is to walk downtown and see if I can find 2 pair of pants and a sweater that I really want to wear for this winter.  I will likely come home with nothing, but looking will be a ton of fun.  There are still a few clothing stores left downtown, so if I can support them in some small way I will be happy to.  Since I won't have a vehicle, I am praying for good walking weather for both shopping and church walks. Maybe I will be able to have one of my happy little lunches out while I am clothes shopping. Eating alone in a restaurant have never bothered me. I kind of enjoy it to be honest.

No word yet from the oncology nurse as to how our friend with the brain tumour is managing.  I am hoping to get word by tomorrow or the next day....hoping, hoping, hoping.  Even if the news is not good, we want to know what is up in as much detail as the nurse has permission to tell us.  

Received a wonderful invitation from a church friend for a dinner at her place the night before my husband leaves to go camping.  We are kind of surprised to be invited to her place as we have known her for several years, but not really well as she is considerably younger than we are.  The invitation is a nice surprise!  Unfortunately for my allergies she has cats, but I will pop my Claritin a few hours before we go over there and be just fine.  Just because there will be a cat present doesn't mean I have to pet it, right?  Wellllllll....I need to remember to tell myself that when I actually see the cat. I LOVE cats and being allergic to them is one of my saddest disappointments in life. I mean, I WAS planning to be a lion tamer when I grew up....at least that was my plan when I was 5 years old. THAT never happened! Sadly..... hahaha 

Got the first tub of winter clothes ironed and put away yesterday. The tub is filled with summer clothes now and is back in the basement.  The second  tub's worth of clothes needing ironing is emptied. The clothes are on hangers waiting on me to have the energy to press them, but I need to wait until I have more summer clothes ready to be packed up in that bin for storage.  There is a tiny heat wave happening this weekend, so I may get a bit more wear out of a couple of items.  

Today was laundry day and there will be more ironing....my husband's cotton shirts and pants.  There are only a dozen items to press so it won't take long.  I can do that in a couple of hours or less, in between helping him pack camping gear and loading up the canoe.

Tomorrow morning I will pick up a few groceries for his trip and for our household pantry.  

I am mulling over the idea of splurging on a recliner chair for myself BEFORE we move next spring.  I mean, if I choose an earthy sort of solid neutral colour it could go with pretty much anything else and fit into a living room of any size just fine...right?  Still thinkin'......

As you can tell, both my week's events and my thoughts at the moment are a tad scattered, but that is okay. Work is being done, relaxation is happening in between chores.  My husband and I are pretty peaceful this week, enjoying a bit of cooler air and scattered rain showers today before the weekend heats up, looking forward to resuming our fellowship group meetings tomorrow afternoon....yup, it is a quiet, but good week of getting some personal chores accomplished and looking forward to a manageable number of social gatherings over the coming week.

Don't Throw Out The EVERYTHING Because You Can't Accept The SOMETHING

 AKA "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater!".

I am meeting more and more people who at one time in their lives have championed the writings of various religious authors, politicians, philosphers and what have you. Then at some point those people changed their theology, political stance, ideologies to the point where their words were no longer acceptable to some of their former fans. So, said fans have chosen to discard, forget, bash even, the words and ideas and people that meant so much to them before those literary, political or religious heroes "fell down the rabbit hole" as one of my friends put it.

I can understand the disappointment of feeling betrayed by people who been responsible for making positive changes in our lives when later on those peoples' points of view undergo a change.  However, that is life. People change their ideals, their religious beliefs, their personal morality, their life paths; that is simply what happens to us all in varying degrees as we go through life.

I personally don't think it is right to turn around and try to discount the people who helped shape our lives for the better, should they decide at some subsequent date to move on to other ideas we cannot accept or agree with.  I think we need to hold on to the original truths we discovered through their positive influences of the time.  We don't have to continue to champion their new causes if we find them abhorrent.

Let's not give up what is or has been good about people, their good writings, their good influences, their moral lives,  by later on blocking even those good things from our lives and thoughts because we can't accept the changes in those people.

Let's not let our sense of hurt or betrayal or fear of the changes cause us to toss away the good we read or experienced.

Let's not throw out the former EVERYTHING (that seemed good to us) because we cannot accept the present SOMETHING (that seems bad to us).  Future bad choices on their parts do not negate the effects of the good that was done by them in our lives in the past. Truth is still truth.

Taking Advantage of the Gorgeous Autumn Day!

Yes friends and family it is in indeed autumn now.  The hours of daylight are reducing, the breeze has a cooler edge to it than we have felt over the summer, the sun is suddenly noticably lower on the horizon and there is a slight yellowish tinge to the very air that is NOT forest fire smoke, more like an aura than an actual air colour I suppose.  Summer is over and autumn is upon us.  Sigh.....  Don't misunderstand; I do love the autumn (and soon the wasps will finally be gone until next year, bonus), I just don't like that its arrival signifies the oncoming winter.  

We both slept in today.  I finally got up and had breakfast at 9:30am and my husband didn't wake up until nearly 10am. So, our day has passed rather quickly. It is already past 3pm and it seems like it should still be late morning!!  He put the scanner on to do a few more slides and put the last of the record albums onto computer files, so now all that is left to do with the albums is to finish boxing the over 100 of them and drop them at the second hand vinyl retailer.  The ones that are worth money have already been given to someone who will cherish them as we did.  YAY!!  One of the two projects is now more or less completed.  It will only take another day or two to complete the slides and photos.  Then on the weekend they can be burned at the bbq pits down the street.

My husband had some library books due today, so since he hadn't left our house since last week sometime, he asked me if I would like to walk to the library with him and have a late lunch downtown.  Perfect!!  That makes two days in a row I have been able to take a rather long walk and it is good for HIM to get out of this suite and get some exercise.  What fun it was walking in the sunshine for part of the way, under shady trees the rest of the way, with not enough breeze to make the walk uncomfortable.  We had a brisket wrap with house salad and fries to share at The Cure and it was delicious.  It was nice to get our meal at the Daily Special price too. BONUS!  We met up with a friend going around the block with her walker to get some daily exercise close to her home. It was so nice to see her.  She has SO MANY health and mobility issues these days, but continues to be a ray of sunshine to one and all.  I think her ministry is actually the administration of cheerfulness, which she bestows freely on everyone she meets.

Now I have a load of summer clothes in the washing machine.  Once they are dry I will put them away in a plastic bin until next summer.  The days for wearing white capris and tee shirts is over.  Shorter eyelet cotton summer dresses are, as of this last weekend, a thing of the past.  I love being able to wash and dry those things and pack them away without ironing until it is time to wear them again next year!  I brought up the first of the winter clothes bins this morning from the basement, emptied it out, put the contents on the ironing board to iron tomorrow and started filling the bin with "strictly for summer" clothes.  Instead of waiting until it is time to  bring up all 4 winter clothing bins from the basement and have a marathon week of ironing them all at the same time, I am starting earlier this year and only doing one bin per week to ten days.  That will be less exhausting and less overwhelming as I try on those clothes to decide which items are keepers and which items are on their way to the thrift shop.

For the most part it has been a glorious day and I am most grateful for it.  Being able to walk outside two days in a row without terrible smoke to worry about is quite marvellous.  Tomorrow morning I am going out for coffee, but if the weather is anywhere near as good as it is today, I will go for another good long walk in the afternoon.

Our Questions Answered!

 We are feeling kind of blue today.  This afternoon we received confirmation that the person who sent us the unsigned note to say she is dying of a brain tumour is indeed the person we guessed that it was. She had lost ground by the time she opted to let ourselves and a few long separated family members know of her plight so she was unable to write the notes herself. She had to dictate them to her care nurse with her usual sparseness of words and in the black ink she always wrote with herself.  The black ink and lack of signature gave her away when we read the note.  Fortunately our messages of love and our assurance of prayers was delivered to her and she is on her way to a hospice to live out her last days.  She is losing ground rapidly after refusing to take any treatments. She was always fiercely independent, private and strong in her faith.  Oh how, after 50 years of friendship, we will miss her.  Lord, bring your comfort to our friend and let her feel you close to her right up to the end of her earthly days. Thank you, Amen!  

I navigated my way to church this morning just fine!  I decided to take advantage of the beautiful warm, breezeless, sunny morning and cut a wide swath around the marathon race route. Dithering around so far off course added an extra 10 to 15 minutes to my route, but I so enjoyed the extra bit of walking.  It was just as lovely walking home after the church "start of the term bbq"!

My poor dear husband thought he was finished last night with the remaining slides he is putting onto computer files, but early this morning he discovered one more carousel of them in his sister's possessions that were sent home with us when we were last in AB. hahaha  So, this morning he began tackling this latest "last batch". hahaha  He is almost done already so will complete the project only one day later than his self imposed deadline.  That is still fantastic to me after all this time and effort he has put into the project.  There were photos of our son on some of the mountain hikes he took with his aunt and his dad many years ago that we had not seen before, so they are a bonus to our computer disk collection!

We spent a relaxing afternoon watching "The Fabelmans". The casting and acting are so very good and I can understand why the movie, a bit of a box office disappointment when it was released in theatres, won so many awards in 2022!  We really enjoyed it.  No, it wasn't all perfect and wonderful, but it was interesting and we enjoyed the particular ethnic humour in the script.  The 2.5 hours flew by.  There were many hilarious lines and scenes. My favourite line is something to the effect of, "Why don't you just show me, instead of describing me to death!??!"  hahaha

We watched the second episode of series 5 from the British detective series "Unforgotten" this evening.  We are enjoying it, but not getting the first four seasons broadcast on our tv system, there are character dynamics we are not familiar with. Nevertheless season 5 brings a change of actor in the lead character, so I guess if we are going to arrive that late into a series, this is as good a time as any.

I need to sort through all the books I picked up at a few of the community library boxes the other day and decide which one I want to read first. Hopefully I didn't pick up too many duds!  It is difficult when standing out in the street trying to balance a book with one hand and keep the excess of other books still in the box from falling out on the ground. It is a feat I am not that gifted at. So I tend to look at the covers, a general description on the back of the book or on the flyleaf and hope for the best.  We shall see how I fared this time around. It is so nice not to be pressured with return dates as I am when I take books from the public library.

I have my weekly coffee date this week and the fall startup of our daytime Bible study group, so I am looking forward to that. Next weekend my husband is likely going canoeing for a day and one afternoon we are going to some friends' house to continue learning a board game that we began with them several weeks ago and have not had time to get together over since.  Not too many commitments or stressers this week, thankfully.

Almost A Smoke Free Day Out There!

I am sitting here watching the sun go down....already at 7pm it is VERY low in the sky, sigh.....summer is ending....waaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!  The difference in the sun this evening compared to most of the rest of this past week is that it is the proper bright neon, blinding white with only the teensiest ring of smoke inspired orange toward the bottom of the circle.  That sun has been bright orange every sunset for so many days in a row I was beginning to wonder if I would ever see a proper sun again! I was wondering if I had been secretly teleported back to Tokyo and would never see anything but a bright orange smoggy sun for the rest of my life!  I have thrown open all the windows and am enjoying much fresher, nearly (but not completely) odorless air at the moment. It is glorious!

Today was a very good day!  We both had a bit of a sleep in, which we needed badly after some very early morning wake ups this week.  My husband spent a good deal of the day dealing with the remains of his photo and slide scanning project and has the first few thousand slides packed up, ready to take to the local picnic park to burn in the bbq pits there.  What a great feeling to see those boxes and know they will soon be joined by even more boxes for the burning.  YAY!!!  We got all our recycling ready to go early next week as well.  I discovered a few more items in my kitchen cupboards that can go to the thrift store, so slowly but surely I too am "getting rid".  It feels GOOD!!  We have almost 2 boxes of cookbooks and kitchen items ready to go and a few more things to sort through before we make the next thrift store run.

Got my letters ready to be mailed to the race organizers and to the city asking for route changes for next year's marathon race and making a few suggestions for possible alternate routes they may not have considered.  It may not help, but if people simply complain without communicating the nature of their woes to the people in charge, those people won't understand the impact route planning is having on the people who are inconvenienced so badly by the way things are now.

I had a lovely walk this afternoon to and from my friend's house.  She is alone this weekend while her husband is attending to some out of town affairs and I was concerned about how she might be faring with her health and mobility issues, but she was actually doing relatively well.  We had a lovely visit for a couple of hours, sipped on a glass of white wine which is so perfect on a nicely warm end of summer afternoon.  My walking route to her place was a good one, despite a couple of unexpected sidewalk closures I was unaware of until I got to them.  I was able to get around those construction rip ups just fine.

My husband and I made today our "clean the leftovers out of the refrigerator" day!  Oh yummy!  We had odd combinations of lentil soup and chicken strips and fresh tomato sandwiches made with sourdough bread, cleaned out a couple of jam jars, two somewhat stale breakfast bars, the remains of a bag of salad greens, a couple of little cinnamon buns from our neighbours; oooh, it was an eclectic mix of foods at lunch and dinner times.  I like LEFTOVERS DAY!  Now I am free to start some more bulk cooking on Monday. My husband already made a fresh batch of our favourite lentil soup for tomorrow.

I am happy to report that my nerves have settled down about the big race tomorrow. Since so many people prayed for me....apparently our pastoral staff got a whole bunch of the other church prayer warriors praying; God bless them.....I contacted the race organizers directly and have my letters planned for sending next week, I am feeling calm and emotionally on an even keel once again.  YAY! Thank you God!

My walking partner and her husband are out of town this weekend to attend a live CHICKS concert!  I am trying not to be envious, but I have to admit that even though I am not a country music fan, the idea of an evening of good old loud, twangy, foot stompin' western tunes is rather appealing at the moment.  Live bang twang a deedle deedle deedle-ang concerts are so great for getting rid of stress with all the head bobbing, dancing up and down, hootin' and hollerin'.....yeah I think I could handle something like that for one evening!  I hope they have the time of their lives at that concert!!!!  I can't wait to go walking with her again and hear all about it!

So off to bed early tonight. The microphone checks along the race route that goes right past our door will begin at about 6am and by 7am there will be racers streaming by with their family and friends standing on the sidewalk right below my bedroom window cheering them on.  That I can handle. It is only once a year and that is not the worst of the inconveniences for us. 

Wow....the sun is nearly down already....at 7:20pm.  Byebye summer.   Waaaaaahhhhh!!!!

Just When I Thought Life Couldn't Get Any Weirder.......

 ....another strange event occurs.  

Today we received in the mail an envelope with the correct name and address but the stamp in the wrong place on the envelope and no return address.  Inside the envelope was a stationery card from an out of province hospital.  The message, handwritten and unsigned, was succinct: "we have been friends for a long time.  I have been diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour. Thank you for your years of friendship."  Stapled to the card was a business card with the name and contact information of one of the oncology ward nurses.  Wha??????

We stared at the card, we prayed, we thought and thought until it suddenly hit us who most likely sent it to us.  It is not the first time we have received unsigned notes from this person....long story I won't go into.  We have not seen said person in about five years but have exchanged a few letters and phone calls during that time.  

Hoping we were wrong we phoned the person's number at home.  The phone rang for  a long time before the recorded message came on. We left a message on the off chance someone will find it, hoping we are wrong about who this person is, but I don't think we are.  Then we sent an email to the workplace of the oncology nurse explaining who we are and telling her about the note and who we think it came from. Obviously she will not be allowed to email back to us with any information due to Canadian Privacy laws, but we asked that if she was caring for this person, could she take the person a message assuring her of our love and prayers. If we don't hear anything we will call the hospital switchboard to see if the person we think wrote to us is a patient at that hospital. If the person is still there we will contact the ward and see if we can leave a message there. We are assuming, especially since we called the person's residence and received no response, that the person is in hospital and likely will not be going home again. there has no family and our friend is very alone.

This incident is dredging up all manner of sad memories of my husband's sister and her husband, who both suffered from brain tumours and experienced death as a result.  Not a happy day now around here, just one of sadness that the "big c" is claiming yet another life of someone in our circle.  Sigh.....

on a happier note the sun is shining today and there is very little obvious smoke in the air. So, I have all the windows open for a bit of air exchange and to cool the upstairs a bit in hopes we will sleep better tonight. Trying to sleep with the windows closed only works for us when the outside temperature is below about -10C.  

My husband was able to fast for nearly 13 hours overnight after some previous failed attempts due to tummy issues and wandered off this morning quite happily to the lab for his regularly scheduled blood work....only about 4 weeks late, but hey, at least he has done it now. YAY!  His doctor will be unimpressed that it has taken so long, but he does understand the stomach issues and the need to keep food in there most of the time.  

My husband is hearly at the end of his family photo and slide scanning project, as well as his project to put our record albums onto disks.  Really very little of it needed to be done and it has taken him nearly 2 years to finish up, but it has been healing during his grief process over his sister's and so many other family deaths in the past few years.  I don't begrudge the time it took him.  Sometimes we do things in our grief that are for our own emotional benefit and there is nothing wrong with that.  I am just grateful that all the boxes of literally thousands of slides and photographs will soon be out of our basement and our remaining record albums are going to a happy new home.  

Other friends have also been in touch today, some with really good news. We have heard from prayer partners with some fairly positive updates.  My husband and I are both feeling well today, we both got a bit of sleep last night and are happy that this week we had so few plans compared to the past 3 weeks.  Our neighbours, whose car broke down the other day and needed assistance getting the car battery charged, have been able to get the repairs done and have a lot of new parts in their car, so they should be okay for awhile now.  Happy to help them. We are helping one of them look for a job here that is not dependent on having English as a first language. My husband is excited about a clergy presentation he is giving in mid October.  Now that he will be done all his scanning projects by tomorrow he is going to have a lot of relaxed time to research and prepare.

So, our own lives are fine.  We will soon lose another friend to a brain tumour apparently and that is the sad thing on the horizon.  Hopefully we will have more answers there soon.