Reminiscing.......

Yesterday was a difficult day. It was the third anniversary of my mom's death.  I got thinking about what I miss most about her and I think that would be that she was my greatest confidante and I was hers.  The older I got the more she could share her troubles and "secrets" with me....my mom was honest to the point of being obsessed with the truth at times, so her "secrets" were pretty cute actually, hahaha.  I miss those conversations where we encouraged each other about our lives.  She understood her grandson more than any of us I think. They were sympatico from the day he was born. They had a deep friendship even after he moved away from home. Mom and Dad made a lot of trips out of town to go and visit him and Mom always, always, always, took him a large carton filled with her delicious, home made chicken pot pies and did all the dirty dishes he and his roommates managed to accrue prior to her visits. hahaha  He was a source of comfort to her when my father became so ill and incapacitated for the last couple of years of his life. Mom, I really miss you......in June it will be 5 years since we lost Dad.  I will have a lot of memories to consider that day as well.  On the second annivesary of my sister in law's death this past summer my husband and I had a long session sharing memories as well.  We have been feeling the losses still to some extent, but happy memories are beginning to be the norm and the "weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth" of the initial grieving process have taken a back seat to the happy times we now remember with great joy.  I am learning what it means to move on without forgetting the good times shared with these dearly beloved ones.  It is all good.

A Good News But Still No Specific News Kind Of Day

The font I am using is the Glory Hallelujah font and I use it with good reason: I received a call back already from the Surgical Wait List line! So grateful it has been only a week since I left the message of inquiry.

I learned that the current wait list for my particular surgeon is 12-14 months, BUT he wants my surgery done in the next 4 to 6 months.  Although I was hoping for a more specific time frame, I am delighted enough to know that I will be taken care of in half of the usual waiting time.  I also found out the surgeon decided I should be on his cancellation list as well, so....are my praying Pentecostal friends going to get their prayer for an April date answered in the affirmative?  hahaha  Honestly, I am just so happy to know that by August my surgery should be done.  Thank you Lord, thank you prayer warriors!  Truly one of those news, but no specific news kind of phone call backs, but it has bolstered my hope, which has been tempted to falter of late.

We celebrated my news today with lunch at Agave after I went for a badly needed haircut.  Yummy beef barbacoa on my taco salad.  Ancho Crema dressing, lots of corn niblets and red pinto beans, radish slices, tomato wedges, jalapeno rounds, feta cheese and arugula.  It was marvellous!  My husband had his usual delicious beef barbcoa burrito and fries.  We have started drinking only water when we eat out an it saves an incredible amount of money not paying for drinks.  After lunch it was off to the Log Cabin thrift store to drop off clothing and some books, shop for a few new books and have a nice relaxing browse about the place.

We have reached the annual pre-spring SEASON OF PERPETUAL ICE!  Oooh, how terrifying for moi!  The two foot high footpath of snow out to the parking lot was covered in a freezing rain type of refreeze this morning when I tried to go for my hair appointment.  I crawled along the pathway, digging in the snow spike at the end of my cane with every little step. I don't know how long it took me to cross the 25 or so yards to the car, but when I reached the hood, I realized the snow ramp I usually walk on to get down to parking lot level was completely covered in ice.  What to do....  I tossed my purse onto the hood of the car when I spotted a tiny circle of pavement showing by the front passenger tire.  Leaning over I spread eagled myself from the waist up across the hood and reached with one foot for that minute dry spot on the lot while digging my cane and the toe of the other foot into a slightly soft area of the ice beside the footpath, prayed without ceasing and gradually eased that first foot onto the circle of pavement that was showing.  I noticed a second little circle of pavement not far away from the first one, peeled myself off the hood slowly, clung to my cane and the side mirror with one hand and the front passenger door handle with the other, while retrieving my purse strap with my teeth and lifting it off the hood.  With my purse gripped firmly in my mouth, I was able to scootch along from the two bare patches, over the rest of the ice on the parking lot to get around to the driver's door. I climbed into the car and breathed a sigh of relief.  Hopefully none of the neighbours were watching my performance!  Talk about terrifying. I have a bit of an issue since my last fall a few years ago in that I imagine all manner of terrible falls while I am crossing icy patches. The pictures in my head appear unbidden and are difficult to control while trying to concentrate on keeping my balance at the same time.  With much gratitude I managed to start the car and drive to the hairdresser's.  The ice in her parking lot was just as bad.  I only had to walk about three steps from where I parked my car there to the dry sidewalk up to the door of her business, but that ice was so clear and smooth that the ice pick on the bottom of my cane refused to grip into it and went sliding along like a curling rock at a tournament!  Thankfully I hadn't stepped out of the car yet when my cane gave me the hint about how dangerous that short walk to the sidewalk was going to be.  I am very grateful for the excellent grip on my winter boot soles.  As I got out of the car I stretched one leg over to connect with a tablespoon or so of gravel sitting on top of the ice, got a grip with that boot and eased the rest of me out of the car.  Standing up and keeping my feet still in place helped me get the car door shut and I shuffled the three steps over the ice.  Returning to the car required a tad less ingenuity as the vehicle parked beside mine left that space and I could walk and stand on a larger patch pea gravel it had been covering.  Whew....got home and parked my car on the main street at the front of our place while waiting for my husband to join me for our lunch and errands.  It isn't safe to leave our car on that street overnight, so he is going to have to pick me up and drop me off everytime I need to go out somewhere until either more of the ice melts or we get some March snowstorms to cover it up again and create more traction until the next major melting occurs. If he doesn't want to come with me wherever I need to go, he has said he will gladly go out and retrieve the car from the parking lot for me and put it on the street outside the front door when I am ready to go out and reverse the process for me when I arrive home afterward. He is a good man.

It has been a happy day.  I am grateful for all the wonderful things that happened: a call back in regard to the estimated general time frame of my surgical procedure, remaining upright in the terribly icy conditions outside, enjoying a slightly cooler and cloudy but still wonderfully springlike day, a happy phone call with my cousin from Alberta and a great BC friend, lunch out, delicious leftovers from earlier this week for a light dinner tonight....it is all great and I am grateful!!

Pension Day! HOOOOORAY!!

Payday today!  So of course that meant we just had to go shopping!  hahaha  This afternoon we went to several of our favourite grocery stores and looked for good sales on things we don't need yet, but that we know will be experiencing fairly substantial rises in price in the coming weeks.  We had such a great time.  Just like during the COVID lockdowns, every storage shelf and cabinet in our house is stocked full of bags and cans and tins and boxes and bottles.  For the next couple of months or more we will not need to purchase many food products apart from dairy and produce, perhaps a few more packages of meat....our favourite condiment.  It is so rare that we each eat more than half a chicken breast or mini burger or little pork chop at dinner in the evenings and we don't eat meat every day, so a few packages of meat last us a very long time.  We are delighted with today's purchases.  We are so very grateful to be able to eat decently these days despite rising prices.  

My husband had a positive appointment with his GP today, so he is very happy, but we have a list of prescriptions to pick up tomorrow.  We are most grateful for the drug coverage we get from a combination of my husband's pension plan and our provincial drug plan....it is incredible to us after not having any medical coverage for over 35 years.

Tomorrow will be a fun day!  I am able to pick up my coffee buddy in the morning and then in the afternoon my husband and I are getting together with several church acquaintances for coffee and snacks and good conversation.  

My physiotherapy discipline crashed today. For some reason I completely forgot to do my exercises this morning and earlier this afternoon, so tonight I will be working hard on all of them.  It takes little to distract me these days and it seems I am moving so slowly that even a simple task like doing dishes takes a longer time than usual.  I will count the time I was on my feet this afternoon as we went from store to store as some kind of "exercise" thus far today.  If this was post surgical physio every other plan we may have for the day would be put on hold and worked around my exercise sessions.  Well, one poor day of pre surgical physio isn't going to ruin my post surgical recovery, so I will forgive myself!

The weather remains incredibly warm this week.  What a blessing....although not so much for people whose basements and garages will be flooding from the quickly melting piles of snow that are everywhere in this city.  My husband went out yesterday and dug as much snow as he could away from the foundation of this rotting building and he checked his drainage system creation in our basement that collects the water from the one corner that is not possible to seal completely and drains it by hose into the laundry floor drain.  So far we have had no problems, but there is still a TON of snow to melt all around our place.  Although the path we pounded out on top of the snow that leads to our car is softening and has gotten a bit lower in the past two days, we are still walking a good foot above the ground.  Our bottom deck step has not yet reappeared from its covering of packed snow.  I am hoping against hope that by some miracle all the snow will be melted before the March snowstorms hit us...highly unlikely of course, but it would be great if we didn't have too much icy re-freeze of the old snow before we have to shovel out once again.  Time will tell.....in the meantime we both feel our moods shifting in more positive directions and for that we rejoice!

Walking Four Blocks....WHOOPEE....(And Whoopee?)

Yesterday I was able to get outside in the warmer air and do my four block walk again....the first time in several weeks that it has been warm enough and the sidewalks immediately surrounding our place have been dry and clear enough to try it.

I have to confess that even though it has only been a couple months (or less??) since my last foray into the wonderful world of walking outside, yesterday's four block snail crawl nearly did me in. My husband came with me and I think even he was shocked by how slowly I was moving and by how much discomfort my hip was giving me and by how completely exhausted I was afterward!  YIKES!!!  Today I made sure I did my 30 physio reps as usual, but they weren't as much fun.  I am having actual pain again at times, despite the anti-inflammatories.  Thankfully they are still MOSTLY working, so I have some time yet before they become useless and I am praying the surgery can happen before they do.  Next week I will add in the ankle weights when I do the exercises, so that will be a good muscle strengthener....IF I can get my legs actually moving when I put the weights on.  In some ways, I know from past experience, once the weights go on it is almost like starting the regime all over again from the beginning.  That new resistance is difficult to get moving for the first week.  However, I am determined to do the full physio plan!!  

The warmer weather is an amazing mental boost to both my husband and myself.  The doldrums certainly start to leave quickly as soon as the hope of spring arrives.  Yes, it is only the last week of February and we still have March to face with its threatening big snowfalls and freezing rain possiblities, but hopefully the horribly cold temperatures have left us until at least December!!  Snow and ice and puddles we will manage to deal with as always.  The geese will arrive in another month and I am already preparing myself emotionally for their (and their poop) to return.  After ten years of it I am getting to be a pro at not freaking out over the mess they make, but it has taken me most of that ten years to arrive at the sense of peace I started to be conscious of last spring.  YAY!  Personal growth is good, right??  My only nagging concern about the onset of March is that it appears to be coming "in like a lamb" and the old adage that then it will "go out like a lion" has proven true often in my lifetime. End of March storms can really mess up the month of April.

My husband had his appointment with the skin specialist this afternoon after an 8 month wait after his referral.  The office called late yesterday afternoon with a cancellation space, so away he went.  I am glad he did.  He is continuing to do all the right things to treat his skin condition but got some wonderful new ideas from the specialist today. He will return for a follow up in six months' time and see what else may be possible. It is all good news for now.  Tomorrow he has a follow up with his GP for some other conditions and I so like his doctor.  The man is amazing, so competent and so caring and not afraid to run whatever tests are necessary to assist my husband's health, to refer to specialists when necessary.  As far as medical care, we feel like we have "fallen with our noses in the butter" here. My GP is a bit more iffy in terms of competence, but I have learned better what questions to ask her to ensure a more accurate diagnosis and treatment plan when I have small health issues. She too is very good about getting me referrals to specialists if she feels I could have a larger issue than she thinks she can deal with.  What a blessing for us both that, despite the very serious collapse of our provincial health care system, we have been here long enough to have GP's and to have our medical coverage set up.  We are both intensely grateful for every doctor we have been able to see in the past ten years. .... well in the past twenty years when I think about it.  How blessed are we?  Incredible.

Our son got a lot of good news yesterday at his own doctor's appointment.  He has been concerned about osteoporosis and arthritis due to an ongoing pain problem, but it appears more likely he is going to have to do some physiotherapy exercises and significantly change his posture when he is painting, so we are all very relieved that his issue appears very treatable over time.

Grocery shopping went well this morning.  We had a short list compared to other supply runs in the past month.  I was able to use fifty dollars in PC points as well.  I have to say that while not every week's offers for points nets me a lot of savings, if I pay attention and shop at a PC points giving store fairly often, I can end up saving several hundred dollars a year.  It is a simple plan thus far and easy to use.  It is like being able to collect coupons, but without all that hassle. The offers arrive on my computer each week right here at home.  I have had minimal problems with the plan over the years.  So thankful for it!

I am going to enjoy my couple of hours alone tomorrow while my husband attends a weekly men's discussion group.  I don't generally do anything really spectacular or interesting while he is gone, but it is nice to have a couple of hours to do or not do anything I wish.  I will go with him to his medical appointment tomorrow because the clinic is attached to a shopping mall, so I can look for some new books, gawp about at a few cheap clothes I don't need to purchase and just have fun toddling up and down the aisles in the stores on my own.  I haven't done any window shopping in a very long time and I do enjoy it, plus I get a bit of exercise wandering around.

Mass Family Confusion!

 We had the most wonderful conversation with our NYC "kids" last evening.  Hearing their cheery voicesl lifts our spirits rather high and we can coast along on that high for several days afterward!

We are praying a lot for them these days:  they are going to have to make time to complete the paperwork to take to City Hall to legalize their relationship as it must happen before our soon to be daughter in law's Green Card final application arrives and that could be any time in the next few weeks or months.  The first three steps have all been approved. Once she has sent that final application in they will not be able to travel for three months pending final approval and the arrival of her card.  Once that happens our son can also apply for his Green Card, so he has begun the pre-process paperwork as of today.   They are hoping they will both be in a space during the ongoing Green Card process to avoid having to pay out another seven to ten thousand dollars to extend their current artist visas toward the end of this year, but I suspect our son may still have to do that.  He is very discouraged as the current horrible exchange rate between CD and US dollars prohibited a very expensive painting of his from being sold last week.  Sigh....thankfully his agent and her representatives are continuing to work VERY hard on his behalf, so hopefully there wlil be another sale very soon.  Coming here to visit us this coming spring is still in limbo due to my own waiting process to find out when my hip surgery MAY be happening. It could be a couple of more weeks before I even receive the call back from the surgical wait list messaging service after I called them last week. My husband is rushing to complete a newspaper article and get it sent away and the it is going to be at least a month before it is published, he is racing to complete tweaking his course on forgiveness that begins in two weeks' time, but in the meantime he is waiting on some information he needs to do that.  Hurry up and wait has become our entire family's mantra of late.  Personally I find it all very exhausting!  I feel like I have been living in Limbo Land ever since my father died in 2020 for one reason and another....trying to help Mom with all the legalities during the nightmare of pandemic lockdowns, then the waiting game that ensued over my sister in law's illness and death, the passing of my mother and the horror of trying to do probate as banks were still in recovery mode after the pandemic closures, etc. etc. etc., on and on and on.  I suppose we are always waiting for something in life, good or bad, but sometimes I am more accutely aware of the waiting process than other times.  Well, the good thing is that I am praying more than I have in years for our own tiny number of remaining family.  There are lots of other family and friends to pray for as well and I so enjoy being able to do that.  I feel that sometimes our immediate family members have not received the amount of prayer attention they should have, but that is changing now...fortunately!

A Little Restaurant Server Nostalgia......

For some reason my husband and I have been feeling rather nostalgic lately and have been talking about our many memories of various accommodations and towns that we have lived in, as well as some crazy experiences we have had over the past 50 years together.

After church today, while driving around seeking a restaurant where we could enjoy lunch, we came upon the Red Lobster and that started a whole new batch of old memories for us to enjoy, so we just had to stop in there for a meal.

Hahahaha....my own personal memories of Red Lobster as a franchise are from years ago when the first Red Lobster restaurant opened in Calgary....the early 1980's.   My mother, always a seafood fan and Calgary not being known for its plethora of seafood restaurants in those days, adored the place.  

Dad wasn't quite as enthused, but he enjoyed making my mother happy, plus he loved the baking powder style biscuits delivered to each table at a time when most other restaurants delivered tall glasses filled with dry breadsticks and pats of nearly frozen butter that were impossible to spread on anything at all, let alone the circular surface of a breadstick.  Aiii yiiii....trying to convince a sufficient amount of icy cold, hard butter to stick to any part of a slippery, round, usually dried out breadstick was an exercise in frustration every time, but it did give us something to do while waiting for the rest of our food to arrive at the table!  As was typical of my father, who could be incredibly charming to the ladies when he needed to be, he managed one day to wheedle a copy of the "secret" recipe for Red Lobster biscuits from one of the regular waitresses, (as "servers" were called in those days prior to gender based political correctness, just like when we used to use the word "secretaries" rather than "office managers" in a recent attempt to make our older generation of employed women feel guilty for being proud in those days for having the distinction of a work title that specifically indicated they were intelligent career females), and I think the dear woman lived in fear for the rest of her career there that Dad would let it slip to someone that she had done that for him and put her job in jeopardy. Oh my.....Dad never did of course, despite his predilection for making sure he told other people everything he knew about anything and everything, hahaha.

As we sat and ate our meal today, reminiscing as well about how the quality of the food and food preparation, as one of the first chain seafood restaurants we ever ate at, seemed to be better in "the olden days", haha, we remembered my parents with great fondness.  

We happened to have an excellent server today and she admitted that she loves her job. She is no "spring chicken" and told us her history of being a server, how much she balked at the idea originally, over twenty years ago and how much she changed her mind once she got started in the industry. She thought my admission that I lasted exactly four hours as a server back in the 1970's was hysterically funny, but she also seemed to feel quite sorry for me that I hadn't taken to serving as a career.

Talking to her got us started on remembering other interesting servers we have enountered at various restaurants over the years:

We remembered Teresa from a family based restaurant in Olds Alberta. The restaurant is long gone and Teresa is retired now, but she was one of the best servers we have ever had.  She had been a server for decades at other local restaurants before we had the pleasure of making her acquaintance. She was taciturn, had no idea what a smile was, which was a bit daunting until we got to know her, but wow was she ever efficient, quick on her feet, never got an order wrong and made every table of guests feel like she was there to serve only them and that it was her absolute duty to be certain they had the best food experience possible.  

Next on our list was a Greek woman whose family owned a Greek style restaurant when we lived in Moose Jaw. Her name remained unpronouncable to us both for the several years she served us meals, but when we found an obituary for her recently we were both very sad.  She was another one who had a taciturn personality...no, wait....taciturn is far too Warm and Cozy a description. She was downright blunt in her speech, not helped by the fact that English was neither her first nor her prefered language! When I first met her I remember quaking in fear of her, hahaha.  My husband never gave up on his attempts to tempt her into giving him a smile or a laugh, but it seemed  waste of his time for the first few years we frequented the restaurant. Then one day, whatever he said caused her to crack a teeny, tiny smirk!  He was overjoyed and even moreso in all our subsequent visits when she would boot whoever our server was at the time and take over our table.  That one small smirk was all he ever got from her usual plethora of frowns, downcast eyes, and apparent grunts of frustration about life in general, but he has never forgotten her as she made such a production for the rest of our years there out of the fact that we were HER customers and would allow no one else to look after us.  God bless her and may she rest in peace.

We remembered Gina, part owner and first class server at a very, very interesting Italian restaurant hidden away in a partially industrial area of north east Calgary.  How anyone other than people who worked in the surrounding buildings ever found the place was always a bit of a mystery to us, but I suppose that like us they discovered it by the word of mouth reports from other friends or family who knew of its existence.  It was never advertised publicly in any way. This was in the 1990's.  My husband's sister and her friend discovered it one evening when they were lost in the area, not really looking for or expecting to find a restaurant open and thriving amongst the office and industrial buildings that closed every day at 5pm.  Deciding to take a chance when they saw its glowing little "OPEN" sign, they went in and discovered what may have been the best Italian food in the entire city.  Gina was amazing, hilarious, somewhat intrusive perhaps, but larger than life people are always amazing to talk to.  Gina would size up each table of guests and before they had a chance to even glance at the limited menu options she would be telling them how she viewed each person and what she KNEW that person would want to order.  hahaha  I was quite taken aback the first time we were there and she approached our table, knowing she had never seen us there before and determined to impart her unique ability to read people as she told us what we MUST order that night.  In subsequent visits we barely got a glance at the printed menus before she descended upon us and told us that "I will have the chef prepare a very special dish for you tonight", before whisking the menus out of our trembling hands.  Gina always did have that effect on me. As soon as I saw her coming our way I would start to shake with just the slighted touch of fear, lest I say something that was construed to be a disagreement with her assessment of what we should be eating at that time!  Over the next few years we took a great liking to her and when the restaurant finally closed down as the industrial and residential neighbourhoods around it underwent drastic changes, it was a sad goodbye. The food truly was amazing and no matter what Gina chose for us to eat, we could never say it wasn't wonderful and just what we actually did want, even though we hadn't known that when we sat down.

Another Alberta server we remembered with great love and fondness was Elizabeth, a 22 year old cancer patient who was determined to work as hard as ever in between her heavy duty chemo treatments. She was an excellent server even on the days when she was grinding her teeth together and biting her lip due to the physical pain she was experiencing most of the time.  She was declared to be in remission within a year of her treatments, but less than two years later the cancer returned and she passed away eight months later.  It broke our hearts. She hadn't quite reached her 25th birthday when her funeral took place.  

From my childhood of course I remembered the servers at the old National Bakery close to downtown Calgary where, as a three and four year old, my grandfather would take me every morning for a "one and one, sis" before hauling me off to work with him.....that meant one coffee for him and one gingerale for me.  I never had the heart to tell him that I detested gingerale, but dutifully drank my morning "pick me up"  from Monday through Friday for many many months. hahaha  My grandfather was not what you would call a flirt, by any stretch of the imagination. He was a straight laced, lower class Irish tradesman, but he knew how to show respect for every person who was serving him either in restaurants or in supply stores, or wherever he happened to be.  He was my first real encounter with a true feminist, although of course that word, if it even existed in those days, would have meant nothing to a small child like me.  I worshipped that man and I find it interesting that my husband is a most ardent feminist as well.

I remembered today a server my family truly enjoyed the one time we found ourselves stranded in Salmon Arm at the old Greyhound Bus Lines terminal restaurant.  It was early in the morning on a Sunday, a cloud burst in the area had drenched our tent in a local campground and caused the bathrooms there to overflow.  In fact we woke up early due to the booming thunder, to discover our sleeping bags and air mattresses were floating on top of the water that had seeped inside our tent!!  There was SO MUCH RAIN!  The restaurant at the terminal was huge, every table was filled to capacity and the rain had prevented all but one of the serving staff from getting to work.  That one server took over the entire space and managed to fly around the place at light speed, making sure that everyone got what they had ordered, constanting intoning, "Sorry youse had to wait so long for your food", and setting our teacups and coffee mugs down with a flourish that reminded us of a card sharp dealing out a new hand around a poker table.  The elegant flourish and the use of "youse" in her vocabulary seemed an incongruous matchup.  Dad talked about dear Tillie for years afterward.  He hadn't met anyone like that ever before I suspect.  He wasn't really into having meals in bus depot cafes!!

Then there were the teenaged servers at the Chestnut Cafe in northern Minnesota where we stopped for breakfast one morning after a miserable experience in a motel the previous night.  We were hungry, exhausted from lack of sleep and eager to get to the Canadian border farther west, so we could go home to Canada...just south of Kenora Ontario I believe.... after over a month on the road for our honeymoon.  The head chef apparently announced that he was quitting shortly after the restaurant opened that morning, the other cook left in solidarity with the chef and that left four teenaged greenhorn server girls to run the whole place.  Although there were only a few other customers beside ourselves  those poor girls were having a terrible time.  As we sat awaiting our very simple order of bacon, eggs and toast, we could overhear their panicked conversations coming through the swinging doors into the kitchen.  "How do you know when the toast is done?"  "Oh no, I burnt the eggs!", "Do any of you know how to make oatmeal?????"  hahahaha Oh, those poor, dear girls were so flustered, completely incompetent to handle the disaster the resigning cooking staff had left them with and they were certainly doing their best to attend to the needs of those of us innocents who had arrived with the assumption that a bit of breakfast would soon have us on the road again. hahaha  If we remember correctly, the arrival of our meals went something like this:  my water, my husband's toast, my bacon, my husband's pot of tea, my husband's scrambled eggs, my toast, my orange juice, my poached egg....and there were LONG gaps of time between each delivery to our table.  We had to remind the girls that we could use some butter and jam for the toast, but by the time those items arrived our toast was too cold to spread butter onto, so we just used a bit of jam to choke down the burnt, crumbly and now very cold burnt black bits. hahaha  It was quite an experience. I don't know if the town of Canyon even exists any more, but personaly I had never seen anything like this place....although I have seen many a similar town in the years since then and they are still just as unbelievable to me if I am being honest.  hahaha

No doubt there are other experience with servers that I am forgetting now, but these are some of the most memorable. Some of them have appeared in previous posts, but it has been fun thinking about them again today. I suppose if a person lives long enough it is possible to collect all manner of interesting memories about the craziest things and people.  Thanks for sharing some of my memories with me.

We are enjoying the above zero high temperature today.  Of course tomorrow all the water on the sidewalks and streets from snow melt will be frozen until mid day, so we have reached that time of year when it is the most dangerous for me to walk anywhere out of doors, but oh, what a relief from the bitter cold.  I always find ways around the dangerous ice and will again this year, Lord willing.

 

 

And That’s One More Reason I Don’t Want To Live In An Apartment!

 One of the condos in our complex had a serious fire a couple of evenings ago. It was caused by an unattended pan of food left on a hot burner on the tenants’ stove. There were flames everywhere it seemed at the time and we wondered if our own building might have to be evacuated. The entire flaming unit has been destroyed and while no one was seriously hurt or killed, the residents did have to be treated for smoke inhalation. The entire back wall of the unit is gone, burnt right out. While the other units in the building were not seriously damaged, thanks to the quick action of the local fire department, there is smoke damage to many of the immediate neighbours’ belongings. 

(At the same time a water main broke in an adjacent parking lot and flooded nearly 20 cars up to their back bumpers. It is now a sea of solid, curling rink quality ice! The residents have been unable to drive their cars out of the lot because all their car tires are totally encased in ice. I remember when the water main broke in our own lot a few years ago….similar disaster in -35C weather.)

So, the cooking fire issue is one reason I don’t have any desire to return to apartment living. Where we live now we only share a wall with one other unit. That is sometimes difficult enough, depending on the noise coming from whoever happens to be living there, how many kids they have pounding up and down the stairs, if they have barking dogs, late night social gatherings, slam their doors, etc., but in an apartment we could be sharing all our outer walls with other tenants. It increases the chances of fires, extreme noise etc. by several hundred percent. I already survived those issues in much younger days when I was less concerned about them in all my naivety about dire possibilities and could sleep through whatever excess noise my neighbours might be making. This is not the time of my life when I feel capable of dealing with these things.

So….I am grateful none of our residents were hurt and I pray the tenants of the burnt out shell have a proper tenant insurance package! 

Next Steps: Calling and Waiting For The Call Back!

 Since it has been 7 business days since I saw the surgeon in person and I was told to wait for a few days to phone in, until the paperwork could be sent to and received by the surgical wait line for processing, I decided to make the call in this afternoon.  Now the wait is on for the return call to give me an ESTIMATED time for my surgery.  Once I find out, cancellations by other patients could move me up the list, or more likely, a run of emergency surgeries taking up OR times, or a lack of anaesthetists on my original surgery date, or any number of other reasons, could result in a delay of my procedure.  I am wondering if it will actually be more nerve wracking to be given an estimated time and then be under stress every time the phone rings for the number of weeks or months of estimated waiting time. hahaha  I can't win it seems. hahaha  I am already having nightmares appearing unbidden during the early morning hours when I should be sound asleep instead of waking up in a panic.  hahaha  Oy..... Anyway, I do hope I get a call back by next week about the estimated wait time for me.

Finally my coffee buddy and I were able to connect this morning.  We usually drink 2% steamed milk with non-sugar vanilla or caramel flavouring over at Brewtopia, but since she was coming here today I decided to use my own 1% milk and some non-sugar cookie dough flavouring.  I made a simple white cake and topped it with fresh raspberries for our mid morning snack.  Usually we talk about how nice it would be to have a snack when we go to Brewtopia, but most of their desserts are too sweet for us both. When I make my own white cake I can cut the sugar by one half and it is still quite sweet enough.  Raspberries are always good on white cake.  It has been three weeks since we last visited and what fun to get caught up. Looking at the weather forecast for next week there are several days when it will be a very easy drive to pick her up again and return to Brewtopia.

My dear husband had a very LOOOOOOONG wait at the lab this morning to have some regular blood work done.  It being a Friday morning that automatically upped the number of clients looking for testing before the weekend, but today the lab was desperately short staffed with only one technician on the job. Whether that is because other techs were too ill to come to work today, or because they have cut back staff to support their colleagues who are on strike in BC, who knows, but instead of his usual twenty minute wait, he sat in the waiting room for two hours.  Tired and hungry as he was after his nearly 16 hour fast, he still took the time to haul his air compressor outside to fill a low tire or two on our vehicle.  He will check the air pressure in the one low tire in particular first thing tomorrow morning, but it appears the problem he thought he had discovered the other day is not quite as dire as originally thought. Lord, let it be true, please, let it be true. Amen.

Carrying on with the family health "scene", our son has a big appointment with his doctor next week.  An issue he has suffered from off and on for most of his life has suddenly become very bad indeed. So, I had to send him our family history of osteo and rheumatoid arthritis and our osteoporosis history.  Oh, dear....with the recent discovery of how desperately low his Vitamin D level is I admit I am feeling very worried about him possibly having inherited the osteoporosis my father and I have suffered from after early age diagnoses for us both. Oh dear Lord, please protect my son from that awful disease!!  Amen.  Hopefully it isn't something even worse than any kind of "osteo/rheumatoid" disease.  He has had a growing list of issues in the past two years, so he has been unfortunately following in my family's footsteps already.  If any of us knew for sure what all we could pass on to our kids as far as chronic illnesses, would we have had children at all?  I sometimes wonder....good thing that usually, with some noteable exceptions, we don't know or no children would ever be conceived.

I am overjoyed that it is currently -2C outside!  The overnight lows for the coming week are in the negative SINGLE digits again and while we may end up with a morning of freezing rain on Monday as a result of this warm up, at least if I can't safely walk out to the car or down the front sidewalk on glare ice for a few days until it melts, at least I can stand safely and fairly warmly on the front and back decks to get a breath of fresh air after being stuck inside for so many days in a row. YAY!  We are going to make sure we run our few errands early tomorrow morning, even set the alarm if we have to, so we can be certain that everything needing to be set up for next week will be accomplished before that freezing rain appears.  We are now entering the thaw and refreeze cycle between the end of winter and the onset of spring, the most dangerous time to be outside walking anywhere. However, it usually only lasts for a month or so. By April it should be safe, or at least almost so, for me to at least take a slow tour around the block! Can't wait!!!!

My husband is completing his PowerPoint presentation for the class he is teaching at church on Sunday morning and will try to get it sent in to the Zoom tech people by tonight.  This is his last class for this session and in two weeks he will begin teaching his class on Forgiveness.  I am looking forward very much to the class. Regardless of what I have heard him teach about it in the past, there is always something new for me to learn about that subject!! 

Pre-surgical physiotherapy is going very well.  This is my second week of doing my exercises three times a day. I will do one more week of that and the following week I will start doing them with the recommended ankle weights....which will be almost like starting over again, if memory serves me from the last time I had to do such a short series of repetitive exercises.  Today I have one more set of reps before taking the weekend off to give my muscles a break.  SO looking forward to the time when both hips are replaced and I can hopefully have a break from any more surgeries, at least for awhile.  Now, if my knees will just hold up........hahaha......

The Danged Suite Is Thoroughly Cleaned!!!

 Over the past three decades I have learned that nothing works on ridding myself from depression, particularly of the Never Ending Winter sort, like cleaning house!!  I spent the last three days tearing each room apart and giving it a deep cleaning like I haven't done in a couple of years. My husband watched this going on and decided that to tackle his own winter blues he should do likewise. At this moment he has his library all tidied and cleaned and he is working on his office space.  He suffers from having too many items in too small a space, so both those rooms are difficult to clean. I gave up that frustration and turned those rooms over to him to take care of when he retired.  It is WONDERFUL!!  

The sky is blue, there are some thin, low clouds, there is warmth in the sun even though the air temperature is still chilly at -15C, but that is about ten degrees warmer than it has been in the past week and the warming trend is continuing through the weekend and into next week.  Oh, we are ever so grateful.  It feels as though hope is being restored after a very dark winter season.  There will be more snow and freezing rain over the next month, there will be thaw and re-freeze, making my life a bit more dangerous for getting about, BUT anything that signals the end of this brutal winter is eagerly accepted!!!!  

Spring is on the way at last!

And now I am going to find a recipe for muffins that I can bake this afternoon.  Instead of going to a restaurant tomorrow morning, my weekly coffee friend is coming here, since I have some tire and fan issues with the car that my husband has not yet had time to address, so I would like to thank her for driving all the way over here by giving her a decent mid morning snack......AND to redeem myself after the dreadful batch of cookies I sent home with her and her husband the last time they were here for dinner.  haha

If you are also experiencing a miserable winter, I hope the weather will soon improve for you and that the joy lurking just over the horizon will soon be attainable by us all!!

The Benefit Of Hindsight

 As an ordained priest my husband has been posted hither and yon between ordination and retirement.  We have lived both before and after official ordination in a number of very interesting places.  Even some of the pre-ordination locales were quirky to say the least.

This morning I got thinking of one of his most difficult postings...not so much in terms of ministry, but in terms of social interaction.  For the few years we were there the social interaction was nearly non-existent until the last year or so of our stay.  It was a good community, but unfortunately we had very little in common with any of the people we met there.  I left the place with overwhelming gratitude and have spent most of my time in thinking of it since more with disappointment than with any great sense of joy.

As I got thinking back on it after breakfast today I realized my focus has been all wrong!!  Instead of rueing the things that didn't work out there, I need to be focusing on incredible life changes that occurred for our family there and how without that difficult posting our lives would be lacking a great deal.  Even our son benefited through our posting there and he didn't even live in the same town, only visited a couple of times briefly.

If we had not been posted there our son would not have met one of the most important people in his life: a parishioner whose child left the area for a more urban experience and as a result, when meeting our son, had the contacts to actually propel his move to New York City forward and his career path has been grafting upward every since.  It is incredible to think what he would have missed out on if we had not been posted there for him to meet the people who basically saved his faltering Canadian arts career!

For myself, it "just happened" that I received my diabetes diagnosis there....in a town that "just happened" to have a diabetic nursing specialist and regular visits from a diabetic nurse from a larger centre.  The quality of diabetes education I received there was second to none.  The GP that diagnosed me, a woman who was working internationally and left shortly after I did for a major post in Saudi Arabia, "just happened" to be in our local clinic when I needed someone like that to direct me to the incredible diabetic nurse.  As I listen to other diabetics I have met from here in Regina and other places I have lived, I realize what a sweet deal I had being diagnosed in that town that I didn't fit into.  

My husband learned ministry lessons there that have proved invaluable in every subsequent ministry posting he has had.  He has utilized those lessons over and over and over again.  

There is one other place where we spent a number of years that left a very,  very bad taste in my mouth and so after my revelation this morning I think it is time to revisit a place I have spent decades trying to forget and seek out what was good about the experience.  There has to have been something good, some reason I can look back on and say, "Oh, that is why we were sent there!".  

This has been a good day of meditation on past experiences, whose reasons for happening are only now becoming more clear to me.

Preacher Pa, Tennis Enthusiast, On Jesus Playing Tennis

 " 'I'd like to see you read Paul's letter to the Romans.  He has a great deal to say about keeping oneself free from vanity. Focus on the important things.'

'Like tennis, I suppose.' I said, with a hollow laugh.

'Tennis is a discipline,' sighed Pa. 'The more disciplined we are, the better we are.  Jesus would have played tennis, had the game existed in the ancient Graeco-Roman world.'

'Whom would he have played?  John the Baptist? He'd have been a great player, wouldn't he, Pa?'

'John would have been too wild, too unorthodox.  I suspect his backhand would have let him down.  He'd have amazed you occasionally though. He'd suddenly do something unexpected and brilliant. He'd have shocked the crowds.'

'Peter?'

'Not confident enough.  He'd lose his nerve under pressure.'

'Paul?'

'He'd challenge the linesman continually.  He's want to analyse every shot.  He'd refuse to admit defeat.'

'So Jesus would have won then, against all of them?'

Pa shook his head.

'Not at all,' he said.  'He'd let the others win.  Every time.'

'So his weakness was making people believe they were great when they were quite ordinary?'

'No, no, no,', said Pa. 'That was his great strength.' "

--from "The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp"  by Eva Rice

-50C Windchill Doth Not A Family Day Holiday Make!

Yes, this morning our windchill is between -42C and -50C depending on what area of the city the weather report is being issued from.  People off work for today’s provincial Family Day long weekend will be grateful about being able to stay home. Well, just three more days of this and then we will get a break at last, so I AM going to survive the winter. We will likely have a very late spring and a beastly hot summer again, but the ice will be gone and I should have at least one new hip before year end. Good things to look forward to abound! 

On Saturday we “celebrated” our 10 year  anniversary of moving to Regina. Ten years in this crazy townhouse. Ten years of adjusting to a “city” that isn’t.  We love the size of Regina and we have made good friends here, but ….. just not sure about what comes next after my surgeries.  We started looking at moving within the city over a year ago before giving up in despair over what was available, but prospects for a different, better accommodation are even worse than they were then, rents continue to climb crazily.  While our rent here is going up again in August, we are still paying substantially less than any of the other places we have looked at, and our age continues to increase, making the moving process more difficult to handle.  Perhaps I have been stupid in refusing to purchase a newer vehicle until we could move to a place with indoor parking of some kind. My car is aging with me, the exterior and now interior starting to look a bit rough, but new tariffs on vehicle parts and production are driving up prices on new vehicles, so there has been a run on second hand vehicles thereby driving up the prices on the few decent ones still available. Quite a conundrum as to what to do. We feel like we are frozen in place. So, we pray for direction, wait on the Lord and my hip surgeries and then begin new searches to see what comes along. Limbo Land….I am becoming a bit more patient about the wait, so that is a good thing. 

Ten years in one place!! I think that is part of the reason moving out of here seems like such a difficult project to take on. Move we must, as this place is crumbling out from under us, but this is the first place we have lived in long enough to call and feel like “Home” since we left Alberta back in 2000.  Renting for 25 years has had its own stresses, but we have enjoyed not being responsible to maintain our own house and property if we are being honest.  

Well, time to get dressed, eat breakfast and start cleaning house. It is time to turn the large living room rug again so I am grateful my husband is here to move the furniture and help me roll up the rug so I can turn it around and give it a good vacuuming.  Tonight, if our car will start, we will be attending our care group. We decided not to cancel despite the cold weather because we all need the encouragement of good friends. Getting the car running today will be good practise for getting it going at 7am tomorrow when all the cars in the lot are to be moved out for snow removal….in these temperatures and with the street parking around us filled with big piles of snow it is going to be hard to get parked close enough to home to run out and start the car once every hour to ensure we will be able to drive it back into the lot after the snow has been trucked out. Lots of fun tomorrow! Hahaha….

Today's Mantra: Only 5 More Days...Only 5 More Days...Only 5 More Days..........

I have severe "cabin fever" today!  It is because of the weather forecast for the next five days: overnight lows between -36C and -40C between tonight and next Wednesday night.  Aaaaargh!!  This means that barring an emergency we will not be leaving the house, at least not in our own vehicle,  until next Thursday or Friday morning.  Seeing the incredible warming up that will begin at the end of next week should be encouraging me that I can make it through just fine until then, but instead it is making me increasingly antsy to get up and out of this suite AS  SOON  AS  POSSIBLE!!!  My goodness, I didn't feel this strength of cabin fever during a nearly one year COVID lockdown back in 2020. Whatever is wrong with me??  At the least, I am grateful I don't have to be concerned with starting up the car and burning gasoline for a half hour in an attempt to get the temperature gauge to register even a tiny bit on the dashboard monitor. There aren't any groceries needing to be purchased or appointments currently scheduled this coming week, plus I won't be having to stagger around on the fresh snowfall that came down overnight and likely won't be cleared away  until next Tuesday, since Monday is the Family Day holiday in our province.  There are many good things about remaining inside for another 5 days, but wow, I haven't been feeling that happy about it.  As the day has worn on I have accepted it and am over the worst throes of feeling contained and restrained.  YAY!  This morning was the worst.  Glad the feeling is passing.

It is warming up a bit in the area of Alberta where we used to live. Friends there are going for a walk around a lovely wooded park area where my husband and I used to enjoy wandering about and camping there with his various family members years ago.  The trees, the view of the foothills and mountains, the water in the river.....it is really a beautiful spot, off the beaten pathway a little bit, but close enough to towns and secondary highways as to not be overly remote.  I miss that park.  I hope our friends have a great time there.

My husband is having a kind of lousy day health-wise today. I am not sure if it is a bit of CFS, or if he is fighting some kind of "bug", (I suspect the former), but he is going to stay home from church tomorrow and watch the adult learning class and the service on Zoom.  Since I don't want to have to go out and start the car with a windchill of predicted -40C or colder, I will stay here with him.  Gosh, I miss the friends there when we have to remain at home on Sunday mornings.  Mind you, some of them will likely also be absent due to the bitter weather.

It has been a good day to distract my mind by doing some more outstanding home chores:  when I washed the dining room tablecloth last weekend and realized how much ironing it was going to need to get it looking at all decent, I stashed it on the ironing board in the closet and tried to forget about it, which I did quite successfully until today. SO, perfect day to iron that miserable, but pretty item and return it to the tabletop where it belongs.  Other small tasks are now done as well and it feels good to have the motivation to do them rather than just sit here feeling depressed.  

Now I am hoping I can relax between now and when I call the surgical "hotline" at the end of next week to find out how many more months I will be awaiting surgery.  Even if it is going to be a longer wait than hoped for, at least I will know how to make plans for the near future.

What is the weather like where you live?

The Good News!

 I am using Happy Monkey font today, because I do feel happy and my mom used to call me a "little monkey"....not when she was happy with my behaviour..., haha.

The surgical consult went unbelievably well today.  Oh ye of little faith....that's me.  My prayer warrior friends are apparently going to receive some very positive answers to their prayers for this surgery.

After talking to me, giving me an exam, checking my ability to do my pre-surgery physio exercises, understanding my issues with blood sugar and GERD in regard to the meds I have to take right now to stay mobile,  and looking at my last two x-rays, the surgeon has decided that "we must get this done sooner than later"!  After having me sign my life away for the full meal deal style of hip replacement surgery, he put me on a waiting list that is considerably shorter than the one I would be on if this were what he called  "regular hip replacement".  

I have some bone spurs starting to grow on the bottom arc of the socket joint and that is causing pain in odd places, the arthritis has progressed quite a bit since my first x-rays in early summer last year and he wants to remove the old hardware he put in 10 years ago after my second hip fracture before the bone there also becomes compromised, shifts that hardware and creates for both myself and him extra problems to deal with.

So, in about a week to ten days I will be able to call a phone line he gave me and find out the approximate time frame for my surgery.  I have no idea when it that will be, I only know this particular waiting list means he will not keep me waiting nearly as long, as in 8 to 12 months, as the one for the "regular" hip replacement surgery.  Sounds like every possible titanium piece available for hip replacement is going to be installed. Wow....  I enjoy this surgeon as he is obviously rather excited to see how his intial hardware has held up over the past ten years and he is looking forward to the challenging surgery I am presenting him with.  

I was flying rather high as I left his office.  I am so grateful to God and to my praying family and friends, praying aquaintces and even praying complete strangers who just heard I need help through the grapevine of various other friends and family.  How blessed am I, right?

In the meantime there is much to do prior to the surgery.  Once the time for surgery is growing closer I will need my GP to order up to date blood work, attend an Education Class with my Support System Husband, Have a Pre-Admission final assessment, get the info that tells me where to get the mobility aids I will need for recovery, etc. etc. etc.  I am so thankful my husband and I are fully retired and shouldn't have too much trouble completing all the pre-surgical tasks.  I think it was a lot easier in some ways to deal with the former fractures in that hip that required immediate emergency surgery....no time for classes and a string of assessments....just popped me right from the ambulance to the x-ray department to the surgery!  Guess it is good that I have to do things the Right and Usual Way this time....less trauma and no nausea inducing morphine in an ER.

It has been a grand day!  I feel like the light at the end of the tunnel is growing closer and getting brighter.  

To celebrate my news we went grocery shopping....yeah, I know, hardly  a celebratory act, BUT it felt good to be able to get some exercise on a morning that was slightly less bitterly cold by the time my appointment ended.  There haven't been gale force winds today, so the bright sun actually contains a bit of warmth to it.  At this moment I don't even care that the cold snap is going to continue for another week or so. I am too happy to be worried about it.  AND we are not suffering with the heavy snowfall that hit Toronto yesterday and is on its way to Montreal today.  We are used to that type of heavy snowfall, but it will be much more difficult for those folk to handle.  Toronto was basically shut down today from all reports on the news.  God be with them.

Then we went to visit our friend who is currently in a convalescent facility. She has improved considerably after suffering from a wicked chest infection that was treated with such heavy meds that she had hallucinations.  There is still the probability of slow onset dementia for her, but to be able to carry on a great conversation with her for a whole hour today was a wonderfully blessed treat.  At least we know she may have many lucid days ahead.  Thank you Lord.

I have a tablecloth that needs ironing.  Best go and do that before dinner...gosh, dinner will be in another hour! Wha'????  Seems like I just ate lunch, but that was nearly 4 hours ago. Where has the day gone?  I think I have been lost in a daze of happiness after the appointment this morning. Yes, I will still have a longer wait for surgery than I would like, but it is tremendously encouraging to know the surgeon is advocating for me and is so on top of what the issues are.  Bless his heart.

Repeating Historical Mistakes

As I look at what is happening around the world these days, I fear our world populations are making the same mistake about our thoughts regarding world leaders that Stalin did when Hitler made it clear he planned to invade the Soviet Union in the early years of World War Two.  Stalin made the apparently reasonable assumption that Hitler was merely talking chaotically and would never risk hurting his own German people by trying to invade the larger country of Russia.  He was wrong of course.  Due to his refusal to recognize the possibility of a true threat because it would be an apparently silly thing for Hitler to do, German soldiers did invade and tens of millions of Russians were murdered by various ways and means.

These days I am hearing many people around me proclaiming that several world leaders are only talking about doing all manner of perceived to be ridiculous land gaining tactics.  "Scare tactics", "Oh he's just saying that, he doesn't really mean it....he couldn't possibly because his own countrymen would suffer, or ....(insert whatever rational reason you can think of here)".  It appears we are indeed risking the same misconceptions that Stalin laboured under until it was too late to save his own people.  

Why oh why can we not seem to grasp what too many current world leaders are really saying?  They are not making threats for the sake of making threats....they are deliberately sowing chaos through lies, promoting misinformation and seemingly crazy (like a fox) actions while the others in their governments are either too ignorant, blind or downright intimidated by them to call them to account and take the kind of action needed to silence them and remove them from power.

I am sorry, but I see potentially bad, frightening times ahead even in countries that have not been involved for a long time in wars fought upon their own soil.  We are falling into the same errors as our predecessors who assumed that other leaders "didn't really mean" what they said.  Despite leaders around the world over reaching their own assigned constitutional powers, they are not being stopped, everyone around them seems either stunned by disbelief or terrified into helpless submission.

Hey, let's wake up and realize the truth. We could be in very serious trouble.  What should we be doing to counter the possibility?  How do we help our government members protect our countries and their constitutions?  I feel kind of helpless at the moment. Yes, of course I am praying and asking God for his intervention and mercy, but what the answer to my prayers will be I don't know.  Are we too going to have to experience deep suffering? It is possible.  It has happened all over the world in the past.  So....what do we do?

Thanks for listening to me spout off about what is bothering me these days.  I am just so tired of hearing people defend the demented conversations of power hungry actual and would be dicators.  I can't talk to them about it any more. They are not listening.

Refrigerator Door….Check!!

Yes, to those of you asking after my post yesterday, I DID get all the photos, lists, assorted out of date paper announcements and crumbling old rubber magnets removed from the front of the fridge!! Yay!! Into the garbage went most everything other than a half dozen magnets, two of which were larger photo magnets of younger, recently married cousins, my Amsler Grid Eye Test and our medical directives, the grocery list paper and attached pen. I scrubbed down the door and now what is worth keeping is neatly arranged on the top freezer door. NOW, if I can just keep things always in the new, neatly ordered arrangement! 

Looks as if the current cold snap may begin to ease later on Thursday. The temperatures will not be balmy by any stretch of the imagination, but could be eight to ten degrees warmer for at least a few days. Ooooh, that would be loverly!! 

My simple physiotherapy exercises are becoming more painful along the old fracture line where my hip was originally broken 52 years ago and re-broken in 2015. Clicking and crunching in that joint is getting easier to feel when doing them and the ache lasts all day.  There are a few chores around here too painful to attempt now, so I am glad to have this updated report to tell the surgeon in a couple of days. Maybe it will be helpful to the timeline?? 

Looking forward to getting more backlog of small house chores taken care of today.

-47C Windchill, Sunny Bright Skies, Sparkly Snow And One Of Two Major Chores Accomplished!!

Today is the perfect day to stay indoors and accomplish a few of the chores that have been waiting to be done for some time now but that I haven't felt enough oomph to tackle!  

The first of the most time consuming two chores is now completed: the dreaded shred!  I am very happy to report that the pile of papers to be shredded, (stacked into a huge, unstable pile on top of the shredder), have so been and are now bagged and ready to go out to the garbage bin.  After I was done I pulled out a set of tweezers and tweezed every last shred from the blades that was stuck in there, wiped out the interior and catch bin and called it DONE!  YIPPEE!!  An easy but time consuming chore is finished until the next set of papers is collected over the next few months.

Also on the list is cleaning off ALL the "stuff" magentized to the front of the refrigerator door in the kitchen.  It is one project that builds up over time; I get so used to seeing all the things stuck on there that I stop noticing eventually that the front of my fridge looks like I have a pre-schooler in the household who happens to take excellent photos, but who loses track of how to attach them to the fridge in an orderly fashion and take down those photos and paper lists that are no longer relevant.  Oh my....what a disaster.  For some reason it struck me a couple of weeks ago just how far past time it is for me to remove all those useless things and leave only the grocery lists up there as a reminder for Mrs. Clueless Shopper here that certain things are desperately needed from the grocery store.....that prescriptions actually need to be picked up in person on certain days.....aiii yiiii....I am not sure how I have managed to find the grocery list pad of paper in among all the useless items around it all over the door.  ALL OVER the door!!!  Sad, just sad....however, either this afternoon or tomorrow morning that chore will be completed as well, Lord willing!  

Get with the programme, sister!!! I need to return to Motivated Me and stop fussing over how depressed winter weather and chronic hip pain make me feel.  There is more going on in life than my feelings....gotta get a move on. This morning has been a grand start!

Giant Sun Dog In The Sky....Why Oh Why Oh Why Oh Why???

 So....I have been unrealistically hoping that the miserable forecast for this coming week and more would turn out to be completely wrong.  The knowledge that it is going to be colder than -30C overnight every night for at least the next ten days apparently with even colder windchills again....still....forever??....seems more than I care to bear. However, just now as I was looking out the window in hopes that the sun disappearing under some clouds was a harbinger of warmer temperatures to come, I noticed a ridiculously huge, giant, hideously immense, rainbow hued circle around the sun....the dreaded sundog which signals more horrendously cold weather is indeed upon us and will be staying for awhile. Okay, I need to remember I am and have been living in Saskatchewan...and for quite a few years now....a couple of decades actually.....and convince myself to toughen up mentally and emotionally for the rest of the winter. (Physically I have always been able to handle the prairie winters disgustingly well!) I live on the prairies. It is bitterly cold in winter on the prairies....I have always known this, so suck it up buttercup!  Amen!!

There, now that I have that little upset out in the open I can relax and enjoy the rest of the day and look forward at least a bit to the coming week's activities....or lack thereof.  We have been up rather early in the mornings this weekend for my husband's teaching assignments and it will be very nice tomorrow to be able to sleep in and sit here wrapped up in cozy robes and blankets all day rather than having to defrost the car and drag ourselves out in the cold to run errands.  I am suspicious that this ongoing cold weather is going to scotch plans with my coffee buddy again this week....two weeks in a row now, yuck....but eventually this weather too shall pass and she and I can return to our regular routine.  My husband's mid week men's group may meet on Zoom this week due to the cold weather and then the following day is my meeting with the surgeon, so those are two things for us to be looking forward to.  YAY!!

One of my Alberta friend's prayer groups is praying that the Lord would grant me my first hip surgery in April.  How sweet are they??  I am joining them in prayer for that as well, and not only for my own sake, but for the excitement they could experience to see such a specific prayer answered in the affirmative.  It is so faith building when God chooses to respond to such specific requests.  He does what he wants and what is best for us and sometimes he answers with the exact thing we are hoping for.  I know from personal experience how much that means to a group of prayer warriors.  It isn't like their faith is going to fall apart if I don't get my surgery in April, far from it, but I would love for them to have that experience to encourage them in their efforts as they communicate with God.  Of course, not being particularly noble, I am not discounting how much it would help me as well! hahaha

My husband had such a good time with the adults at church this morning talking about the story of Cain and Abel.  They are an excellent group for interacting with whoever is teaching the class and have every level of Christian experience and education.  We learn a lot from each other, not just from the teachers of the classes.  We are so like those two brothers. In some ways they are archetypal characters.  We can all see bits of our own attitudes in Cain's behaviour if we are honest with ourselves.  God spent so much time talking to Cain even before he murdered his brother Abel, trying to warn him that he had a sinful opportunity right on his doorstep, so to speak, and giving him the heads up that he should not give in to the temptation. Even after Cain failed and gave in to horrendous behaviour, God still marked Cain in some way that prevented him from being murdered in revenge for the rest of his life.  God seemed to be attempting to stop the cycle of revenge killings that Cain may have started.  It is a fascinating story and says a lot about humans and about God.  Next week our pastor will discuss Noah and the flood and the following week my husband will teach about the Tower of Babel.  Talking about the early chapter of Genesis but with an emphasis on what is actually written in the text, rather than extrapolating or downright inventing, plus studying what some of the Hebrew words and writing styles of the time are telling us about how the ancient Hebrews viewed life and God, has been a very positive learning experience.

Realizing as we left church today that we will be more at home than outside of it for the next week or more, we decided to go for lunch at Bonzzini's pub and it was a lot of fun. The cold must have kept many of the weekend regulars away and we had the place almost to ourselves.  We splurged on extra side salads with our fish and chips and pepper sauce'd chicken tenders.  Good pub grub and while the food may be far from worthy of the Ritz, it was tasty and filling as always.  It was just good to be out and about, around other people today.  It will reduce my "cabin fever" in the coming days.  Grateful for our day.  And now it is time to go scrounging through the refrigerator to hopefully discover something light and tasty for dinner tonight. 

Tonight’s Poetry Corner….Translated From The Chinese.

 Chu Hsiang (1904-1933)

Beauty runs a pawnshop,

Accepting only the hearts of men. 

When the time comes for them to redeem their belongings,

She has already closed the door.

                                                      Kai-yu Hsu

Moi et sports……

 Forwarded by a friend:

“The most important parts of the Super Bowl are the commercials and the food.

I don’t care who makes the most baskets.”

Sorry beloved sports fan friends. I have tried over the years to care about American football, but I still don’t understand the differences in the rules from Canadian football, hence I have given up. 

Forgive me…….

Draggin' Through The Snow!

 What a lot of snow we have now.  We have gone from calf deep snow all over the back lawn to just over the knee deep snow after yesterday's snowfall and big winds last night.  We have lost the bottom two steps of our back deck as they have completely disappeared under hard packed snow.  The narrow pathway from our deck to the parking lot my husband shovelled out a couple of days ago to assist me in cane'ing my way to the car blew in and hard packed so badly that shovelling it to any depth proved impossible.  So, he put on his heavy snowboots and tramped out a path about 10cm deep for me to try to use to get to and from the car.....hahahaha.  It might have worked well, but the high winds nearly blew me over a couple of times when they tipped me over just enough to lose my footing and slip off the path.  My gallant husband was there to save me, fortunately!

The streets between our place and the grocery store were so packed with oatmealy snow that the bottom of our vehicle was dragging along the snowy road.  We were happy to discover the parking lot at the store had been cleared sufficiently for me to be able to walk the few feet to from our parking spot to the door.  Oh my goodness....this is the most snow we have had all at once since we moved here ten years ago. (In fact at the end of next week we will complete our tenth year here.  Who'd a thunk we'd last here this long???)  I was grateful enough to be able to get to the grocery store that the nearly four hundred dollars I paid for five small cloth bags worth of food didn't faze me quite as badly as it would have otherwise.  Well, there are going to be even more people trudging to the food bank and asking for help to find affordable groceries this year as the prices continue to rise.  A year ago four hundred dollars was our monthly grocery/cleaning and personal hygiene products budget. Now we are approaching nearly double that each month.  This means I am at least somewhat more thankful for this overpriced, decaying townhouse we are still living in....it may be a dump with a huge rent, BUT after looking at the other rentals yesterday that are currently available here, we are still saving between five and seven hundred dollars a month on rent and utilities by remaining here for the time being.  That is how we can afford groceries.  Thank you Lord!!

A dear friend from Alberta let me know that her father, over 100 years old, passed away today. Her relationship with him was even more complicated and hurtful than mine was with my own dad, so grieving is going to be quite a process for her.  Please keep MaKay in your prayers as God so leads you to do so. Thank you.

Another friend got better news today.  After being hospitalized a month ago with a serious infection, she is being released tomorrow to go to a rehab/convalescence facility to try to regain her strength.  Her husband is currently in another province having a complicated surgery for a rare form of eye cancer. And  I think I have health problems????  Not so much!!  

The "joys" of aging and its emerging health complications is all around me with friends and family, right here at home with my own wait for surgery and my husband's constant battle with CFS and other smaller chronic issues that are beginning to plague him.  I am so grateful that I believe this life is not all there is and that some point, when I pass from this earth, I will be with Jesus. No, I don't know exactly what that means or what that will look like, but it doesn't matter. Jesus has proven trustworthy during my earthly life.  He will care for me in the next.  I know I have written that before, but it bears repeating as a form of encouragement.

No Coffee Time Tomorrow...No Sirree.....SNOW!!

I am disappointed that weather has once again cancelled my weekly coffee visit with my friend from church.  Sigh....good old winter strikes again.  Brrrrr.....while it isn't as cold this afternoon as it has been, with a temperature of only -17C, we have had quite a lot of snow today and it will continue to fall until early tomorrow morning. Winds are to increase overnight, so the drifting we discover in the morning may be quite frustrating for people who have to dig their cars out of them to drive to work.  My husband has a meeting at church at 10am, so I hope he is able to get the car ready to go.  The windchill by tomorrow morning will be -37C once again....blecch!!

Earlier this morning he swept about 5cm of snow off the top of our deck railing and now there are nearly another 10cm accumulated out there again.  The snow continues to fall....deceptively teeny flakes that don't look like much until they begin accumulating on the ground. Getting the back door open in the morning is going to be interesting as the snow continues to pile up against the bottom of it.  Likely one of  us is going to have to go out the front door, flail through the knee deep snow to the back porch and shovel out the back deck and door so my husband can get it open and get to his meeting....after he cleans all the snow off the car and digs out the ever growing snow pile behind it.  So grateful we only have a month or so left of the more extreme weather before we start battling with the predicted late spring conditions....at least it will be a slight change of pace. hahaha

Accidents have already begun out on the highways in the area.....this province so rarely closes them despite the build up of ice and snow and white out conditions that happen so often here.  The photo below is courtesy of discovermoosejaw.com: 

Highway One Today

It has been a good day of paying bills, talking on the phone with a hospital bound friend, catching up on life with my husband and making a creative lunch from leftovers....half a bacon sandwich, a bowl of tuna salad, an oat bar....tonight we will finish off last night's tortellini, broccoli and brussell sprouts.  No cooking anything fresh until tomorrow.  I am hoping to also have the energy to do a fairly major shredding project and cleaning off of the refrigerator door that has become a repository of old magnets holding ancient photos and bedraggled Post-It notes that haven't been relevant for a few years now....why I returned them to the fridge door that last two or three times I cleaned it is beyond my comprehension!

OK, I have been talking about doing a couple of chores...time to get started on at least one of them!!!!

Purge, Purge, Purge! The Continuing Saga.....

 My husband is very busy this week preparing for several teaching assignments this coming weekend, but despite his commitment to these projects, he has taken some time since the weekend to go through a few more books out of the hundreds we have in here. The "keep pile" is now getting to be smaller than the "get rid of" pile and although there is a way to go yet, I am very encouraged by his progress.  Truly, in this case slow and steady IS winning the race.  YAY!

Today as I was putting away my ironing, I decided to go through my ever dwindling amount of clothing items and admit to myself which articles of clothing still fit me and are in great shape, but that I regularly opt out of wearing in favour of something else.  I hauled those items off their hangers and folded them neatly into a large brown paper shopping bag to be dropped off next time I am in the vicinity of a thrift store.  We are more than half way through the winter season, so it is time to get rid of the various items I have been deliberately avoiding putting on.  Someone else will find them in the thrift store and love them dearly....a good thing rather than having them rotting away here on my clothes rack being deliberately ignored for whatever reason:  too tight, too loose, wrong colour, impossible to iron despite the necessity to do so, no longer flattering at my age because it is better for younger women, not flattering because it makes me look even older than I am, the teensy ALMOST invisible stain on the bottom hem that someone else has the skill to turn up to hide the mark, the tiny but obvious stitch where there was a little tear that I fixed myself and that someone else could repair much more professionally to make the garment look nearly new again....oh, there are all manner of reasons to pare down once again.  And yes, for those of you who are wondering how I can possibly be paring down again for at least the third time in the past year, you are right to assume I had a LOT, a. lot. of clothes to cull from.  The amount of items I am left with makes more sense, is easier to keep track of and each and every item WILL continue to be worn quite happily....and quite regularly.  Yay!

It is quite cold again today and it has been snowing most of the day: small flakes, but still they are accumulating.   We have swept off the deck and steps a couple of times already.  Hopefully the wind chills will lessen by tomorrow and the actual temperature will be all we feel when we go outside.  without windchills in the -35C to -45C range, an air temperature of -25C or so is bearable.  No problem.  I am tracking the daily temperatures closely this week because we need a few groceries and we are trying to pick the best day to run that errand.  

Hmmmm....I am sitting here daydreaming about my own purging project.  I think I will go through my clothes one more time.......

C'Mon Guys...Opse You Eyes To Other Possibilities Than Treasure!

 I started watching The Curse Of Oak Island a couple of years ago and find the search for buried treasure there and the amount of time, financial and material resources being poured into the project by the fellows who are determined to find whatever treasure may exist on/under the island quite interesting.  Personally I don't think there is anything truly treasure-like to find, but if nothing else the little Island is turning up all manner of interesting clues about the people living there and their activities over the past few centuries.  With the addition of proper archeologists working on site, more Canadian history is slowly being uncovered and that is what I find fascinating.

For whatever reason, the current batch of treasure hunters and there have been many since the 1700's, including a former US president, are determined that every underground nook, cranny and "hidy-hole" are potential places for treasure vaults.  Certainly there is evidence of major underground work occurring on the island as far back as the 1200'sAD or even earlier....wooden structures are being discovered up to and over 150 feet below ground surface.  Many people over the centuries have been using the island for things like ship repair, military landings and farming and who knows what else.  Hopefully, even if the current treasure hunters leave the Island and take their huge drilling equipment and other expensive search tools with them, the Canadian government will continue its archeological digs across the island and learn more about our Maritime history.

Now, I admit I do not know what kind of editing is done before these episodes are aired on tv, but what we see are a great number of men who seem to think hiding treasure is the only reason for anything they have found on the island to exist.  This week's episode had my husband and I rolling on the floor with laughter because some of their conclusions seemed so ludicrous to us.  As I say, perhaps our own ideas about the purpose of a recently unearthed underground cavity lined with slate and brick have also been discussed by the searchers, BUT based simply on what we the viewers are shown, my husband and I are assuming what they have actually found is the "toad hole" where the last owner of the lot they are digging on stored his milk and cream and other foods in the days before refrigeration....in this case the owner would have used this toad hole in the mid 1800's.  One of the metal items located down in the hole was a piece of metal rod with a hook on each end....oh yes guys, we agree, it was for hanging something on for easy lowering and raising....however, in our opinion it was not so much for lowering and retrieving buckets of hidden Spanish coins as  much as it would be for lowering buckets of milk into the cool ground to keep it fresher longer. Another item found was the bottom of a glass jar that could have held cream or other foods needing to be kept cool. Rather than a hidden treasure vault, we suspect that these well intentioned treasure seekers have actually discovered the previous owner's "refrigerator". For the sake of the searchers we do hope we are wrong and they find what they hope to find down there in the ground, but it seems odd that if a home owner had a trove of Spanish coins on his property back in the mid 1800's, (coins that he obviously had from somewhere when he lived there because he used them to pay for items he purchased at that time), he would have buried them only a few feet underground away from his house where anyone could find them, instead of burying them under his house where only he would have access to their location.  My husband's farm in north central Alberta was using a toad hole in the 1950's and 1960's prior to electricity coming to their area, when they were able to purchase their first refrigerator and ice box.

So, who knows?  I wish these fellows well and for their sake I hope they find wonderous riches to compensate for the millions of dollars they have invested over the past more than ten years of searching, but I hope they don't instead have a bitter discovery that any treasure possibly buried on that island has already been discovered and removed a couple of centuries or more ago.  

It is fun to have something else to think about than the current state of the world, that's for sure......