What The Heck Was Going On Around Here Today?

 Our own day was rather subdued.  My husband had a number of emails and short papers he had to finish up today and I did the laundry. Big whoop....However, these chores all needed to be done tout de suite, so it is all good. The weather was nicely warm all day, not much of a breeze, but most tolerable for temperature and the sun shone brightly.

Our complex as a whole though had a few issues going on this afternoon.  Kids from two different buildings in our court got into some kind of a scuffle and then both sets of parents got involved. The one set of parents who live closest to us actually called in other adult reinforcements! All of a sudden there were cars full of grown men and women arriving in the lot, filling up the parking spaces of other tenants. Just as this angry mob was about to descend on the offenders of the other family involved in the original fracas, three police cars manned by six officers arrived and put a stop to the melee before it had a chance to really begin.  Thank you Lord!!!  It seems that almost every day this week something or someone has caused an issue in our particular part of the complex. There are various repair men being called in to suite after suite every day, tensions have been high among the kids when they have been out playing, men from different suites who, to the best of our knowledge don't even know each other, have been outside arguing over what each parent lets their own kids get away with outside....today was a most blatant display of ridiculous anger and how quickly mob mentality over small issues can escalate. The police were here for the better part of an hour before all the "extra help" and even the involved adults from the suite nearest to us got in their cars and drove away. Those neighbours have not yet returned.  

Shortly after the police left, the children of two other families who had not been involved in fracas numero uno got into a huge fight outside our front door. The older boys put the run on the one boy's two younger brothers eventually, then one of the dads went slamming outside hollering at the older boys and physically dragging them back into their own suites. 

What a wild afternoon.  Other than a brief soccer game just before dinner between five boys and a couple of kids out in the back tooting on whistles and driving us all completely mad for an hour after dinner, there have been no kids outside tonight, no parents sitting out on their decks talking all evening.  You could shoot a cannon down the middle of the parking lot and or across both front and back lawns and not hit a solitary soul.  I am not happy about the reasons for that, but I have to admit I am thoroughly enjoying the unusual level of quiet this evening.  

I hope tomorrow is less frantic between the various kids and their parents.  Today was rather ugly so my husband and I remained indoors until things calmed down enough that we felt sufficiently safe outside to take out the garbage and compost to the bins.  

We talked about church tomorrow, took a look at the long list of things that need to be done around here and have chosen to remain at home instead.  The list of things my husband in particular has to achieve before we travel seems to be getting longer instead of shorter, so I helped him with a couple of things tonight.  The service will be available online by mid afternoon so we can watch it on YouTube once it is posted.

All the laundry for the trip is done and I will do some ironing tomorrow.  There have been a couple of serious changes of plans at our destination, so we have to change some of the clothing items we planned to take originally.  I will do another trial pack up with the new items at some point this week, so in that aspect of the trip I am starting all over again.  Always something, right? hahaha 

The Days Are Flying Past Too Quickly It Seems!

Sorry folks that I won’t have any more interesting fonts here until I have time to go back through previous posts to discover which link I included in one of them that has a setting which overrides my Google font settings so I can change that post and sort out the fonts again. Always something….

It seems July is disappearing on me already! I am still adjusting to the loss of the month of June and it is nearly August! I haven’t even been doing much of mesmerizing interest, yet the days are flying by. Saturday….did we even have Saturday last weekend? How did we spend the day? 

Sunday was a happy day. My husband preached and presided at our favourite out of town church, so I was able to sit with dear friends. After church a meeting turned into a wonderful lunch get together. I love conducting spiritual “business” over a good meal! Yum!

Wonderfully warm, but not overly warm weather coupled with blue skies and a comfy breeze made for excellent driving conditions, which I very much appreciated since I did all the driving. My husband awakened at 6am with one of his delightful tummy disaster episodes, so we were both intensely grateful that it passed before we had to leave for the service!

Sunday evening we relaxed and indulged our entertainment needs with the latest episodes of “Patience” and “Grantchester”.  At 8pm my neighbour came over to ask if I could drive her family to the grocery store, so I enjoyed that brief outing. I think her husband was surprised to find himself relegated to the back seat with the children after I put his pregnant wife into the front passenger seat….welcome to Canada Saleem, teehee! I think he forgave me? My husband and I were still a bit hyper from the joy of the day out of town, so we both had to read ourselves to sleep. Late night arriving visitors next door woke us up again at 11:30pm and their joyful outdoor greetings and subsequent backyard soccer game kept us entertained until nearly 1:30am. Thankfully we could sleep in yesterday morning.

We are currently being blessed with two days of temperatures of about +24C before heading into another week of highs in the mid +30C’s. I took advantage of that yesterday to do all the laundry that accrued during the previous very hot week. This morning I am about to bake a fruit loaf and that will be the last of my oven use for awhile again.

We are currently awaiting the arrival of the building maintenance staff to perform the quarterly Changing Of The Furnace Filter, as well as the plumber who is scheduled to flush all the drains in our unit. Guess I should go and get the banana loaf made before our place is inundated with trades folk.

Oh, before I go, could you send up a prayer if you are so inclined for our neighbour Hafav who just lost one of the twins she was expecting and is struggling medically to retain the other twin to term? Thank you SO much.

A Bit Of A Change.....

 ....in the weather today!  At least temporarily this afternoon we are seeing some sunshine and blue sky poking through the clouds and it is glorious. The temperature is into the low +20'C's this afternoon. What a treat.  Possibly more rain and thunderstorms tonight, but not the certainty in the forecast for those events that we have had in previous days.  After going to bed at 1am once the noise of people and traffic from the fireworks display last night calmed down, it was very nice to wake up to lighter skies than I have seen the past few mornings.

It was a perfect day for running errands after my happy visit with my coffee buddy this morning.  We took another load of "basement items" to the thrift store, but the medium sized old steamer trunk was not acceptable after one of the supervisors there deemed it too large to deal with....hmmmm....sofas are not too large apparently, so not sure what the real reason was. No problem.  We drove down an alleyway in The Hood, located a number of homeless people living in a patch of long grass behind an abandoned house, opened the car to show them the trunk and one of the fellows was more than happy to balance it on his bicycle while he rode away to wherever he has his belongings stashed. He is thrilled to have something to store his belongings in to keep them drier on these rainy days....or maybe he is looking to sell it for some money so he can feed his addictions, but whatever.  It is out of our basement and will be useful to this man in some capacity.  Thank you Lord for hooking us up with him.  The other boxes that were accepted at the thrift store have left another fairly decent sized patch of basement floor free to do more sorting.  Although it is taking an exceeding long time for my husband to clear things out of there it IS happening this time, ACTUALLY HAPPENING, compared to every other move we have made around the country over the past over 20 years.  YAY!!  Now that my husband has started to recover from his latest round of tummy episodes and is no longer taking the statin that gave him severe headaches every day for over a year, he is starting to lose patience with all the things he has been storing in the basement. I am seeing items leaving our house that I never ever thought he would decide to get rid of.  Last weekend he hauled both of his precious canoe barrels to the home of a friend who is starting to take large groups of teenagers from his school on canoeing expeditions.  WOW, someone who not only can use them but was so excited and grateful to get the barrels that my husband was just glowing as he handed them over to their new owner.  YAY AGAIN!!!

We stumbled across a very low price for gasoline as we passed the reserve gas station on Albert and filled up for $1.49 per litre.  That is always exciting and particularly so today as the car was less than a quarter filled with gasoline when we started out on our errands today.

After "fixing" a screw on my glasses the other day, resulting in my inadvertently bending the frame so much that the focal point of my glasses shifted and left me with double vision for the past 3 days, I decided I had best go to the vendor at my eye doctor's office and try to get them fixed. Fortunately for me, although they were not in great shape, they were better than I thought. The tech there was able to get them back into shape and my vision is restored.  However, she did show me exactly how badly I mangled them and advised that the next time I need a change of lens prescription I NOT try to have the new lenses put into these frames as they are too fragile now.  I have learned my lesson.  Leave the "turning of the screw", even though I do have the correct tools at home, to the professionals.  Wow, do I ever feel stupid.  I thought I was so smart taking care of that loose screw on my own, but in the process I made a huge mess of my delicate and expensive frames I have had for less than a year. Sigh.....hopefully when I have my annual eye examination in the autumn I will not have to get a change in prescription.  However, if I do I have decided I am going to ditch the graduated lenses, convenient as they are in many ways, because it takes so little for that central focal point to be moved due to dropping, bending, having any sort of accident with the frames and then my vision is kaput again.  I am going to ask my optometrist to take me back to a single lens for middle and longer distance and then have a pair of reading glasses.  Yes, it will be inconvenient, but I am realizing how much I have been struggling with these graduated lenses over the past 20 years, never seeing as sharply as I discovered about three years ago that I COULD when my optometrist forgot to put the close up part of my prescription onto the scrip for the techs. The mistake wasn't discovered until I had my new glasses for a week, was thrilled to be able to see more clearly and sharply than I had in years, but then realized I couldn't read any books up close. hahaha  I know how badly the vision issues of the last three days affected me because once things got sorted out again today, I became nauseous after wearing the repaired glasses for about an  hour.  It didn't last long as my eyes adjusted to being able to see more clearly again, but wow....I did a REAL NUMBER on those poor frames.

We picked up a few groceries before we came home....2 regular sized cloth tote bags...$160!  The cost of everything continues to rise and it is becoming more and more difficult to see any huge discount on the sale items.  Tomorrow we are supposed to get our first updated Grocery Assistance/GST,PST rebate from the government, but I am wondering if we will get any raise at all from the whole $49 per quarter we have been getting. I suspect not, hahaha.  Guess we will find out tomorrow.  

I Hadn't Realized How Many Years It Has Been Since......

 ....we last lived and worked and ministered in a downtown core situation surrounded by people in desperate situations of mental illness, addiction, poverty and ongoing unemployment., until today at lunch time.

We spent the morning removing a large wooden work bench and table from the shed of a friend whose house is going up for sale next week and she has been good enough to store that table for us for the past several years.  After we dropped it off at its new home we decided we should take a short break and eat a bite of lunch before returning to remove our canoe and rehouse that as well.  

The closest place for two grubby, dusty "haulers" was a fast food joint, so we opted for a quick burger.  The restaurant is right on the edge of the neighbourhood known here as The  Hood and it is populated by many down and out people who are suffering from lack of emergency medical services and addictions counselling etc. etc. etc. and it is, quite frankly, a bit of a daunting area not that far from where we live.  Today while we were eating our burgers a fight over a drug deal gone sour erupted right at the entry door. Voices were raised, epithets filled the air and after a couple of minutes a physical fight ensued.  The restaurant has a security guard who is highly visible but the fight was too much for him to handle on his own. When it became evident that one of the participants was armed with what looked to me like a home made shiv, the police were called in.  Thankfully the situation was solved before we had to exit the restaurant because the scuffle was happening right in front of the borrowed car we had with us for hauling the table and canoe.  Whew!  It would have been very difficult to explain to the owners of the car what had happened to their vehicle if it had become part of the argument happening around it.  I have to confess that for the first time in as long as I can remember, I felt a little twinge of fear about the situation.  It has been decades since I have had that response while in a section of the city that suffers such problems. It was embarrassing to be honest.  When I remember the folks in Calgary and area we were privileged to deal with for so much of our married life, I realize how far away we have been from having that lifestyle surrounding us.  I hadn't really understood how much our lives have changed since those days.  Kind of rocked me back on my heels to be honest.  I need to monitor my responses more carefully when I am now faced with that sort of culture.  Man oh man......I shocked myself today and not in a good way.  

When it was time to return for the canoe, my husband decided to ask our Syrian neighbour Saleem to help him move it instead of having me trying to assist and dropping my end of the heavy old thing, as is my wont, when my husband is trying to get it up on top of the vehicle to tie it down.  Saleem was a wonderful helper....he and his wife Hafav are both younger than our son!  So, Saleem was very quick with his part of the loading process and before I knew it the men had delivered the canoe to its new home and returned the borrowed vehicle to its owners, so I got a text to come and pick them up much sooner than expected.  When they got back Saleem and Hafav had time to come over for tea and snacks, so we spent a wonderful hour with our translators on phones and iPads learning more about how they ended up here as refugees. Their tale brought big soppy tears to my eyes. They have suffered even more than we understood before.  Oh dear Lord, deliver them all from the trauma of wars in their home countries. Amen!  We so admire them for all they are doing to learn about Canadian life and culture and their fledgling attempts to speak English.  May they find their way as happily as is possible in such circumstances.  Some Canadians have never suffered the tragedy of war and we truly have no idea what that kind of suffering and fear is like. May the Lord preserve us from ever having to find out.....

So, everything is now removed from our friend's house before it is listed for sale. Those items have found new homes for the present and our friends have their vehicle back.  It has been a very productive day on several fronts.  I am realizing if our next door neighbours are forced to move to less expensive accommodation this summer how much we are going to miss having them living right beside us. 

And: now we are waiting for the next four days of rain to begin after having a mostly overcast, but at least a dry day today. 

The Rain Came Down And The Floods Came Up

Did you go to Sunday School as a kid and sing the little ditty about the wise man who built his house upon the rock as opposed to the foolish man who built his house upon the sand, so when the rains came down and the floods came up the wise man's house stayed standing and the foolish man's house floated away? (for those of you wondering what on earth I am talking about, the wise man represented those who built their faith on Jesus the Solid Rock and the foolish man represented those who ignored God's laws and rejected Jesus and went their own way and lived to regret it.)  When the rains came teeming down this morning for several hours, we were concerned that we would be in the same position as the foolish man and that the floods would "come up" into our basement once again.  There was a break in the rain for a couple of hours while we were in church, but now it is pouring once again, so although thus far we have not had any leakage in the basement that my husband's convoluted arrangements of plastic piping and connections to the drain in the basement floor have not been able to handle, we are going to have to keep an eye on it over the next two days of predicted rain.  I have to say that at least the 103 geese currently feeding on our lovely green back lawn are happy to see the new puddles in our parking lot where they can come and drink after a feast of new grass shoots.  My husband and I will definitely be dancing the Poop Scoopin' Boogie back and forth to the car for the next few days until the sun comes up and dries out the goose droppings so we can shovel them up and get rid of them.  Sigh....how can such beautiful birds leave so much destruction behind them? 

We received our formal wedding invitation online this afternoon for our son's and daughter in law's wedding reception celebration in August.  They did such a good job with it, clear instructions on how to respond, how to let them know if the responder is coming to both the reception dinner and the Shabbat dinner at auntie's the night before, or just one of the celebrations, whether there are food allergies and other dietary restrictions to be considered, full addresses for both venues, and an easy to use page for sending wedding gifts.  Their shared computer and creative skills worked well together for this invitation.  There is one family who cannot remotely afford to attend...my son's "other family" from Vancouver.  How I wish, for a wedding gift specifically for my son, I could afford to pay for them to come to NYC for a few days and join in the celebration.  Their inability to attend is about his biggest disappointment in regard to the whole celebration, although he was expecting it.  Sigh...

Our son got another blow last night when we received word that his other "Alberta family" from growing up years lost the patriarch of the family somewhat unexpectedly a few days ago....a very rare form of blood cancer....just one of many cancers he had suffered after 37 years of firefighting in the town where our son grew up.  This family is so special to us all: they adopted our son every summer for at least two weeks or more to take him along on their family holiday in the Shuswap, camping right at the lake.  They took him every summer for about ten years and gave him the time of his life. We could never go away in the summers, partly due to financial restraints and partly because when my husband was well enough to work on his construction projects, summer was prime time for jobs.  I don't know what our family would have done without the kindness of this family who lived right down the street from us while our kids grew up together. Our boys were great buddies all through school even though they attended different schools, the parents were kind but strict and had strong moral values that aligned with ours....it was an amazing relationship for our son's growing up years. They are a wonderful, hard working, stoic family who had many trials of their own to deal with over the years.  May dearest "uncle" to our son rest in peace and rise in glory.

My husband read the scriptures at church today. hahahaha  He did well of course, as a retired priest, but he made one little boo boo at the end after he finished the Gospel reading.  Instead of saying what was written in the bulletin to signify the readings had come to an end, he automatically, as a retired Anglican priest, said, "The Gospel of Christ" and in the Anglican church the response is, "Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ."  The Baptist congregation of course was completely thrown by the fact that he said something so different than the sentence and response they are used to, so there was a confused silence from all of them while the three of us in the church with Anglican backgrounds automatically responded, "Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ" into the soundless vacuum.  hahahahaha  My poor husband instantly realized what had happened so he rather shame facedly returned to his place in the pews. hahaha  No one will remember...these Baptists are good like that....but I had a good laugh at my husband's expense.  He is tired today after a poor sleep last night and I suspect that is why he messed up just a wee bit. hahaha 

My husband was delighted to receive a phone call from our son this afternoon in honour of Father's Day.  Although he would have thought nothing of it if that call had not come, I could see he was pleased to be remembered.  My husband went around this morning greeting the congregation members with "Happy Solstice!"  A few of them were not thrilled to be reminded that after today the number of daylight hours will begin to shorten as we start the slow slide back to the winter season. Spring is over....such as it was around here...and summer began three weeks ago....huh?  We haven't even had a true spring yet, as shown up in our flagging tomato plants and patchy pots of flowers on the back deck.  

I am looking forward to the vegetable portion of our dinner tonight: friends at church brought us a bag of beautiful fresh asparagus from their family farm.  It looks luscious and I can't wait to steam it tonight and cover it in melted butter. Yum, yum.  (And no, for those of you who always ask, we did not go out for lunch after church today. It being Father's Day and us not having a reservation anywhere since we can't justify the cost of all the restaurant brunches by the small amount we can each eat, it wasn't worth trying.) 

 

Wiggle Waggle, Wiggle Waggle....All The Live long Day!!

 The large puddles in our parking lot that formed during recent rainy days has attracted quite a following of bum twitching geese and their babies...well, toddlers now....and so we are once again inundated with geese after a lovely slow start to the rise in population on our lawns.  Over here they are away from all the power walkers and their dogs in the park across the street and they don't have to lead the "children" down a steep bank to the lake to get drinking water.  We are prime real estate for these families, including one mom and pop who are herding 19 goslings around the place. Ooooh, the poop on the lawn is even worse right now than it was last summer when we had a regular adults only population of between 30 and 40 each day. I never thought I would miss our childless couples so much! hohoho!! The rain has made it impossible to scoop the poop up yet, so.....eeeewww....I have a lot of shovelling to do, maybe tomorrow afternoon. Not that the geese will be gone, but if I can clean it up every couple of days or so and the clean lawns last for an hour, that would be sufficient.

My husband was badly delayed getting away to his friend's place today after having to run me around for medical appointments and medication pickups, but he finally drove off late this afternoon....and returned less than 10 minutes later to get his sunglasses and hat that he left in MY vehicle. hahaha  Well, he should be more than half way to his destination now and there should be dinner awaiting him when he arrives. Then he and his buddy can spend the evening packing all their gear properly into the CRV and take off early tomorrow morning for their destination to the west.  This trip is easier than most because they will be staying at another friend's place...inside...so no need for tents and other equipment specific to outdoor camping.  Yay!

The first meds I took this morning hit me pretty hard.  I felt like I was moving under water and couldn't keep my eyes open for the next five hours, but the second, mid afternoon dosage hasn't bothered me that way at all. What a relief!  I expect I will feel kind of lousy again closer to bed time as these sorts of sinus/ear/respiratory infections tend to hit me that way. Tomorrow morning I will feel horrible again I am sure, but will sleep sitting up with my tv pillow behind my back so that I don't have sinus drainage into my ears as badly as I had last night when I slept flat on the bed.  I was feeling just at the edge of dizziness for part of the morning and am grateful beyond measure that I didn't cross that line after all.  I stood outside the clinic door from 7:30am until 8am waiting for it to open, much to my husband's horror, but being outside always clears my head...just standing in the fresh air, my rain hood up to protect my ears and a warm sweater under my coat, kept me upright long enough to get into the clinic and sink into a chair for the whole one minute before I was called into the exam room.  I am glad the zombie like drug reaction ended because I was afraid I was going to feel like that all day. Whew!

The kids next door are inside the unit screaming their heads off and their three friends are there with them bashing and banging around in their suite so loudly and continuously it sounds like they are going to come right through the walls.  It is the worst noise they have ever made but there is a reason for it: they are alone in the suite with no adults present. This morning the next door mom and dad were picked up by some friends to take dad to a walk in clinic or maybe the Urgent Care clinic because he is very ill apparently.  Six hours later they have yet to return. I have no trouble believing they have been waiting at Urgent Care for that long, or perhaps they had to take him into hospital for tests after his appointment and that will take forever. My husband watched him trying to walk to the car this morning. He was hunched over and obviously in severe pain and discomfort. So we have been praying for him today.  The parents of the other kids in the suite live close by so if the parents from next door don't show up soon I am hoping our neighbour kids will be fed and taken care of if this situation goes on for much longer.  In the meantime I can hardly think from all the pounding on the walls and in the stairwells and from the constant shrieking and hollering and screaming. hahaha I remember how I would  have felt being alone at home with my siblings and all our friends with no adults present. The kids range from age 4-14 so I bet they are having the time of their lives. I know I would have! hahaha

Pleasant Family News!

My husband had a nice long phone chat with our son today. He has many happy bits of news to report that encouraged all of us.  I spent nearly an hour in the prayer room at church praying for him this morning over some concerns he is facing right now, so it was nice to get some good news about his life.

Last week a gallery where he had a show last fall sold two more of those paintings and to a huge international financial investment house to add to their art collection.  So happy for him.  He also got a surprise raise in pay at his job, so that was a wonderful surprise.  He had some medical tests that came back with better than expected results so we are all rejoicing in those.  He and his wife have some very belated honeymoon plans they are putting together for after our visit there.  The play his wife produced opened last week and a critic from the New York Times who both she and my son greatly respect was in attendance. Whether or not it gets a printed review, unlikely as it is a new play by a lesser known playwright, at least a major critic came to see it; good advertising in itself as word gets out.  

My husband spent a long time researching "alternative to flying from here to NYC" travel possibilities for our upcoming trip just in case the Strait of Hormuz remains closed indefinitely and more international flights end up being cancelled at the last minute.  They now include us getting a ride to Saskatoon and taking the train across Canada to Toronto and then transferring to the Amtrak for the rest of the trip across the border, driving to Minot to catch a flight the rest of the way across the States, driving the entire way and back, (the least possible option due to our concern that we don't have the oomph to do that even one way, let alone two), taking a few extra days at the beginning to fly to Vancouver for those days and then taking the five hour overnight red eye flight from there to NYC....oh there are many alternates, we just need to settle soon on one of them and start making those arrangements.  Who knows how all this will work out...but we are having fun dreaming and planning in the meantime.  Actually my husband is doing all the research and making the suggestions as planning trips is right down there near the bottom of my list of fun things to do, along with slapping myself across the face with a board!! Thank goodness for my husband or we would never go anywhere at all!!!

The thunderstorm warning for overnight has been replaced with a 60% chance of showers, so that is a good thing, although we do desperately need those showers here in the city.  While I spend the upcoming hot days giving this suite a good cleaning, my husband will be getting the trellis and heavy plastic wrapping ready for the two tomato plants to go outside at last, as well as getting the rest of his herbs purchased and planted out on the deck.  Ruddy plants...l love the produce they give us, but oh my it has been so nice not having spiders and wasps all over the deck and back door area yet this year.  I have seen exactly one spider outside spinning webs anywhere near the deck so far and that has been a huge treat. Oh well....

We are realizing how noisy it is going to be this summer, right into the wee hours of the morning, once the kids in our court get out of school.  Most of the new immigrant kids come from hot, hot countries where daytime is for sleep and nighttime is for coming outside where the kids can play and the adults can sit and visit on back decks and stairs.  My husband and I are not going to play "noise police" this summer. The rest of the complex has been defaulting to us and letting us be the only ones, as of the end of last summer at least, who come outside at 2am to ask the neighbours' kids to please go inside and stop hollering and kicking soccer balls against the side of the building so everyone else can get some sleep.  Nope, this year we will put the white noise in our room at a higher level and be prepared to wear our earplugs all summer. It is someone else's turn to explain to the new families about the local noise bylaws and being considerate of the other tenants.  The kids are always so very good and respond well to getting direction. We don't have to be angry, mean or rude to them and since none of their parents speak English at this point it is the kids with their own versions of newly learned English that we have to chat with about noise. There are times when we so wish we could speak Arabic and Swahili so we could communicate with the new people here more effectively.  If the other adults in here continue to complain about kid noise in the wee hours of the morning they can be the ones that figure out a way to deal with it.  Overnight noise control used to be a group effort taken on by most all of the other long term tenants in our court until last summer when we suddenly became the only ones who wanted to help the kids understand the rules here.  The sense of community really began falling apart last summer and that is kind of a shame.

Here's to a week of extreme warmth and if we are tempted to complain even a teensy bit about the heat, we will remember the snow that continued from the end of last October until the middle of May!!! That should shut us up! 

 

 

A Night's Grace And Then Our Part Of the Widespread Storm Arrived!

 Although yesterday involved a fair amount of windy gusts blowing us about, no rain arrived and we slept all night with the windows open, barely a breeze happening.  My walking partner and I had a a lovely short walk in the morning and then I walked sans cane over to the hairdresser's and back after lunch with only a stiff breeze to contend with.  Around 7am today the real winds began, but still they were manageable.  No rain until mid afternoon. For the past two hours the house has been shaking, we have been forced to shut the windows to keep the rain out and the storm is definitely "ON", but we are no longer scheduled for that 20-40mm of rain, only about 10-15mm.  I continue to pray that the wind will continue to blow in directions NOT directing the rain into the weakest points in the foundation of our suite, but the mop and bucket, along with plenty of towels are all adorning our basement at the moment, just in case.  My husband is doing some work down there on purpose so he can keep an eye out for any water breaching the filler in the walls. I brought my husband's new lawn chair inside to keep it from blowing away in the present gales.  

SO thankful that the worst of the wind had not started by 8:30am because my coffee buddy decided the weather was good enough for her to keep our weekly visit after all.  At that point the sun was shining. She had a good drive over and we had such a wonderful visit.  By the time she left the sky was turning grey but the winds weren't much stronger than they were when she arrived so I know she got home safely.  

All the walking yesterday made me rather tired today, but I got through my first set of chores okay and was sitting about after lunch wondering if I hadn't better get going on the ironing from Tuesday's laundry when the phone rang.  It was a dear, dear friend I rarely see any more, so 90 minutes later when we hung up it was getting too late to start a major task. Since the power has been blinking a bit and threatening to go off, I decided ironing was a silly job to start.  Of course it could go off and scrap this post as well, but this risk is more FUN to take than ironing. haha

Last evening was quite a surprise and quite fascinating:  my neighbour's 12 year old daughter came to the back door around 7pm and motioned for me to come to her place.  Out on her back deck, sitting on carpets and cushions, were her mom, Mohammad's mom and another, slightly older woman also from Syria.  The three women met when they were all out walking separately through the complex and just ran into each other, got to sharing in their Arabic language and discovered all three are refugees from the same city in Syria.  So now my neighbour has two good friends here.  The reason I "had" to come over was to meet these women and after an hour together of sipping tea and trying to communicate together......them on the deck flooring and me balancing precariously on an overturned plastic pail with a pillow on top since there is no way I can get down on the ground at this point, they dropped the hint that perhaps I could start teaching them all some English. Mohammad's mom is the most skilled in English speaking and comprehension but the older woman is the most skilled in understandable gestures and she has an hilarious sense of humour.  Oh how much I wish she was already an English speaker so we could share some laughs of understanding together.  Compared to Arabic, English has facets that are much easier to say and to remember. ("In Canada, one man, one woman, two men, two women and a big crowd are all "YOU!"  In Arabic they are all different words....said with just a touch of pride, teehee.)    So now I am praying about whether or not I should offer them a class once a week or so.  One issue will be that their husbands want the families to speak Arabic at home....a decision that helps no one in the family adjust to living in Canada, even though their reasons are understandable. Such fear of losing their culture and language, but it is hindering their kids in school.  If the women I am teaching are not allowed to practise it at home in conversation then my efforts will be wasted and their frustration will continue to grow. With the cuts in ESL and other such courses in our dear province of late.....over 170 staff in those programmes have recently been cut and there are more layoffs pending.  There is literally no in person programme available for my ladies to attend here.  They have all tried online courses but were completely lost, thus gave that up. Sigh....  SO government folk: let's just continue opening the floodgates to let refugee families into our province and then not allow them to learn the language we speak here. Yup, makes a ton of sense, doesn't it?  Sigh....  The women were trying to teach me some Arabic words but the only one I can remember is the word for house because it sounds like a French word I know. hahaha  I am far more hopeless about learning Arabic than any of them will ever be about learning English.  At least as they continue to live here and keep trying to understand and speak a few words, they have hope of one day becoming sufficiently fluent. Ancient I however.....haha....hopeless!

So there is my conundrum and prayer request. Do I volunteer some time to attempt to help them with their English or do I just step away and let them figure it out on their own? I am under no obligation of course to take them on, but what would God like me most to do?  It would be conversational English only as I no longer have my materials from teaching adults in Japan and I am not prepared to make this a "final phase of life" calling. We shall see how things go next week and in the meantime I am praying hard for direction.  

I have one plan in place already for when my husband is away hiking next month: I am going out of town to church on the Sunday and going for lunch afterwards with a friend.  Really happy I will for sure, Lord and weather willing though of course, have a little time away myself! 

Bouncing Back! Aiiii Yiiiii.....

 So, 90 minutes after it started my husband's episode passed and he is bounding about the place quite happily.  I wonder why it is that some medical issues that bother us in childhood disappear as we hit our teen and adult years, then return in our elder years.  My husband started having these types of stomach issues when he was about 4 or 5 years old and they disappeared by the time he was a preteen. Sometimes he could trace oats as the culprit, but removing them from his diet didn't clear the problem completely.  He remained free of all such attacks until he was in his late 60's when they began all over again and only sometimes involve specific foods.  This time however we can't seem to track any particular offender, so he is keeping a daily food intake diary and recording his reactions to each thing he ingests.  Here we go again.  Last time we  discovered that now pears and beets are no-no's and presently cucumbers, plus bananas at bedtime seem to be adding to his discomfort this time around, but he has eliminated that starch and others at bed time with only minor improvements to the condition over all.  Well we will keep at it until we discover if there are any other foods that have filled his food sensitivity bucket to overflowing.

I am happy to have been able to go out in the raging wind and drifting snow a little while ago to find some grocery items we know he can still eat without any reaction.  Wow, no one would ever know that between our next door neighbour and my husband a good 8 inches of snow were shovelled off our decks and back yard paths to the cars yesterday afternoon.  Between more flurries this morning and the strong winds those decks and pathways are all blown in again.  Probably not worth shovelling until a bit later when the flurries have stopped for some time.  The wind will just fill in the gaps with pre-fallen snow again.

My it was good to have the automatic start to melt the sheen of ice off the windshield of the car before I got out there.  I had a suspicion it was something we would enjoy having and now that we do, my suspicions have proven to be correct. 

All things considered, the day and my husband are definitely improving and soon it will be time to watch our local girl try for her second attempt to qualify for the diving competition finals.  I do wish her very well indeed.  It is daunting to come back into international competition after being out for so many months with an injury.  

Carol And I Are BOTH Improving Slowly But Surely!

It has been a glorious, warm and sunny day today.  What a relief after ongoing snow and ice and fog for the past few days.  Okay, okay, tonight it is to rain again and be a bit colder for a day, but overall the spring is winning its struggle to get started around here.  How I appreciate the attempt!

After a relaxed morning of lingering over breakfast and reading a couple of more chapters together in our current shared book of choice, (Steve Saint's "The End Of The Spear"), we went over to the hospital to visit Carol.  I think it is one of the few times I have truly experienced seeing someone transition "from death to life" so quickly.  Only three weeks or so ago Carol was on the verge of death, comatose, her body fighting sepsis and her kidneys and heart and lungs on the verge of shutting down.  Today she is lucid, bright eyed, texting and emailing on her phone, eating well and doing her in bed physiotherapy each day while she waits for a bed in a short term rehabilitation facility.  We had a wonderful conversation, prayed together, shared mutual joy at her nearly miraculous healing and it was incredibly encouraging to my husband and I.  So proud of her for fighting through this disaster and starting to come out healed on the other side of it.  Now we pray for the rehab bed to come available to her sooner rather than later.

My husband and I parked our car a couple of blocks away from the hospital...not only to avoid having to pay for parking, haha, but to give me a chance to do a few blocks of walking outside without my cane.  I admit I felt kind of discouraged about the severity of the limp by the time we returned to the car. BUT my husband said to me, "You know, if you were under the care of the very first physiotherapist you ever had, no doubt he would have some kind of little trick to help you walk with less of a limp."  "Yup", I thought. "He likely would have some little trick fer shur!"  

After we got home I got thinking about what my husband said. I started walking around the living room and checking what I was doing with the foot on the operated leg. Sure enough, I discovered I have not been rotating the weight off of my heel and onto my toes when I am walking.  When I go to step forward with the non-operated leg, the toes on my operated leg are not receiving my weight in order for me to roll forward off those toes so that that leg pushes back at the hip while the non-operated foot reaches forward to take that new step.  Duh....how could I have missed that one little fact in the midst of all the physiotherapy I have been doing so faithfully???????  After dinner tonight I spent some time walking around the main floor of our suite, deliberately rolling my weight onto those toes and immediately my gait became, if not perfect, far more natural so that the limp was greatly reduced. Voila....a new strategy to work on to lose the limp.  Bless my dear husband for what he said. It certainly got my attention and seems that this new practise for walking technique is going to help me.  WOW  and YAY!! Since the top of that tendon is not functioning properly any more I have to stop assuming walking postures will return automatically.  I have to deliberately place my leg and feet in the proper walking positions and continue to do that consciously with every step until I have retrained the surrounding muscles to make it happen with less deliberate pre-thought on my part.

Early to church tomorrow as the adult early morning class is starting a six week series of teaching and discussion on various words used in the Bible that are not necessarily understood any more and that have passed out of popular usage.  I don't know what the topic is for tomorrow or who will be teaching it, but I do know my husband will be teaching next week on "purity".  Looking forward to this new class.

This afternoon's icing on the cake was a visit from a dear, dear friend....the one who bought our Honda a few weeks ago.  As I watched her pull up beside our car in the lot I had the funniest feeling watching what used to be our car being driven by someone else. hahaha  We had a great visit.  I so appreciated her dropping in because she has a schedule every weekend on her "days off" that would do me in even if I was twenty years younger!!  That woman can complete more tasks in one day than I can complete in two weeks or more. Incredible!

Enjoy the rest of the weekend everyone and if you have good weather already for spring, enjoy every second of it.  Thanks again for praying for Carol.  God has been very positive in his answers to these requests and everyone in her family is grateful.

Now, if my husband could just have his tummy troubles settle down....less intense episodes today, but two instead of only one.  I am certain these issues all tie in with his CFS, so we just have to discover what it is food-wise that may be setting off these episodes and he can no longer eat. When we finally figure that out we will have to take time to also figure out if this food is permanently off his diet list or if he can restore it to the menu once he recovers from these present attacks.....aaaah, never a dull moment around here with my husband's health issues. Since the CFS has been going on since 1986 I think we are both kind of used to it at this point.

Got Through It!

I am delighted that despite a nearly 2 hour wait to see the specialist today, my husband got through that wait and the appointment without rushing out ill before the appointment even happened. Thank you Lord!  About a half hour before we left to go to the clinic, I noticed my husband was turning pale again and he admitted he was starting to develop the initial  symptoms of the tummy attacks.  He drank a bottle of nearly freezing cold carbonated water as keeping cold seems to either heal these attacks or fend them off altogether if he can get the water down soon enough.  Yup, it did the trick, but we took another bottle of water and a freezer cold pack with us anyway. So grateful neither was needed.  

By the time the appointment was over my husband was feeling MUCH better and I am sure good news from the specialist, the best actually, was a large contributor to his change of both attitude and colour and symptoms.  He felt great, so we walked over to City Hall and purchased three packs of pre-paid downtown parking vouchers to try them out until we feel sufficiently ready to learn how to pay with our mobile phones.  hahaha  The vouchers are easy peasey to use. They are like lotto scratch tickets so I will have to carry coins in my wallet whenever I park downtown.  You simply scratch off the date, hour and minute of parking, and the year, detach the voucher and put it in the front window on the dashboard. If you think you are going to need the full two hours allowed you simply remove a second voucher, fill it in the same way and just move the time ahead by one hour then place it beside the first voucher on the dashboard.  It only takes a few seconds to do that.  City Hall has space for two or three cars to park for free for up to 15 minutes for people going inside to purchase the vouchers.  So, we now have 14 hours of pre-paid time left for downtown parking.

My husband was ravenous (of course he was....the stress of the appointment was not only over, but he got good news), so he decided we should try out the vouchers immediately.  Fancy Fork was on the way home, so there we went to have our lunch....at 2:30pm!  Thankfully I had chosen to eat a very late breakfast this morning just in case we got held up at the doctor's office, so I was well within my six hour maximum window between meals by the time we ate at the restaurant.  I made the mistake of ordering the beef dip....I say it was a mistake because it was so blasted tasty I used the fact that the whole wheat buns the meat was on were too fresh and soft to last if I took half the sandwich home,  to justify eating the entire sandwich.  Well...."only" about 4-5 carb units all at one time.  (I brought the side of fries home with me for another day.)  I had to exercise when I got home to try to wear some of those carbs off before they raised my blood sugar too much.  hahaha  The beef was delicious, not much fat and I didn't come across any gristly bits, the garlic mayo was not too strong and the fresh very thinly sliced onion slices were a nice addition. There could have been a bit more au jus, but that is a minor technicality. It was the most delicious beef dip I personally have ever eaten.  My husband had a cheese burger sandwich, without the cheese since he never eats beef and dairy together, but he got a good amount of lettuce and tomato,  a bit of strip bacon and the very delicious Caesar salad...dressing on the side to cut down his fat intake due to the two strips of bacon on the burger.  So, we both cheated just a little and enjoyed every mouthful of our most reasonably priced mid afternoon lunch.  I was so relieved my husband was feeling better and able to eat so well after living on grilled cheese sandwiches and plain pancakes for week that I nearly cried into my plate!!

Despite the temperature rising to a balmy -3C this afternoon the wind was bitterly cold all day. So the inch or so of snow hasn't really melted anywhere that car of foot traffic hasn't turned it to icky slush.  Maybe tomorrow we will see more sunshine and less wintery snowfall.  Maybe...   

A Wonderful Surprise Gift Came In The Mail Today!

 I got quite a surprise when I checked our mail today!  A box came for me from my husband's cousin in Ontario. She and her husband used to live here and he was one of my husband's most beloved colleagues.  Inside the box was a most beautiful and wonderfully knit shawl in my favourite shade of grey!  Cousin had worked hard with tenacity and determination to learn how to knit in this style and I was the blessed recipient of her amazing efforts.  (She is talented at all things craft, garden and food/drink, and swordplay related, but knitting something like this has not been of interest to her....until now it seems.)  It is quite delightful to be getting unexpected gifts...first books from a Vancouver Island that arrived yesterday and then today this shawl.  Wow....incredible to be so thought of and gifted.  Thanks so much you two!!!  I am feeling special today.

When It's Spring Time On The Prairies!

 We woke up this morning to a thick blanket of large snowflakes coming down...way more snow than the predicted "flurries".  There were about 3cm of snow that had melted off again by the time church was over just after noon.  The streets and some sidewalks are sloppy with water puddles and our back lawn is soggy, sodden and bog-like to walk on.  

We completed our series of study this morning on literature and poetry in the adult church class. This morning we read a story by Annie Dillard, "A Field of Silence".  Her descriptions of being alone on a farm one day, while sometimes being uniquely over the top as is her wont it seems, certainly encompassed my own feelings of loneliness, desolation and a need to see God in a new way when I spent my first time living (for six LONG weeks) on a farm back in 2001.  City girl that I was, it was very difficult to make the adjustment to the differences in sound, sight, distance and general culture so I found that her writing captured those desolate, confused feelings very well.  

We lunched at the Knotted Thistle afterwards.  I enjoyed very much their Celtic Plate....a huge no no for my diabetic carb count, so I did leave a portion of the massive mashed potato base, but thoroughly enjoyed its covering of sliced roast beef strips, peas, cabbage, gravy, "real" bacon bits, fried onions and gravy.  Any meal that consists so heavily of hot beef smothered in hot browned gravy is my kind of comfort food!!  We took our time and reviewed the church service and what all we had gleaned from the sermon today.  It was fun.

As soon as we got home I collected the spaghetti meal I made for our friends yesterday and delivered it to them. They decided I should stay for a good long visit over coffee and that was lovely.  I will be vibrating for the next three days from the strength of the coffee, but it tasted so darned good!  If it wasn't for needing to keep my caffeine levels so low due to osteoporosis, I could really get back into drinking good coffee again. 

Tonight we will watch the church choir Easter concert online.  Trying to get parking near the church on concert nights is a hassle and as the temperature will be well below zero again by then the now wet, puddley sidewalks will be a sea of ice I don't need to be walking on.  It is more fun at home because I already know a number of the choir pieces they are doing and I can sing along in my old croaky voice without disturbing or offending any of the concert goers, hahaha.   

Tomorrow it is back to the full physiotherapy routine and a start to getting my spring and summer clothes ironed and hung in the closet.   We are expecting about 5cm or thereabouts of snow between tonight and Tuesday morning, hopefully no more than that and most of it should melt off in a few days' time.  Spring on the prairies....the weather changes several times a day, snow falls and melts within a few hours or even minutes, the sun comes and goes over the course of each day, the clouds change from white to iron grey to white again, then disappear altogether for a day or two between snowfalls.  All this topsy turvey weather is a great omen that spring is actually going to happen this year. What a crazy start to the spring season....as always!

The latest update on Carol is thus:  all of the sedation drugs have been stopped and she was expected to wake up yesterday, but she didn't.  This afternoon she has begun responding to pain and other stimuli for the first time, so that is positive.  The nephrologist would like to avoid having to put her on dialysis for a few days to help pull the rest of the sedation meds from her kidneys and hopes they will bounce the drugs out on their own.  He will continue to monitor that situation for a day or two and then reassess.  Her family are feeling more positive about Carol's eventual recovery, but even if the final outcome is spectacular, it is still going to take a long time, lots of medical care and our prayers for her.  Thanks again from everyone for your prayers and concern.