Adjusting To The New Next Door Neighbours....A Possible Prayer Request?

 It is just after 9pm on Friday evening and two of our new young fellow neighbours next door have just arrived home after over indulging in some kind of drink or smoke. Sigh...they are sitting on their back deck, just under our bedroom window, cussing and hollering and while they have until 11pm technically to do that, I can only hope they are still going to be able to fathom the time and obey the rules.  I REFUSE to be the crabby, nasty old woman next door, I REFUSE!!!  They have thus far in the nearly a week we have been home, been fairly quiet when inside their suite. The music was a bit loud at first, but we let them know that was unacceptable and they have been great about it ever since.  My husband has an important Diocesan meeting tomorrow morning so I pray he can get some sleep tonight.  AND I pray we don't have to call the emergency rental company number later tonight or in the middle of the night to have noise and music shut down.  As I wrote that last sentence the noisy pair went inside and thus far no music, so perhaps we will be blessed with quiet tonight after all.  Praying so hard this is a good relationship....non existent as it likely will be, if it can at least be quiet I will be thrilled.  We have a suspicion from what we have seen going on, that the young woman who seems to be the lease holder is actually not living there, but is subleasing it to the two fellows.  Since that is completely NOT allowed here we suspect their unusually quiet daily behaviour, (other than tonight), now that we are home from holidays is so that they do not draw unnecessary attention to themselves so they don't get caught.  hahahaha  We could be wrong about this, but we really don't think so as this wouldn't be the first time this stunt has been attempted since we moved in. We've seen it all before.  hahahaha  

Tomorrow morning I have the opportunity to attend the women's breakfast at our church, but I think I will take advantage of having the car while my husband is working and dash over to the grocery store for a number of items on the list.  We are trying to wait until next Wednesday to do a major shop, since we both have too many commitments between now and then to work in a big shop, but I realized tonight there are more things we will need before then that we realized.  I admit I am kind of looking forward to going to the store on my own, even though it will be crowded on a Saturday.  It has been a long time......

LIttle Cabin In The Woods......

 Slowly photos are trickling in from my husband's phone to my photo files and sometime this weekend my husband will open a Drop Box file so our son can send his own photos from our time away.  One small set of photos I do have already is from our trip upstate to the "cabin" north of Red Hook.  Not being a camper in any way, shape or form, this large luxury cabin was just my style and I am so grateful for our kids taking us there for 4 days. Have a lookee see:

How beautiful is this place, right?

The backyard pathway to the river and swimming holes.

Getting ready for our first bbq meal.

Our son the Grill Master!

Final salad preparations

The nearby Elizaville Diner...Exterior

View from the diner

The interior

Driving to the cabin.....

And to the diner.

Time to go back to the city.

Laughing At Comparison Distances

 I have been too busy running catch up errands and doing laundry to go specifically for walks since we arrived home, but today we walked up to the nearest hospital to visit a friend who was admitted in our absence.  Before we left on our trip a 16 block round trip walk was, if not physically, mentally beyond me.  Ohhhh, what a terrible chore to drag myself all that way over to the hospital AND walk all the way back again, hahahaha.  I realize today how much left over winter depression was playing into my refusal to consider walking a reasonable distance with any regularity here at home this past spring and early summer. Today the walk seemed incredibly short and the walking time passed quickly.  My husband and I walked over there, had a good long visit with our friend and walked home again in four minutes short of an hour.  Walking the 34 block round trip to and from Fairway Market in Manhattan, plus walking up and down the aisles accumulating groceries that then had to be carried all the way back to our suite was no issue...not even a sit down part way there or back was ever necessary.  Interesting I had to go all the way to NY state to get over my lingering depression, but wow, it has certainly made a difference to my attitude and hopefully continued fitness now that I am home again.  I am ever so grateful for the break away to get my mind back on a more positive path.  Oh please God, please may it last and carry me through the impending winter months.

Changes At Home And Final Thoughts About The Trip

Yesterday was a blur of errands once again, things we planned to leave until later on this week, but as it turned out had to be done right away. One of the things we tackled was finding out what happened with Canada Post in regard to our requested and paid for Mail Holding that didn't happen.  

We went to the local postal outlet and talked to the young woman who set things up for us.  Her immediate response was along the lines of "Not again!!!".  Instantly she reached under the counter where she was standing and pulled out a piece of paper from a stack of papers upon which she had already written not only the phone number to call to report an issue, but even the numbers to punch as we went through the recorded phone message to ensure we eventually reached an actual person..."for service in English press..." and "for home delivery service issues press...."  This gal had the whole sequence written down already for us and away we went home to make the call.  My husband talked to a very helpful woman that took all our information and promised she would launch an investigation into what happened and we would hear back from Canada Post by Sept. 21st.  However our phone rang before 8:30am today and it was another Canada Post person, just as helpful, who told us exactly what had happened with a breakdown in the mechanized processing of held mail and that we were not the only recent victims of an issue that has cropped up in recent weeks requiring repair.  He has passed our issue on to the higher ups and said we will hear from them as well in the coming week to arrange a reimbursement of the fee for services that we paid when we set this up.  He was also most apologetic.  My husband and I are pleased by the attitude of the people we have talked to and understand the explanation of what happened. Whether or not we end up getting our fee back is another thing and if it is not returned there is no other recourse for us, but for now we are satisfied that every effort is being made to help us.  Glitches happen, but we do hope we will be reimbursed for the mess the breakdown created for us.  We will pray and see how it goes.

I washed seven loads of laundry yesterday and for the first time since prior to my hip surgery in 2025 going up and down all those stairs so many times didn't exhaust me at all.  It felt good to be getting such good exercise after all the walking we were able to do in NYC.  Must not let the depression that sets in at the first ice freeze up in the winter take over this year and discourage me from at least setting up an in home exercise programme to keep my operated hip fit so it can handle taking the greater weight bearing load for a couple of months after my other hip is replaced. 

I had coffee with my Thursday buddy this morning and it was such fun getting caught up on all her news. A lot can happen in four and a half weeks!!!  

A lot has happened around here in our court, that's for sure!  We have now discovered there are four 20's something students (we think they are students) living next door to us and we are so grateful that they got the hint about the volume of their music and have kept it down to a dull roar in the late mornings and early afternoons. At night it is incredibly quiet over there, or at least if it isn't the white noise we play all night is covering it.  I think if they continue to be willing to be so quiet we are all going to get along well. Hopefully we will not be making noise that disturbs them either.

To our dismay, all the African kids and their mom seem to have moved out while we were gone, so we had no opportunity to say goodbye. All the bicycles and toys are gone from their back deck, there are new curtains on the windows and a plethora of pails and mops and cleaning products scattered on the back deck. The car that was there is also gone, replaced by a different vehicle.  Our hearts are sad to lose that family.  

Two other new sets of neighbours moved in across from us while we were away, suites that had been empty for some time before we left.  We have seen little of who the new neighbours are in there, but we hope they do well here and are happy.  Elderly rental units, not in the best condition...things change often and quickly it seems. 

I have been thinking since we got home about things I would have trouble adjusting to if we ever found ourselves living in our beloved NYC and there are a few things that would be difficult to get used to:  the tolerances between driving lanes both inside the city and upstate terrified us for most of our trip.  The lanes are so much narrower than here that it is normal to have the vehicle beside you only inches away as drivers barrel up the street as fast as possible to keep the traffic moving.  I found it frightening on the highways going to the cabin.  The speeds are a bit lower than on our major highways here, but with the narrower lanes it is still pretty scary when there is a lot of traffic.

Another thing I have always found distressing when visiting most anywhere I have gone in the USA over the years is the lack of street lights at night.  It is understandable due to the cost of electrical power and other factors, but wow....to be driving or walking along in the near pitch blackness, particularly on the more residential side streets, is very difficult to get used to.  I had trouble seeing some of the potholes in the streets and bumps on the sidewalks. My husband had a tiny flashlight with him that he used a few times just for safety's sake.  People there laughed at us for that because they are so used to the darkness, but we felt safer from taking a tumble by using it.

The bicycle lanes are interesting.  The speed at which both food delivery cyclists and others go is phenomenal and there seem to be far fewer accidents than I would expect.  The only thing is that as a pedestrian crossing a bike lane to get across the road, we had to be hyper vigilant as to the presence of these talented speedsters so we wouldn't get hit. Only once did we see a cyclist wipe out dangerously when a pedestrian who didn't see him walked right out in front of him when he was cruising at top speed and he had to swerve and fall to avoid hitting her. Fortunately and nearly miraculously, other than a slight patch of road rash on one hand, he wasn't injured. Didn't even rip his shirt despite the force of his landing.  Thank you God that both he and the woman he nearly hit are okay.

The distances to go anywhere outside the area where a person is staying can be daunting, but the transit system, despite delays and a less than reliable schedule, particularly for the buses, is still pretty amazing and I am more aware than ever of the lack of decent public transportation available here at home in comparison. Well of course that is the way it is as we don't have the population, therefore the money, to support any major changes to our own system.

So my complaints about NYC are few at this point.  It is a marvellous place to visit and I WOULD want to live there, hahaha. 

After lunch this afternoon I will begin ironing the giant stack awaiting me.  I didn't have time to do laundry before we left, so I had over two weeks' worth of dirty clothes to contend with between what were in the clothes hamper here and the dirty clothes from our trip.  The washing machine belt here is starting to fail so the clothes are coming out more wrinkled than usual, meaning I am ironing a number of items now that never used to need it. No problem. Just wish I didn't have to wait until the belt fails completely and leaves me with a washer filled with water and half washed clothing before it can be reported and another machine brought to replace it.   

Now it is time to take a huge load of books we are finished with over to Bonzzini's restaurant to put them into a little community library sort of arrangement they have right inside their lobby.  I hope the shelves are not full because we have a LOT of books to deliver, hahaha. At least if we can't fit them in there we aren't that far from other boxes along our route home....after we eat lunch at Bonzzini's....hopefully.....teeeheee...I am slow to get back on the cooking bandwagon but have some meat thawing in the refrigerator for tomorrow.    

Although we did some cooking on our trip, it was minimal really and so we are in that habit now, like most good New Yorkers, of eating out once a day.  I miss the hot brisket sandwiches at 2nd Avenue Deli very, very much!  There are no specifically Jewish delis in Regina.  Well, that is okay...it means next time we go to NYC, (Lord willing and our health doesn't crater), a proper deli restaurant will be one of the many things we can look forward to.

My husband has promised to download photos tonight so that I can post a few while I wait for our son's photos once this incredibly busy week at work comes to an end.  Dropbox here we come!!

As you can see, my thoughts are still scattered all over the place, but as I settle down and get back into the swing of daily life on the prairies, I will be more coherent in these posts. 

No promises...... 

 

An Incredibly Busy Day And It Has All Been REALLY GOOD!!!!

This has been a rather incredible first day home in over a month!  Our plans today were to sleep in...didn't happen because we were in bed so early last night, hahaha...then eat a leisurely breakfast....which we did just after 6am, so guess we are still on NYC time two hours ahead of here....then figure out how to spend our quiet day mostly at home recovering from the trip.  HAH! That is so NOT how things went, hahaha.

I decided I would go to the bank and pay off our US credit card bill and redeposit the rest of our US cash, but had few other plans. Maybe I would stop at the store near the bank and pick up the yogurt I forgot to get yesterday...or not...whatever....  Before the bank opened I remembered that I was supposed to call the surgeon's office about my other hip surgery as soon as I got back and see if my surgeon came back to work this week and what the next steps are.  WOW, that started a whole day of action!  The office manager told me to hie myself to my GP as soon as possible for a requisition for new x-rays of my "used to be good" hip which has been complaining rather obviously after a whole month of very long and brisk walks. She told me that my surgeon is not coming back now until the middle of October...so the progression has been that he would come back the middle of March, then July, then September and now October. The line up to see this wonderful man, assuming he eventually actually returns, who will no longer be able to do nearly as many surgeries in a day as he was doing before going on medical leave is getting longer and longer of course,  BUT now he has taken on another doctor as his partner.  I do not know this second surgeon but I believe if he is now the partner of my surgeon he must have some skills.  Once the surgeon's office receives my x-rays I will be contacted to choose which of the two surgeons I want to meet with between the third week of October and into early November.  I am praying very hard about this decision because as much as I love my surgeon, I can't wait around for an extra long time just to see him if the other surgeon is going to be available sooner and will do the surgery sooner.  With the news that the new AI Data Centre being built just south east of our part of the city is going to actually be quadruple the size that was announced, (to the tune of a $50 billion investment), resulting in an influx of thousands of construction workers and over 500 permanent workers when it is completed, we know that will drive rents up and reduce greatly the number of rental residences.  Maybe "we gotta get outta this place" is what is going to have to happen. Maybe we are going to have to return to teeny tiny town living in order to have an affordable place. Maybe God will do something incredible either here in Regina to get us moved farther from the Data Centre, or find us a teeny tiny town not too far from the city, or somewhere else all together that we would never expect. Who knows, I just know I cannot wait around too many more months to get moved out of our current tenement post surgery or there will be nowhere left to go.  We cannot justify paying much more for this dump than we already are.  Our ministry within the complex is dwindling now as those we have been helping have been slowly moving on to government housing we don't qualify for or out of the city altogether.

OKAY, so back from the bunny trails to the actual story of what happened today.

As soon as I hung up from the surgeon's office I called my own GP to see if I could get an appointment for a requisition some time soon.  The office manager there asked me if this afternoon would be soon enough as two appointments had just opened up. TODAY?  Already?  You betcha buddy!!  I went right after lunch, (at DarBar to celebrate our safe and on time arrival home and to delay the start of having to cook for as long as financially possible), only waited a total of fifteen minutes to see my doctor and emerged quickly with the needed x-ray requisition. My doctor asked me why I was looking "so fresh" today so I told her where I had been. She agreed that NYC is a wonderful and busy place with many things to see and do...."Not like here!", she said at the end of that conversation, hahaha.  Yup, she gets it.

Off to the Imaging Clinic and within 10 minutes of arriving my x-rays were all finished and the papers signed to have them sent to my surgeon's office, where they should be available in two or three days.  Incredible!!  Bing, bang, boom, life is going full speed ahead already.

The pile of mail has been opened, sorted and dealt with since I got home from the x-ray appointment, joy has hit me because the utility bills for this month are showing a goodly amount of money left over from my pre-payments, so there will be little to pay on any of them next month either!  We have not met our new neighbour on the other side of the wall yet in person, but through a series of noise testing he has discovered how loud he can play his tv and music now that we have arrived home again. He seems to understand now the lack of soundproofing and has been most compliant. Hopefully we will bump into him soon casually outside and be able to welcome him to the fold.

One thing that certainly has been helping get readjusted has been my husband remembering to download the first couple of days of the September Sumo Tournament that began this past Sunday for our afternoon viewing pleasure.  Another thing was getting back behind the wheel of the car to drive to the bank.  The car started right up, first try, so the new battery definitely held up with the car sitting unmoved for four and a half weeks.  I had to stop and think where I was going today and how to get there as I have not thought about the car or driving since the day we left for NYC. hahaha  Our dining room table has an old towel covering it and on top of that towel are the many tomatoes our house sitter picked from our back deck plants before the first frost, along with some of her own larger tomatoes and a gorgeous looking cucumber.   One of the "basics" we got at the grocery store our "chauffeur" friends took us to after we landed was a package of precooked, lower sodium bacon, so tonight for dinner it will be bacon and fresh tomato sandwiches. Yummy!!!  Seeing all those tomatoes ripening up again this year makes for a better feeling about being "home".  The x-ray tech was happy to hear we had enjoyed our time in NYC, but of course although it is a great place to visit, we wouldn't want to live there. I told him that actually I would give my right arm to live there but my arm wouldn't raise enough money, haha!

It is now after 4pm, so since we ate lunch at 11:30am it is time already to be getting some of those tomatoes sliced and a couple of bacon strips heated up to make sandwiches on the nice fresh bread and bagels we purchased here yesterday.  

What a wonderful day of needed accomplishments. I am still kind of stunned by the series of appointments this afternoon that were so quickly set up after my call to the surgeon's office!  Wow...

Tomorrow I suppose we are going to have to do battle with Canada Post about them not holding our mail, despite all their email and snail mail assurances to the contrary before we left. Yesterday we got an email message from them saying it was our last day of mail holding and that all our mail would be delivered to our home post box today. hahahaha  All we got was the credit card bill that always comes on this date every month, because all the mail that was to have been held, showed up in our box several days each week as usual. HOLD SCHMOLD!!  Well, live and learn, even if we get our money back by some miracle, (which I highly doubt is possible), we will never attempt to use that service again. It is truly the only real blight on our homecoming. Everything else has been good, good, good!!! Hallelujah!  The friends who picked us up at the airport yesterday are on their way to the maritimes today and sent us "happy, smiley face" photos from Toronto from their also on time flight this morning.  Oh happy day!

Home, Freezing, Soaked, BRRRRR....First Time Our Furnace Has Been Turned On In Mid September!!!!

What a day, what a day, what a day this has been!!  A good day, but we are completely zonked. It is currently about 7:30pm and my husband has been in bed for the night since 6:10pm, that is how zonked he is!

We were both asleep last night just before 10pm. I woke up at 3:30am, half an hour before the alarm went off and my husband just beat the alarm by seconds....it would have been 1:30am Regina time.  So, I have now been up for 18 hours, but I am still too wired to sleep, so might as well end this trip blog for the present until the photos get moved off my husband's and son's phones for publication here in the hopefully very near future.

We did take time for a decent breakfast even at that early hour to use up some of the leftovers.  Fortunately we had very little food that had to be thrown away.  At 4:50am we were down at the desk checking out and waiting for our taxi to arrive by 5am, the one the front desk staff had booked for us the previous evening. They HAD booked it!  We were there and heard the conversation between the desk clerk and the establishment's regular driver. When the driver was not there by 5:10am and no sign of any cars on the street at all, the front desk clerk told us he would call a Yellow Cab, which was there in about 6 minutes. The clerk was most upset and said it is very weird that this driver was not only not there early, but apparently wasn't going to show up at all.  The Yellow Cab driver, as we drove at breakneck speed toward La Guardia Airport, told us what had likely delayed to the other driver. There was a huge accident on the main freeway coming into our place that had traffic backed up for miles.  As our driver swung down another side street to avoid the pile up, we could see hundreds of cars stranded at a complete standstill and many, many flashing red and blue lights attached to police cars and ambulances.  It is quite possible that if our original driver was also trapped in the slowdown and had he shown up to take us to the airport WE could have been trapped in that horrible traffic mess and possibly been so delayed we might have missed our flight to Toronto.  Bonus #1.

Bonus #2 is that when we got our boarding passes printed up and headed into the LONG lineup to get through security, my dear husband, who pays all kinds of attention to details in airports and such places, noticed as we coiled around and around the pathway set up for the lineup of passengers, a sign that said the passengers were to take TWO different paths to security.  No one else seemed to be seeing the sign and there were only a handful of people waiting to go into that area of security.  My husband told me we were going to take that secondary path.  We ended up behind only ten people waiting to go through security there, rather than a couple of hundred others who remained in the original line up.  Bonus, we got into security quickly and another bonus is that we just happened to have wandered into the section of security that uses the wonderful newer machines that can see and interpret everything in the luggage, only the liquids in their separate bag needed to be removed from our carry ons. We were able to leave our shoes on. While we were waiting our turn to go into this area we glanced over the the folk going into the other security area and noticed they were opening luggage to dump computers and prescriptions along with the liquids into the trays going through x-ray AND they had to take their shoes off, which we didn't have to do.  Definitely a bonus for us, me in particular as I absolutely have to sit down to get my shoes on and there wasn't exactly a plethora of benches once we got our bags back.  Oh, and also part of this airport area bonus is that when we arrived at the airport we had no idea where to go to get our passes printed up.  We just headed for a sign that said Air Canada and had several people sitting at a long counter there, just like any area of an airline that weighs luggage and receives luggage and prints up passes.  There were surprisingly few people there and that was because, as the woman we walked up to told us in no uncertain terms, this was the place where people who are part of a particular Air Canada special elite programme go to check in. It was not for us mere peons. She was not kind. My husband told her that he was very sorry, but that as a visitor to the airport he had no idea whatsoever where else to go for a pass, that there were no visible signs directing us anywhere else, but that he would be happy to go wherever she directed us. She harumphed quite a lot, asked for our passports, printed up our passes and waved us on our way to the departure gates. teehee

Bonus #3 is the most amazing one to me:  We got through getting our boarding passes and security so quickly that we had far more time to wait for our flight than we thought we would. As we sat waiting and wondering how best to fill the time, I got looking at our connecting flight in Toronto.  My husband and I started thinking about how long it might take in Customs in Toronto with the crowds headed that way....so many passengers on several flights early in the morning.  He started remembering how very, very far we would have to walk to even get to Canadian Customs after we landed and then how we had to walk almost as far back the way we had come to get to the national flight departure gates.  It hit us suddenly that, particularly if our flight from New York left even a few minutes late, we were most likely going to miss our connecting flight by quite some time.  We looked at each other in horror, realizing then our booking mistake when we first made plans to travel.  At that exact moment, I looked up and saw another departure gate across the room and the screen behind the desk appeared to be showing yet another flight to Toronto that was leaving 90 minutes ahead of the one we had booked.  I told me weary husband to get over there and find out how full it was and if there was ANY chance at all we could get on that flight instead; to get moving to ask because they were going to start boarding in about fifteen minutes.  Off he went with missionary zeal to talk to the woman at the desk. He returned a few minutes later to tell me that she had agreed to put us on standby and page us if such a thing turned out to be possible.  Not thirty seconds later she paged us, we grabbed our luggage and passports, raced over to her and within seconds she had taken our old boarding passes and printed us new ones for the earlier flight. WOW!!!!  She was even able to seat us together near the back of the plane and there was lots of room in the overhead bins back there for our luggage.

Bonus #4 is that due to our arriving in Toronto so much sooner, we could have lunch at 9:30am at the airport!!  I have to admit that after we got off the plane from La Guardia and realized how heavy our carry ons actually were as we trudged slowly along the incredibly long route to Canadian Customs, we kind of folded energy wise. haha.  We were SO slow that by the time we got there no one from our flight was anywhere in sight! They had all cleared already.  However, that meant we had no line up at all.  Since we had filled out our Declarations online the night before all we had to do was walk right up to a Customs officer's window in the otherwise now completely deserted room, declare two bags of green tea leaves and a bottle of  Yuzu juice, both of which are allowed and very quickly we were trudging back again to find our departure gate for the Regina flight.  We had LOTS of time to stop and eat lunch just after 7:30am Regina time and we found a kind of nice little place with a very tasty breakfast!  Bacon and scrambled eggs and toast and tater tots....my husband was too tired to eat so he wanted a small plate of parmesan fries. Unfortunately they are not on the breakfast menu, but the server took great pity on him when he was so very disappointed and brought him a bowl of tater tots covered in parmesan instead, hahahaha. He really enjoyed it along with 2 Corona Cera! I can't imagine drinking even his no alcohol beer at that time or the morning, but he had helped me carry my very heavy luggage along with his own for the seemingly miles we had walked after our flight, so he deserved a relaxing time and a treat to drink.  He was SO HAPPY to be able to sit down in a comfy booth and have a ton of time to enjoy his food and drink.  It was a lovely surprise.  AND for my blood sugar a big relief. If we had kept on our originally scheduled flight from La Guardia I wouldn't have had time to eat anything between our breakfast at 2am Regina time and our arrival home at 1:30pm other than a small cookie provided on the plane from Toronto.  I would have been in a coma by then because I didn't realize at the time I still had a nut bar in my purse! hahaha That and the cookie would have carried me most of the way, but it would have been pushing it.

Bonus #5: our flight to Regina was absolutely packed full.  We knew from looking at the sheer number of people and their full sized carry ons that there wasn't going to be room for all that luggage in the small sized bins of the Airbus 319. We have flown in those before and it is a nightmare of tiny bins. SO when the inevitable call came offering people free under the plane storage for their carry ons and no one stepped up, my husband and I decided we would do that.  We were flying directly home so the chances of our two bags going missing were pretty slim.  The bonus was that for those of us, all four people whoopee, who stepped up and let our baggage be moved under the plane, we were allowed to board immediately after the business class passengers. We had lots of time to get comfy and watch the rest of the passengers struggling to find space somewhere, anywhere for their bags in those wee overhead bins. In the end the plane was delayed leaving by ten or more minutes because there simply was no way to get everyone's luggage overhead. So, the last ten people to board had nowhere for their bags so one of the flight attendants got a cart and loaded those ten bags on it for transport to the under carriage of the plane.  When we got to Regina to debark it was kind of cool not to have to wrestle heaving carry ons down from the luggage bins.  

Bonus #6: Two friends surprised us by meeting us at the airport to drive us home. We felt loved and not bereft this time when we got to the baggage carousel. They not only drove us home, they stopped at the grocery store for us along the way so we could grab some basics until we get ourselves together over the next couple of days and organize a proper list. How kind and caring is THAT?  And even more so when they themselves are trying to get ready for a big trip to the Maritimes, flying out tomorrow morning at the same ungodly hour we flew out when we started our own trip.  We felt very welcomed home, that's for sure. It took a bit of the edge off missing our kids already and realizing we will not be waking up in Manhattan in the morning.

The one non-bonus in all of this is the crappy weather.  In Manhattan it was between 78F and 86F every day we were there, even when it was raining. When we landed in Regina today it was 59F, pouring, teeming rain and just starting to blow like crazy.  It is September 15 and we actually had to put our furnace on when we got home...THE FURNACE....in mid SEPTEMBER!!! What kind of a crazy place is this, anyway??

My husband was very upset right after we arrived home and he discovered that in his attempt to disconnect some electronics before we left on our trip he had managed to disconnect the television, so not one programme we had set to record actually did.  He was so very upset, but I told him that his bad news had nothing to do with a flood or mice in the basement, so it was no big deal. It is only tv, right?  If you want to know how a programme turns out you go online and look it up. AI has to be good for something, right??  hahaha

It is almost good to be home in some respects, but have to admit it helped a lot that both kids texted us  this evening..... 

Ciao For Now!

Despite it being a sad day of farewell on the one hand, on the other hand it was a beautiful day together with the kids and Auntie. In some ways it was a perfect goodbye to our son and our new family of in-laws. 

My husband and I emptied our large carry on bags first thing in the morning and refilled them with all the kitchen utensils, foods and dish towels the kids provided for us. The grey clouded skies were threatening but we managed to duck out to the bus between rainstorms. All was well until we stepped off the bus into a teeming downpour, haha. In the less than two blocks we had to walk between the bus stop and the kids’ apartment we got drenched! It felt kind of good, despite us both being saddled down with heavy bags. 

My husband cooked pancakes for us all while the kids supplied fabulous fresh fruits, plump sausages and perfectly cooked bacon. A touch of real maple syrup and brunch was complete. Gosh it was good. 

After lunch Auntie showed us old family photos and told us the history of their family: an epic story of war, concentration camps, interrogations, prisons and fleeing for their lives from country to country for too many years.  It was on the one hand stomach turning to hear these truths, but on the other hand it was a story of the remarkable resilience of those who survived not only the war but the continuing post war horrors that are rarely brought to light any more.  I managed not to cry, but it wasn’t easy. We were shown photos by our son’s wife of her most beautiful mother, a former model and an amazing, loving mother who tragically passed when her daughter was in high school. We felt most privileged to be shown these special treasured pictures. 

My son and I were able to take a short walk together and share some thoughts close to both our hearts. Our family is in the process of being transformed and we thank God for that. 

Finally we could string our visit out no longer and we all said our goodbyes. The rain had completely cleared off by then so we tossed the now empty carry on bags over our shoulders and walked the 24 blocks home so we could say our silent goodbyes to the various shops and restaurants we enjoyed over the past month. We walked past the Empire State Building glistening in the late afternoon sun and said a prayer of thanks for this most amazing vacation with our family. 

Tonight we dined on leftovers, took our recycling to the basement, showered, packed as much as possible, arranged our taxi to the airport in the morning and now at 8:30pm we are already getting ready for sleep.

It has been one of the happiest months of our lives!