Christmas 2023

                         Nadolig Llawen!        Merry Christmas!        Buon Natale!

Christmas 2023.

From our home to yours, dear Family and Friends,

Again, at this very special time, it is our pleasure to share a little bit of our lives over this past year.  May you enjoy a full and restful Christmas/New Year season.  2023 gave us a mix of very routine living and a substantial challenge within our life experiences.

Angela, Christy, and their dog, Adam remain well-settled at their leased townhouse in Richmond. Christy continues working her job with Microsoft from home while Angela seeks opportunities to apply her new skills with digital modelling. Angela’s year  has been filled with portfolio preparation. The ceramics artist shows through in her digital works and Ted and Tina remain constantly impressed by the beauty in the creations she has showed us As an additional expression of her creative inclination, Angela has taken up sewing and found a wonderful opportunity to purchase a top-of-the-line but antique and fully functional sewing machine, at less cost than current bottom-of-the-line counterparts.

Angela, Studying Her First Sewing Creation

David remains active with his music and continues private study on his viola, with Thomas Beckman. As principal violist with the New Westminster Symphony Orchestra, he has special musical responsibility. We enjoyed their Christmas concert with a Richmond dance ensemble. David also continues to perform with the VSO School of Music’s Camerata Strings adult ensemble, most recently in performance at the Vancouver Playhouse earlier last month. The highlight of the year came last Spring the Camerata Strings included David’s composition, Memories, as part of a public concert.

Apart from his music, David remains happy with his part-time employment with Meridian Farm Markets at their store in Tsawwassen. He recently received recognition for his five years’ service to the store and enjoys an increased but somewhat variable working schedule. David has picked up an interest in travel, arranging and taking his first ever flight on his owner a trip to Ontario. He now plans two trips away in the new year.

David ’s adopted vegan lifestyle remains important for him. In response to his ASD, David continues to see his local support counsellor at Alongside You. Tina and Ted remain thankful for such readily at-hand support.

Tina continues to suffer ever stronger back pain that increasingly limits her general activity. She qualified for a disability tag on our car and uses her walker when out and about, a great help when Tina has to walk more than a few steps. That scheduled initial appointment with a surgeon in January only led to heartbreaking disappointment for Tina in particular and for our whole family. With new referrals, she is back to waiting on other scheduled initial appointments with different  surgeons, one not until 2025, November, the other pending the result of an upcoming MRI.

Tina and David at North 40 for Belle’s Second Birthday, July 1st

With exercise and prescribed medication, Ted's health continues stable; in fact, he feels very well indeed. He remains a participant in the atrial ablation study out of VGH and periodically wears a monitor for a few scheduled weeks. Otherwise, he has not even been bothered by any occasional colds this year.

Ted continues to use long walks as his primary mode of exercise, usually twice daily with our Poodle, Belle, as a companion, every day of the week, allowing him easily to exceed the recommended minimum 10,000 steps per day. Ted enjoys his camera, often carrying it while walking Belle. His collection of photos, here around Ladner and south Delta, certainly has not stopped growing.

Belle remains an utter delight, filling our lives with love and laughter with her spirited dog personality. Her fascination for balls, especially well lost ones she finds during her walks and carries home, gives us dog balls, tennis balls, lacrosse balls and baseballs everywhere! Ear infections and a frightening liver condition worried us but with veterinary care and prescribed medication, Belle is her cheerful self.

Ted’s Favourite Belle Portrait

With its diversifying new variants, COVID-19 remains an active concern. All of us have kept up to date with booster vaccinations and strive to avoid exposure. As usual, we all had our Flu shots soon  after they came available.

Beyond the immediate family, we continue to enjoy our extended family, although mostly only virtually still. Email and Skype keep us in touch with with John and Liz. We get together with Norman and Barbara for a few occasions, especially when Gareth and Rosy came up from Oregon to visit them, as will be for this Christmas.

As winter returned to us, we again watched South Delta’s annual return of vast flocks of Snow Geese, many now continued on to the Skagit River delta and/or California’s Sacramento Valley. Trumpeter Swans are back and more readily noticed than last winter.  Resident Bald Eagles returned early, starting to renovate their nests before the end of October. Now, trees along Highway 10 and in the North 40 Park Reserve have started to burst into our annual crop of transient Bald Eagles. At home, our bird feeder remains frequented by Chickadees, House Finches, Dark-Eyed Juncos, Song Sparrows, White Crowned Sparrows, Spotted Towhees, the occasional Nuthatch, Downy Woodpeckers, and Northern Flickers while Anna’s Hummingbirds use their feeders as frequently as ever (we have a heated feeder for the very cold weather). Steller’s Jays continue to take our steady supply of in-shell peanuts. Four seem to be constantly together and we suspect they make up a family that must have nested very near us last summer. As we write, a huge flock of Red Winged Blackbirds is settling into our backyard Hawthorne trees. They won’t stay long but they’re great to see.

Trumpeter Swans on a Ladner Farm Field, December 19th

We remain attentive and concerned with events in our world beyond our family. We pray that peace may be restored to a fully intact Ukraine with the ignoble invader driven out. The new Israeli/Palestinian conflict has us alarmed, such a complex problem! May Israelis find a way out from brutal suppression of their Palestinian neighbours and Palestinian terror extremists moderate their responses so both can find peace together. When, oh when, will the civil wars in Syria and Yemen resolve, sadly, not as long as other powers continue using the various sides as proxies. May this season of peace touch all these and other conflicts.

And now we look forward to 2024.  Recent weeks, of course, have filled us with Christmas preparations.  We hope yours have gone well and we wish you a Blessed Christmas and all happiness in the New Year.

Merry Christmas with our love,

Ted, Tina, David, Angela, and Christy.

P. S. This letter was scheduled, with intent, to arrive on Christmas Eve but has ended up delayed with our apologies .

        Blwyddyn Newydd Dda!        Happy New Year!        Felice Nuovo Anno!