Christmas 2025

 Nadolig Llawen!         Merry Christmas!         Buon Natale!

Christmas 2025.

From our home to yours, dear Family and Friends,

It is again 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.  2025 brought us mostly very routine living.

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 works as the Studio Technician for UBC’s Pottery Club and continues to seek opportunities to apply her new skills with digital modelling while expanding her portfolio preparation. Together, they are developing a unique game, Christy writing the code and Angela developing the digital modelling.

As well, Angela continues as a ceramics artist, throwing new pieces and showing with the Dusty  Babes Collective. She has taken on a shared studio in Vancouver and uses the kilns in the Mergatroid Centre, within the catchment for the Vancouver Eastside Culture Crawl, qualifying her to participate in that major showing.

Angela delighted in meeting her cousin Evan and Amanda’s new little girl, Charlie.

David remains active with his music. As principal violist with the New Westminster Symphony Orchestra, he retains special musical responsibility. He had a wonderful surprise late in the Spring when the White Rock City Orchestra called upon him. He now plays for two community orchestras, rehearsing on both Saturday and Sunday each week. David also continues to perform with the VSO School of Music’s Camerata Strings adult ensemble.

Tina with David, ready for an orchestral performance

Apart from his music, David remains happy with his part-time employment with Meridian Farm Markets at their store in Tsawwassen. David’s travel interest took him to Florida early in the New Year and back to Ontario at the beginning of Summer.

David ’s adopted vegan lifestyle remains important to him. In response to his ASD, David continues to see his local support counsellor at Alongside You. He was also surprised to learn that the conductor at WRCO is also a professional counsellor with specific interest in ASD and enjoys periodic sessions with him. 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 and requires her to use a disability tag on our car and her walker when out and about. She particularly enjoys Ladner’s Shirley’s Walk as a walk she can handle. Tina’s new surgeon for her back identified bone density loss and guided her to medication for recovering bone density before surgery will be possible. Her back distortion burdens Tina’s left knee, damaging it that now she requires knee surgery sometime in in the New Year.

With exercise and prescribed medication, Ted remains in good health, feeling very well indeed. His participation in the atrial ablation study out of VGH is now complete. He was part of the control group. During the summer, he did experience a month long spell of Afib that resolved itself. A brief scare with inordinately frequent PVCs during the Fall also resolved itself.

Ted continues to use long walks with Belle as his primary mode of exercise, usually twice daily and a shorter walk before putting Belle to bed for the night, every day of the week, although David sometimes takes on Belle’s second walk. With these, Ted usually easily exceeds the recommended minimum 10,000 steps per day. Tina continues swimming as gravity free exercise, and Ted joins her twice a week, swimming 2500 metres readily. Ted enjoys his camera, often carrying it while walking Belle. His collection of photos, here around Ladner and south Delta, certainly continues to grow.

Belle remains our delight, filling life with love and laughter by her spirited dog personality. She remains fascinated with balls, especially well lost ones she finds during her walks and carries home, filling the house with dog balls, tennis balls, lacrosse balls and baseballs! Bello also loves ball chase play which she often shares with her best friend, Rolly, or her occasional other friends. Belle’s susceptibility to ear infection remained well controlled all year. Thankfully, with veterinary care and prescribed medication, the frightening liver condition of the year before last has not reappeared and tested as fully resolved during the Spring. Troublingly, that test showed a new issue, low serum potassium. We learned that this could be indicative of something else that may be very serious indeed. Potassium supplementation and monitoring followed and continues with a four week trial special diet to start after Christmas. Otherwise, Belle is her cheerful self.

Beyond the immediate family, we continue to enjoy our extended family, although mostly only virtually still. Email and Facebook keep us in touch with with John and Liz. We get together with Norman and Barbara for a few occasions, especially when Gareth, Rosy, and their new blended family come up from Oregon to visit them, but will again miss them this Christmas with Rosy having reached an age that it is more appropriate to mark the occasion in her own family home  with her newly blended sisters and her grandparents visiting.

John and Liz visited in mid Spring with daughter Leah and grandchildren Lauren and Carter, enjoying North 40 with Norman and Barbara.

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 but less readily noticed. Resident Bald Eagles returned, starting to renovate their nests at the beginning of November. This is accompanied by a burst of new nest construction. Transient Bald Eagles have been slower to return. 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 and make us laugh with their selective antics.

We remain attentive and concerned with events in our world beyond our family. Canada’s federal election satisfied us but we continue to hold concern that so much conflict persists world-wide, all continued from last year  May this season of peace touch and help resolve all this protracted strife.

And now we look forward to 2026.  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.

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

If Canada Had Never Been Invaded

 Some time ago this speculative question appeared on Quora:

"How would the United States be different if Canada was never invaded?"

I gave this as my speculative history answer and welcome other speculative analyses in comments :

"What is now Canada was invaded three times:

1. "When under French control, by Britain with full support of the American colonies. This was a successful invasion that resulted in British North America, eventually Canada. If this invasion had never happened, the American colonies would likely have remained sufficiently wary of the French presence that the American Revolution would not have happened and the United States would not have come into existence, remaining British colonies until eventually evolving into into independent nation(s) with full membership in the British Commonwealth of Nations. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 would have remained in effect and the American colonies would not have expanded across the Appalachians.
2. "During the American Revolution, by American forces that were completely repelled in successful defence of British North America. If this invasion had never happened, American revolutionary forces might not have suffered some depletion, General Benedict Arnold likely would not have changed sides, and the American Revolution just might have taken less time.
3. "With the War of 1812, by American forces under the official American federal government policy to annex British North America, a dismal defeat for the United States as the invaders were successfully driven out. If this invasion had never happened, it would be because the Monroe Doctrine did not exist, The United States was not as expansionist as it actually was, the War of 1812 did not happen, and there would have been no Treaty of Ghent (betraying British Ally, Tecumseh) to give Americans excuse to cross the Appalachians. The United States would likely have remained confined east of the Appalachian Mountains as Britain enforced the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to support Tecumseh in creating a viable First Nations confederacy south of the Great Lakes as a British protectorate and eventual independent majority First Nations nation state with full membership in the British Commonwealth of Nations. The United States would likely not have been in a position to purchase the Louisiana Territory from France, resulting in an eventual French influenced but largely First Nations nation state west of the Mississippi River. Spanish/Mexican control of what is now southwestern United States would have persisted and Mexico would now be a geographically larger country. The eventual British exploration and colonization of the Pacific Northwest would have kept a larger portion of that region under British control, extending between what would have been Spanish/Mexican California and Russian Alaska. The United States would not have been in a position to purchase Alaska from Russia but Britain/Canada might eventually have done so. Hawaii would never have become American, remaining a British Protectorate kingdom until eventual recovery to full independence as its own kingdom within the British Commonwealth of Nations."