Christmas Letter, '18

Nadolig Llawen! Merry Christmas! Buon Natale!

Christmas 2018.

From our home to yours, dear Family and Friends,

Again it is our pleasure to share a little bit of our lives over the past year at this very special time of year.  We hope you enjoy a full and restful Christmas/New Year season.  2018 brought challenges and changes.

Tina continued to take casual shifts, nursing at VGH while she enjoyed her retirement but found those shifts increasingly wearing on her health. She took complete retirement in the spring and feels the release from ward nursing  For the first half of the year, she also kept up her cello lessons at the Delta Community Music School under the tutelage of Bo Peng, accepting gradually increasingly more challenging music to learn. With autumn, Tina changed from private lessons to joining the Camerata Strings adult ensemble in the VSO School of Music. She, now, enjoys the new cello music and playing as part of an ensemble.

With exercise and prescribed medication, Ted's health continues as stable although the atrial fibrillation that developed very late last year persisted well into this year, long enough that his heart doctors decided he needed cardioversion to correct it. This was a very simple procedure, the doctor simply made Ted’s ICD jolt his heart. Otherwise, he is bothered only by occasional colds.  While in atrial fibrillation, Ted did have to ease off on his swimming and cycling exercise routine, substituting long walks with Angela's dog, Adam.  In addition, a change in Angela’s working schedule meant that he continues to walk Adam twice a day, most days of the week.  These are long walks that can take an hour or more each and Ted routinely exceeds the recommended minimum 10,000 steps per day by a substantial margin.

Angela and her friends in the Dusty Babes Collective continue to work in their ceramic art studio in South Surrey near White Rock. She spends much of Tuesdays to Fridays with her own works at the studio.  Angela continues her part-time position as the lead ceramics studio technician for the South Surrey Recreation Centre, working Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and teaching ceramics classes at South Surrey on Tuesday evenings. From time to time she also teaches on Saturday mornings or Wednesday evenings. Angelo teaches mainly adult classes which vary from those for absolute beginners to classes in more advanced ceramics skills. Most recently, she taught glazing. This class involved presenting much more theory than any of the other classes she has been teaching. After the first session, Angela announced, "I have never talked so much in all my life!" Busy at South Surrey, Angela left her one day a week studio technician position at Vancouver’s West End Community Centre early in the new year.

Tina and Ted both remain in wonder at the beauty of Angela’s ceramic creations which range from handcrafted ceramic buttons through cups and bowls of various sizes and exquisitely delicate ceramic sculptures to large vases. Last May and June, the Dusty Babes received the honour of having a main gallery showing in a public art gallery, the Gibsons Public Art Gallery. The Dusty Babes also hosted an open studio showing and sale, just this month, presenting works by the entire collective. Angela remains an active member of the Potters Guild of BC, participating with their substantial changes at the Gallery of BC Ceramics.

Outside of her art, Angela continues her interest in sophisticated board games and computer gaming which she shares with her girlfriend, Christy, enjoying relaxing time to play and be together each Sunday afternoon and evening.

David completed his musical studies as a founding student in the new strings program within the Music Department of Kwantlen Polytechnic University at the Langley campus, earning a Bachelor of Music in Musical Arts degree, specialized on his viola. His studies gave him great success while he really enjoys the associated performance opportunities.  The strings program remained very small which meant that no large ensemble (required as part the music degree program) existed, and KPU continued to send their strings players to the Langley School District Honour Orchestra who rehearsed on campus in order to make up that large ensemble. David played Principal Viola. Kwantlen also required music students to participate in small ensembles and kept the chamber orchestra under instruction from the Borealis String Quartet as a small ensemble. We enjoyed end-of-term recitals and concert performances by David as a solo performer with piano accompaniment, by the Chamber Orchestra, and by the full orchestra.  Outside university, David continued with private study on his viola with Robert Hirschhorn Rozek and keeps those studies up.

Last spring, David rehearsed and performed with the West Coast Symphony Orchestra, a semi-professional organization that mixes professional and amateur musicians. After KPU graduation, David continued to watch for opportunities in other orchestras. He found the New Westminster Symphony Orchestra to be a better fit for him and joined in September, really enjoying rehearsing and performing under conductor, Jack (Jin) Zhang and a guest conductor. David also plays his viola with the Camerata Strings adult ensemble in the VSO School of Music. In both cases, David is playing as an amateur but he watches for professional opportunities to arise.

David continues to enjoy writing, especially fiction, with which he extends his imagination. He continues his major rewrite of The Stolen Treasure, a novel he had originally developed as a young teen.  His novel, The Sheltered Life of Betsy Parker, published three years ago as a digital copy, continues to draw ongoing interest and responses on the GoodReads literary sharing site. David keeps the second addition available both digitally and as hardcopy on Amazon. Apart from his music and his writing, David has found part-time employment with Meridian Farm Market at their store in Tsawwassen, working two days a week. He continues to keep a lookout for other non-music employment opportunities.

David’s ASD remains a significant factor in his life, limiting his social connection among his contemporaries and gave him another crisis mental health issue this autumn. He has the courage to share this publicly. His ASD specialist psychiatrist and our minister at Ladner United Church, together, give David wonderful support in response through that issue. Tina and Ted feel deeply thankful for such readily at-hand support. David's ASD psychiatrist does travel a lot in his work and asked David to find a fall-back professional for those occasions when David may need urgent support while he is away. For this, David has reconnected with the Able Developmental Clinic and their principal psychologist who assessed David as a child.

Other than a few quick trips to Vancouver Island, our only get-away this year was, again, a return to Cusheon Lake Resort on Salt Spring Island for the Canada Day weekend.  This brought us our familiar enjoyments of the lake, Beddis Beach, Ruckle Park, Ganges, and Salt Spring Island Gelato at Harlan’s as well as the, remarkable for a small community, Canada Day fireworks.

Beyond the immediate family, we continue to enjoy our extended family. With Ted’s brother Norman, wife Barbara, and son Evan living nearby, we share visits regularly. Evan and his business partner keep very busy establishing their construction contracting business, Form to Finish Construction. Evan’s brother, Gareth completed his post-doctoral work at Melbourne University (Australia) and returned to North America during the summer, taking an Assistant Professorship position at Western Oregon University with the responsibility to create a new environmental research laboratory. While settling in at Monmouth, Oregon, Gareth, his wife Zoë, and baby daughter Rosy took a brief opportunity to visit home with Norman and Barbara and join us for one of our visits to the George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary, We look forward to when they come again after Christmas. At Thanksgiving, Ted’s second great-nice*, Cassie Hopkins, her brother Luke, and his new bride Adele, graced us in sharing our festive dinner, letting us connect more closely with remote family. Early in November, Ted’s brother, John and daughter Leah visited from Calgary, enjoying Adam and Norman’s dog, Lola’s time in the North 40 Dog Off-Leash Park.

Several years ago, Ted had done genealogical DNA testing with 23andMe. Angela gave Tina a 23andMe kit for her birthday this year. As part of their service, they advise of others in their database with closely matching DNA.  Both of us continue to discover relatives previously not known to us. Ted found a distant cousin living in Sydney, Australia, who is related on the Butchart line of his mother’s side of the family. She is most enthusiastic about our family connection. Tina found Petraccione relatives, the son of one first cousin and the daughter of another first cousin plus several other not yet resolved possible connections. She looks forward to discovering connections on the Crompton side of her family.

Looking beyond ourselves, here in British Columbia, we participated in the referendum on electoral reform. Together, we found ourselves ill at ease with the options offered in support of so-called proportional representation. As a life-long voter who has prided himself as a vote-the-person voter and not a vote-the-party voter, Ted is particularly uncomfortable with the idea of placing MLAs into our legislature for whom nobody has directly had an opportunity to cast a personal vote. He could only see the partial option for a preferential ballot (STV) as somewhat reasonable. since he has long hoped B. C. would return to voting with a preferential ballot. Ted remains troubled by the direction Canada’s federal government continues to take: not enough of the promised “real change” and too much keeping the destructive policies of the defeated previous government. This applies most strikingly to the government’s approach to so-called free trade treaties (more accurately characterized as international corporate protection deals) containing the sovereignty-attacking ISDS provision that treats international business corporations not as subjects of nations and welcome guests within other nations but more as non-territorial kingdoms apart from and equal with nations. Ted is pleased that ISDS did get removed during the NAFTA renegotiation into the new USMCA treaty. It does remain in the CTPP agreement and as part of the ongoing negotiations towards the TiSA. We also share a certain unease with many around us at the actions of the current President of our neighbours to the south and his insistence on denying anthropogenic climate change, feeling some satisfaction that Congress is no longer Republican dominated. We continue to share many Canadian’s concern for the plight of the many refugees from those horrible civil wars in Syria and Yemen.

Perhaps the greatest change among us was with our family pets. Well past her eighteenth year, our calico cat, Catinka, remained very much queen of our house but, over the summer, showed every sign of remaining healthy but elderly, losing weight and moving more carefully, yet very much still her confident self. Then we lost her. She simply disappeared. A neighbourhood lady told how two of her cats had successively grown elderly and disappeared without a trace. It seems that it is an elderly cat thing to have a sense that the end has come and find a very very private place to die. We miss our Catinka dearly. Angela’s ducks continued to hold authority over our backyard. Jemima and Rebeccah again resumed their egg production with the new year, almost as heavily as last year, giving eggs all through the spring and into summer. Then came mid-August when we lost them to unknown wildlife.

Adam, Angela’s red-haired standard poodle, continues to endear himself to us all.  He keeps quite the collection of “friends” that he loves to greet and engage in play when out and about, his favourite game being “Chase Me,” running in great circles centred on the one of us who is out with him while his “friend” chases him along an inner circle.  To Adam’s dismay, many of his “friends” give up on this game. He runs too fast for them. Adam has much of Ladner well mapped in his head and his chosen routes when we walk are many and varied.

As winter came back to us, we are enjoying south Delta’s annual return of Trumpeter Swans and the vast flocks of Snow Geese. Very soon, trees along Highway 10 will burst into our annual crop of Bald Eagles. Early last summer, Ted had the privilege to show off to an Australian visitor several of Lander’s resident Bald Eagle nests with their near fledged youngsters. He also shared our own resident Steller’s Jays, the George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary, and the great Tsawwassen Heronry with this visitor. At home, our bird feeder remains frequented by Chickadees, House Finches, and Juncos while Anna’s Hummingbirds use their feeder more frequently and Steller’s Jays enjoy our steady supply of peanuts.

Ted continues to seek players to experiment with his invented team sports of Two Ball and Delta.  Lacking sufficient contact of his own among sports-minded youth, he continues to approach schools as their Physical Education and intramural sports programs likely offer the best chance of drawing sufficiently large groups of players together.  This remains disappointing as no schools have taken up either game yet.  Ted also keeps up his web presence for the games, periodically posting to the site blog, and on Facebook.  These continue to catch some attention worldwide, but he still awaits word of anyone actually playing either game.  You remain invited to have a look, perhaps to draw the games to the attention of sport-minded people you may know.

And now we look forward to 2019.  Recent weeks, of course, have filled us with Christmas preparations.  We hope yours have gone well and we wish you a Merry and Blessed Christmas and all happiness in the New Year.

With our Christmas love,

Ted, Tina, David, and Angela.

P. S. That this letter arrives on Christmas Eve is entirely deliberate.

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

Christmas Letter '17

Nadolig Llawen! Merry Christmas! Buon Natale!

Christmas 2017.

From our home to yours, dear Family and Friends,

Again it is our pleasure to share a little bit of our lives over the past year at this very special time of year.  We hope you enjoy a full and restful Christmas/New Year season.  2017 has remained a typical year for us, happy with mostly ordinary challenges.

Tina continues to take casual shifts, nursing at VGH  while she enjoys her retirement.  She also keeps up her cello lessons at the Delta Community Music School under the tutelage of Bo Peng, accepting gradually increasingly more challenging music to learn.  When Bo introduced Tina to a cello that more suitably matched her stature, she readily accepted the opportunity to change instruments. Now, Tina also enjoys the new cello’s music.

With exercise and prescribed medication, Ted's health continues as stable except for a bit of a cardiac scare earlier this month from atrial fibrillation that doctors assured us posed no threat. Otherwise, he is bothered only by occasional colds.  He continues to alternate 3 days of swimming (2500 m. in roughly 50 min.) with 3 days of cycling (16.4 km. in roughly 50 min.), sometimes substituting a good stiff walk (a little over 4.3 km. in roughly 45 min.), although through the current month that schedule has been somewhat disrupted.  In addition, Ted often walks Adam once or twice a day, depending on Angela’s working and studio activities.  With stops for sniffing and other doggy business, these walks do not constitute measurable exercise but can take an hour or more each.

Angela and her friends in the Dusty Babes Collective continue to work in their studio in south Surrey near White Rock. She has spent much of Tuesdays to Fridays with her own works at the studio.  Angela continued her part-time position as Monday ceramics studio technician for the South Surrey Recreation Centre in addition to her Saturday ceramics studio technician work for Vancouver’s West End Community Centre but added periodic stints teaching ceramics classes at South Surrey on Tuesday evenings. Angela’s immediate supervisor at South Surrey moved on to other opportunities at the beginning of December and Angela promptly received the call to take his place as the lead studio technician. This is still part-time work, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but, when she teaches on Tuesdays, her schedule becomes quite full. Busy Angela, the West End Community Centre has called her to take selected extra Tuesday and/or Thursday shifts this month. Tina and Ted both remain in wonder at the beauty of Angela’s ceramic creations which range from handcrafted ceramic buttons through cups and bowls of various sizes and exquisitely delicate ceramic sculptures to large vases. Last spring, the Dusty Babes received the honour of having two members, Angela and Amelia Butcher, accepted to have their works on permanent display at the Gallery of BC Ceramics. The Dusty Babe’s open studio, earlier this month, successfully presented and sold works by the entire collective. In addition, the Dusty Babes look forward to fulfilling their invitation to present a group show at this prestigious gallery of ceramic art, not yet scheduled in the new year, and at a scheduled showing of their works at a gallery in Gibson’s Landing, come spring.

Outside of her art, Angela continues her interest in sophisticated board games which she shares with her girlfriend, Christy, enjoying relaxing time to play each Sunday.

David continues his musical studies as a founding student in the new strings music program within the Music Department of Kwantlen Polytechnic University, commuting to the Langley campus for his final year.  His focus remains on his viola, giving him great success while he really enjoys his studies.  The strings program remains very small which means that no large ensemble (required as part the music degree program) exists, although the university attempted an approximation of a large group by forming a chamber orchestra with instructors from the Borealis String Quartet. This did not persist with the new term in September and KPU welcomed the Langley School District Honour Orchestra onto campus for rehearsals while taking the KPU string students into that large ensemble. David plays Principal Viola. Kwantlen also requires music students to participate in small ensembles and kept the chamber orchestra with Borealis as a small ensemble. We enjoyed the end-of-term recitals and concert performances by David as a solo performer with piano accompaniment and by his trio (David, a cello student, and a piano student from Kwantlen Music’s piano program) in March and by his solo performance with piano accompaniment and with the chamber orchestra at the end of term this month.  Outside university, David continues with private study on his viola with Robert Hirschhorn Rozak.

David continued private study on piano, at the Delta Community Music school, in Garth Preston’s studio, through the spring but did not resume with autumn, concentrating on his university studies.  David anticipated being free to take his viola to play and perform with the Stradivari Ensemble in the New Year but their rehearsal scheduling just did not work for him.  As anticipated, David did accept the Vancouver Welsh Mens’ Choir invitation to audition to join the choir and was accepted.  He attended a few rehearsals in the New Year, welcomed warmly, but found that learning choral music distracted him from his studies and regretfully decided he could not continue. He did want to keep up with some form of orchestral playing beyond what KPU offered. With a bit of investigating, David learned of the West Coast Symphony Orchestra, semi-professional organization that mixes professional and amateur musicians. He auditioned, was readily accepted in the viola section, and joined rehearsals late in the autumn. David looks forward to being part of his first concert with the WCSO in the New Year.

David continues to enjoy writing, especially fiction, with which he extends his imagination. He is currently in the midst of a major rewrite of The Stolen Treasure, a novel he had originally developed as a young teen.  His novel, The Sheltered Life of Betsy Parker, published two years ago as a digital copy continues to draw ongoing interest and responses on the GoodReads literary sharing site. David keeps the second addition available both digitally and as hardcopy on Amazon. From the events in the novel for which wrote piano tunes, David and his Music Technology instructor for developed a musical media project during the spring term. That instructor also introduced him to the Sarah McLachlan School of Music as a volunteer supporting young music students who share in David’s ASD, a very satisfying experience for David.

David’s ASD remains a significant factor in his life, limiting his social connection among his contemporaries and gave him a second crisis mental health issue early in the year. He had the courage to share this publicly and his ASD specialist psychiatrist and our minister at Ladner United Church, together, give David wonderful support in response through that issue. Tina and I feel deeply thankful for such readily at-hand support.

Other than a few quick trips to Vancouver Island, our only get-away this year was a return to Cusheon Lake Resort on Salt Spring Island for the Canada Day weekend.  This brought us our familiar enjoyments of the lake, Beddis Beach, Ruckle Park, Ganges, and Salt Spring Island Gelato at Harlan’s as well as their, remarkable for a small community, Canada Day fireworks.

This year brought two significant life events for us to mark. We helped Ted’s immediately younger brother John celebrate his seventieth birthday in Calgary in September. In the extended family, Ted has become a great uncle once more. His nephew, Gareth and wife Zoë remain at the University of Melbourne where Gareth works on a post-doctoral fellowship studying the effects of artificial lighting on cricket and other insect populations. They now have their first born child making grandparents of Ted’s little brother Norman and his wife Barbara, just born as Ted writes this.

Also with the extended family, in March Ted went Calgary with Norman to support John as he proudly presented some of Dad’s memoirs and poetry to the Calgary Welsh Society at their annual St. David’s Day luncheon. John’s wife, Liz, daughter Leah and our Cousin Iris Macleod also attended. The membership received the presentation and accompanied by a PowerPoint slide show very well. Ted’s extended family also grew as he located a long-lost family member.  Several years ago, Ted had done genealogical DNA testing with 23andMe. As part of their service, they advise of others in their database with closely matching DNA.  One such person turned out to be Crystal Adamek, the daughter of Ted’s late half-brother, Bud (Edward Joseph Hopkins)’s only son, Ted’s nephew, long lost to the family ever since he was adopted as a young boy by his mother’s second husband. Born Victor Warren Hopkins, he is now Victor St. Laurent and lives in Swan Hills, Alberta, sharing Ted’s interest in amateur astronomy.  Victor and his wife Della with Crystal, her husband Wayne, and baby daughter give new branches to the Family Tree! Ted and John keep occasional contact with them both as we delight in welcoming them into our extended family and Ted and Victor sway comment on night sky events.

Looking beyond ourselves, Ted remains troubled by the direction Canada’s new federal government continues to take: not enough of the promised “real change” and too much keeping the destructive policies of the defeated previous government.  This applies most strikingly to the government’s approach to so-called free trade treaties (more accurately characterized as international corporate protection deals) containing the sovereignty-attacking ISDS provision that treats international business corporations not as subjects of nations and welcome guests within other nations but more as non-territorial kingdoms apart from and equal with nations. Ted’s concern impelled him to prepare a petition in response to NAFTA renegotiation, focussed on this element of the treaty. He copied the text to his blog. He is deeply disappointed with the lack of participation in this petition as Canadians seem either no longer to have care about retaining our national sovereignty or do not understand the threat.  We also share a certain unease with many around us at the actions of the new President of our neighbours to the south and his Republican-dominated Congress.

We continue to share many Canadian’s concern for the plight of the many refugees from those horrible civil wars in Syria and Yemen. May a way to peace be found quickly.  Our congregation at Ladner United Church still supports one Syrian refugee family after two others attained sufficient independence to make their own decisions and relocate closer to relatives in Ontario.

Catinka, in her eighteenth year, remains very much queen of our house, while Angela’s ducks continue to hold authority over our backyard. Jemima and Rebeccah again resumed their egg production with the new year, just as heavily as last year, then slowed and stopped completely when they moulted with the end of summer.  They have not yet returned to laying again.  Adam, Angela’s red-haired standard poodle, continues to endear himself to us all.  He keeps quite the collection of “friends” that he loves to greet and engage in play when out and about, his favourite game being “Chase Me,” running in great circles centred on the one of us who is out with him while his “friend” chases him along an inner circle.  To Adam’s dismay, many of his “friends” still give up on this game. He runs too fast for them.

As winter came back to us, we have enjoyed south Delta’s annual return of Trumpeter Swans and the vast flocks of Snow Geese. Very soon, trees along Highway 10 will burst into our annual crop of Bald Eagles. At home, our bird feeder remains frequented by Chickadees, House Finches, and Juncos while Anna’s Hummingbirds use their feeder more frequently and Steller’s Jays enjoy our steady supply of peanuts.

Ted continues to seek players to experiment with his invented team sports of Two Ball and Delta.  Lacking sufficient contact of his own among sports-minded youth, he continues to approach schools as their Physical Education and intramural sport programs likely offer the best chance of drawing sufficiently large groups of players together.  This remains disappointing as no schools have taken up either game yet.  Ted also keeps up his web presence for the games, periodically posting to the site blog, and on Facebook.  These continue to catch some attention worldwide, but he still awaits word of anyone actually playing either game.  You are most welcome to have a look and draw the games to the attention of sport-minded people you may know.

And now we look forward to 2018.  Recent weeks, of course, have filled us with Christmas preparations.  We hope yours have gone well and we wish you a Merry and Blessed Christmas and all happiness in the New Year.

With our love,

Ted, Tina, David, and Angela.

P. S. That this letter arrives on Christmas Eve is entirely deliberate.

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

Christmas Letter '16

Nadolig Llawen! Merry Christmas! Buon Natale!

Christmas 2016.

From our home to yours, dear Family and Friends,

Again it is our pleasure to share a little bit of our lives over the past year at this very special time of year.  We hope you enjoy a full and restful Christmas/New Year season.  2016 has been very much a typical year for us, happy with very ordinary challenges.

Tina continues to take casual shifts, nursing at VGH  while she enjoys her retirement.  She also keeps up her cello lessons at the Delta Community Music School under the tutelage of Bo Peng, accepting gradually increasingly more challenging music to learn.  Although Tina intended to resume taking harp instruction as well, that just did not work out again for this year; perhaps in the new year.

With exercise and prescribed medication, Ted's health continues as stable, with only occasional colds and a few dental issues.  He continues to alternate 3 days of swimming (2500 m. in roughly 50 min.) with 3 days of cycling (16.4 km. in roughly 50 min.), sometimes substituting a good stiff walk (a little over 4.3 km. in roughly 45 min.).  In addition, Ted often walks Adam once or twice a day, depending on Angela’s working and studio activities.  With stops for sniffing and other doggy business, these walks do not constitute measurable exercise but can take an hour or more each.

Angela and her friends in the Dusty Babes Collective continue to work in their studio in south Surrey near White Rock. She spends much of Tuesdays to Fridays with her own works at the studio.  Angela left her part-time work at Spawts last spring.  Instead she added another part time position as Monday ceramics studio technician for the South Surrey Recreation Centre to her Saturday ceramics studio technician work for Vancouver’s West End Community Centre.  Tina and Ted both remain in wonder at the beauty of Angela’s ceramic creations which range from hand crafted ceramic buttons through cups and bowls of various sizes and exquisitely delicate ceramic sculptures to large vases. The Dusty Babes had two exclusive gallery showings of their ceramic art works, the first, in July, was their Vanity Publishing show at the Pop Up Newton Gallery in Surrey’s Newton town centre. This show emphasized the Dusty Babes more artistic ceramic creativity and included Angela's “Wallflowers,” a collection imaginative decorative ceramic flower sculptures dispersed across one wall of the gallery. This month their Comfort Show at Pop-Up-Town Gallery in White Rock featured their more functional, pragmatic, ceramic works, all presented for public sale. Angela included beautiful vases, mugs, and bowls. Their open house in October give the public opportunity to see their works in progress within their various studio spaces. Now, the Dusty Babes look forward to fulfilling their invitation to show at the prestigious British Columbia Gallery of Ceramics not yet scheduled in the new year.

Outside of her art, Angela has developed a growing interest in sophisticated board games with which she shares with her girlfriend, Christie, and English as a Second Language teacher whom she met a year and a half ago.

David continues his musical studies as a founding student in the new strings music program within the Music Department of Kwantlen Polytechnic University, commuting to the Langley campus.  His focus remains on his viola, giving him great success while he really enjoys his studies.  The strings program remains very small which means that no large ensemble (required by the Kwantlen Music Department) exists, so the university continues to send him and the cello students to play with the Trinity Western University Orchestra. This should change with the new term in January as KPU anticipates having enough string students to put together their own, rather small, large ensemble. Kwantlen also requires music students to participate in small ensembles and we enjoyed the end-of-term recitals and concert performances by David's string quartet (David, the cello student, a flute student from Kwantlen Music's wind program and a piano student from Kwantlen Music’s piano program) in April and by his two trios (one with David, a cello student, and a piano student, the other with David, the same cello student, and a harp student) at the end of term this month.  Outside university, David continues with private study on his viola with Robert Hirschhorn Rozak.

Although studying music at Kwanten, David continues private study on piano, at the Delta Community Music school, in Garth Preston’s studio.  He also continued to play with the adult Richmond Orchestra for the first half of the year but decided to focus more on his KPU musical studies and did not return to the orchestra when it started preparing for it's new season in September. With the change in KPU’s large ensemble for strings scheduling, he anticipates being free to take his viola to play and perform with the Stradivari Ensemble in the New Year.  We had a surprise when we attended the Vancouver Welsh Mens’ Choir/Winter Harp Christmas concert as one of the choir members approached David to join the choir.  He excitedly looks forward to giving this a try when the VWMC resumes rehearsals with the New Year.

David continues to enjoy writing, especially fiction, with which he extends his imagination.  The novel, The Sheltered Life of Betsy Parker, that he published last year as a digital copy has drawn ongoing interest and responses on the GoodReads literary sharing site. David received sufficient feedback that he made some significant revisions to the novel and published a second addition, now available both digitally and as hardcopy on Amazon. David has also taken two the events in the novel and written piano tunes attached to those events, drawing interest from his instructors at KPU. In the same way, one of David's written assignments this past term drew such interest that his instructor passed the work on to David's Music Technology instructor for development into a musical project in the new term starting in January.

David’s ASD remains a significant factor in his life, limiting his social connection among his contemporaries and gave him a crisis mental health issue late last spring. His ASD specialist psychiatrist and our minister at Ladner United Church, together, give David wonderful support in response through that issue. Tina and I feel deeply thankful that David continued connection with his ASD specialist psychiatrist while he had no significant ASD issues for psychiatric attention. Dr. Bailey was thus able to respond promptly when this issue arose.

Other than a few quick trips to Vancouver Island, we did not take a get-away this year.  On one off those trips we enjoyed visiting with Ted’s former schoolmates, Dick and Lynn Zandee at their beautiful home in Duncan.

This year brought few life events for us to mark, the one of significance being that Ted joined all other first-year Baby Boomers in celebrating his seventieth birthday in March.  We shared an early "Christmas" as Ted’s brother Norman and his wife Barbara prepared to leave for Australia for a Christmas visit with their son Gareth and wife Zoë at the University of Melbourne where Gareth works on a post-doctoral fellowship studying the effects of artificial lighting on cricket and other insect populations.

Looking beyond ourselves, Ted grows increasingly concerned with the direction Canada’s new federal government takes: not enough of the promised “real change” and too much keeping the troubling policies of the previous government.  This applies most particularly to the approach to so-called free trade treaties that are more accurately characterized as corporate protection deals containing the sovereignty attacking ISDS provision. Ted has written open letters to our MP, the Prime Minister, and other appropriate Federal ministers and Opposition critics and copied them to his blog.  We also share a certain unease with many around us at the result of the Presidential election among our neighbours to the south.

We share many Canadian’s concern for the plight of the many refugees from that horrible civil war in Syria.  Our congregation at Ladner United Church participates with many others across the country and added a third refugee family whom, with the previous two, we participate in giving financial support as they settle into their new lives.

Catinka, in her seventeenth year, remains very much queen of our house, while Angela’s ducks continue to hold authority over our back yard.  Sadly, we lost Tango this past autumn. At fourteen and a half years of age, his moult in August took just too much out of the old boy.  He recovered his full plumage but was just not quite the same drake, moving delicately with elderly caution until the morning when we found he had passed in the night.   Jemima and Rebeccah resumed their egg production with the new year, less heavily than last year, then slowed and stopped completely when they moulted with the end of summer.  They have not yet resumed resumed laying again.  Adam, Angela’s red haired standard poodle, has settled in as very much a part of the family, continuing to endear himself to us all.  He has quite the collection of “friends” that he loves to greet and engage in play when out and about, his favourite game being “Chase Me,” running in great circles centred on the one of us who is out with him while his “friend” chases him along an inner circle.  To Adam’s dismay, many of his “friends” give up on this game as he runs too fast for them.

Ted continues to seek players to experiment with his invented team sports of Two Ball and Delta.  Lacking sufficient contact of his own among sports minded youth, he continues to approach schools as their Physical Education and intramural sport programs likely offer the best chance of drawing sufficiently large groups of players together.  This remains disappointing as no schools have taken up either game yet, advising that they are preoccupied with implementing new province-wide Physical Education curricula.  Ted also keeps up his web presence for the games, periodically posting to the site blog, and on Facebook.  These continue to catch some attention world-wide, but he still awaits word of anyone actually playing either game.  You are most welcome to have a look and draw the games to the attention of sport minded people you may know.

And now we look forward to 2017.  Recent weeks, of course, have filled us with Christmas preparations.  We hope yours have gone well and we wish you a Merry and Blessed Christmas and all happiness in the New Year.

With our love,

Ted, Tina, David, and Angela.

P. S. That this letter arrives on Christmas Eve is entirely deliberate.

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

Christmas Letter '15

Nadolig Llawen!                     Merry Christmas!                              Buon Natale!

Christmas 2015.

From our home to yours, dear Family and Friends,

Again it is our pleasure to share a little bit of our lives over the past year at this very special time of year.  We hope you enjoy a full and restful Christmas/New Year season.  2015 has been very much a typical year for us, happy with very ordinary challenges.

Tina continues to take the occasional casual shift, nursing at VGH  while she enjoys her retirement.  She continues with cello lessons at the Delta Community Music School under the tutelage of Bo Peng, accepting gradually increasingly more challenging music to learn.  Although Tina intended to resume taking harp instruction as well, that just did not work out for this year.  Perhaps in the new year.

With exercise and prescribed medication, Ted's health continues as stable, with only occasional colds.  He continues to alternate 3 days of swimming (2500 m. in roughly 50 min.) with 3 days of cycling (nearly 14 km. in roughly 40 min.), sometimes substituting a good stiff walk (a little over 4 km. in 40 min.).  With David well moved on from the Richmond Delta Youth Orchestra and Ted’s term as immediate Past President completed at the end of August, he is no longer active with the Delta Symphony Society.

Angela’s news is most exciting as she and her friends in the Dusty Babes Collective found a studio in which to work.  One of the major British Columbia ceramic artists had retired and sold his studio property to a developer who was not developing immediately but offered the site for lease as ceramics studio space.  Angela discovered the notice and the Dusty Babes promptly took up the lease; they have it for at least a full year from last June and she now spends most Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays working her art there.  Angela continues part-time work at Spawts, a ceramic studio that specializes in ceramic family pet paw print impressions, working Mondays and Fridays.  She enjoys this work with the very small staff that includes one of her Dusty Babes friends.  In January she added another part time position as Saturday ceramics studio technician for Vancouver’s West End Community Centre.  Occasionally Angela also teaches school break concentrated children’s ceramics classes at the Delta Potter’s Association studio.  Tina and Ted both remain in wonder at the beauty of Angela’s ceramic creations which range from hand crafted ceramic buttons through cups and bowls of various sizes to large vases.

David continues his musical studies as a founding student in the new strings music program within the Music Department of Kwantlen Polytechnic University, commuting to the Langley campus.  His focus remains on his viola, giving him great success while he really enjoys his studies.  The strings program remains very small which means that no large ensemble (required by the Kwantlen Music Department) exists, so the university continues to send him and the cello student to play with the Trinity Western University Orchestra. Kwantlen and also requires music students to participate in small ensembles and we enjoyed the end-of-term recitals and concert performances by David's string trio (David, the violin student, and a piano student from Kwantlen Music’s piano program) in April and by his quintet and his duo in December.  Outside university, David also took up private study on his viola with Robert Hirschhorn Rozak and occasionally fills in with his viola for the Stradivari Ensemble.

Although studying music at Kwanten, David continues private study on piano, at the Delta Community Music school, in Garth Preston’s studio.  He also continues to play with the adult Richmond Orchestra; fortunately that orchestra’s major concert this fall did not conflict with Trinity Western University Orchestra’s major concert as it did last year.

David enjoys writing, especially fiction as he extends his imagination.  In his free time, during the summer before last, he wrote an initial draft of a novel.  As he found chances through autumn, winter, and spring into this past summer, he worked through revisions and published the book as digital copy.

Again, our year brought a few significant life events for us to mark.  Ted’s cousin David T. E. Hopkins passed earlier this month after a few month’s battle with cancer.  He rests, treasured, in Ted’s boyhood and current Internet connection memories.  Earlier in the Autumn we celebrated with Ted’s brother Norman as his son Gareth and wife Zoë left for Australia to take up a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Melbourne upon completing his PhD in Environmental Studies at Utah State University.

Looking beyond ourselves, Canada’s federal election last Fall drew our attention more intensely than ever before.  All of us have always voted in every election for which we have been eligible, keeping our political thoughts largely to ourselves.  For this election, issues were so critical that Ted just could not remain private with his thoughts and shared his views via his blog, and some e-mail messages.  The most critical issue to Ted’s mind did not get addressed properly but over all the whole family is satisfied with the election result.

We share many Canadian’s concern for the plight of the many refugees from the civil war in Syria.  Our congregation at Ladner United Church participates with many others across the country and is providing for two refugee families anticipated to arrive any day now, by year end.  The Ladner community gives enthusiastic support, participating in this project.

We took only one get-away this year, returning to Cusheon Lake Resort on Salt Spring Island for the Canada Day weekend.  As usual, we enjoyed Beddis Beach, Beaver Point at Ruckle Park, and Harlans’ Salt Spring Gelato among all else we enjoy on Salt Spring.

Catinka remains very much queen of our house, while Angela’s ducks continue to hold authority over our back yard.  Jemima and Rebeccah resumed their egg production with the new year, less heavily than last year, then slowed and stopped completely when they moulted with the end of summer.  Less frequent egg laying resumed this month.  From January to August, Tango remains convinced that he should not let any of us exit the back yard.  Adam, Angela’s red haired standard poodle, has settled in as very much a part of the family, continuing to endear himself to us all.

Ted continues to seek players to experiment with his invented team sports of Two Ball and Delta.  Lacking sufficient contact of his own among sports minded youth, he continued to approach schools as their Physical Education and intramural sport programs likely offer the best chance of drawing sufficiently large groups of players together.  This remains disappointing as no schools have taken up either game yet.  Ted also kept up a web presence for the games, having revised the site, and on Facebook.  These continued to catch attention world-wide, but he still awaits word of anyone actually playing either game.  You are most welcome to have a look and draw the games to the attention of sport minded people you may know.

And now we look forward to 2016.  Recent weeks, of course, have filled us with Christmas preparations.  We hope yours have gone well and we wish you a Merry and Blessed Christmas and all happiness in the New Year.

With our love,

Ted, Tina, David, and Angela.

P. S. That this letter arrives on Christmas Eve is entirely deliberate.

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

Christmas Letter '14

Nadolig Llawen!                      Merry Christmas!                      Buon Natale!

Christmas 2014.

From our home to yours, dear Family and Friends,

It’s a pleasure to share a little bit of our lives over the past year at this very special time of year.  We hope you are enjoying a full and restful Christmas/New Year season.  2014 has been very much a typical year for us, a happy year with very ordinary challenges.

Tina enjoys her retirement but still takes the occasional casual shift, nursing at VGH.  She continues to enjoy cello lessons at the Delta Community Music School (http://www.dcms.ca) under the tutelage of Bo Peng, cellist with Borealis String Quartet (http://www.borealisstringquartet.com).  Late in the spring and through the summer, Tina added to her musical repertoire by taking up harp lessons from Lori Papajohn, harpist and Musical Director of Winter Harp http://www.winterharp.com), an ensemble whose concerts have become one of our favourite Christmas traditions.  Tina attended these lessons in Lori's own home, delightfully filled with harps all over the house.

Ted's health continues as stable, with only occasional colds.  He continues to alternate 3 days of swimming (2000 m. in roughly 40 min.) with 3 days of cycling (nearly 14 km. in roughly 40 min.), sometimes substituting a good stiff walk (a little over 4 km. in the same 40 min.), with this exercise and prescribed medication, Ted remains well.  For the 2014/15 orchestral year, Ted continues to serve as immediate Past President of the Delta Symphony Society, the sponsor of the Richmond Delta Youth Orchestra.

Angela keeps contact with her friends in the Dusty Babes Collective as they continue to strive to find their place among British Columbia ceramic artists.  In the mean time, Angela has taken part-time work at Spawts (http://spawts.com), a ceramic studio that specializes in ceramic family pet paw print impressions.  She enjoys this work with the very small staff that includes one of her friends from ECUAD.  Being employed, Angela has to spend less time in her own studio here at home and at the Delta Potter’s Association studio.

Tina and Ted felt touched and blessed when David chose to confirm his infant baptism and informally joined the congregation at Ladner United Church.  During the year, our congregation completed major renovation of our aging church building and returned from temporary accommodation in the fall.

David continued his mathematical studies at Simon Fraser University through the spring and summer semesters. He does well with pure Mathematics.  In the spring, he received a surprise invitation to become a founding student in the new strings music program within the Music Department of Kwantlen Polytechnic University, at their Langley campus.  This university had brought the Borealis String Quartet onto its faculty to create this program and the quartet identified selected students to invite.  David took the invitation up and has been studying music, with focus on his viola, full time since September, really enjoying the fall term.  He is currently one of just two students taking this new program.  This means that no large ensemble (required by the Kwantlen Music Department) exists, so the university sent him and the violin student to play with the Trinity Western University Orchestra. Kwantlen and also requires music students to participate in small ensembles and we enjoyed the end-of-term recital and concert performances by David's string trio (David, the violin student, and a piano student from Kwantlen Music’s piano program).  He will continue with these musical studies for the spring term, likely returning to Simon Fraser University in the summer for Mathematics while Kwantlen Music is idle.

Although studying music at Kwanten, David continues private study on clarinet and piano, here at the Delta Community Music school.  He also continues to play with the adult Richmond Orchestra (http://www.roca.ca) but was disappointed when that orchestra’s major concert this fall conflicted with Trinity Western University Orchestra’s major concert (http://twu.ca/academics/samc/events/2014-2015-events/band-orchestra-fall.html).

Our year brought significant life events for us to mark.  Tina lost her uncle Sisto in the spring and we shared with his wife Gloria at his funeral.  Then, in early summer we lost a very dear family friend from David’s years with the Delta Youth Orchestra, Sherri Plewes.  They rest, treasured, in our memories.  Summer brought the excitement of Ted’s brother Norman’s son Gareth’s wedding with Zoë Stopher, whom he had met early in his doctoral studies at Utah State University and who has enthusiastically assisted him with his newt research.  This was a beautiful wedding in a beautiful setting. 

That wedding occurred on a beach near Gold River, Oregon, and brought us our major getaway for this year as we travelled the remarkable Oregon coast.  We were pleased to accept the kind invitation of one of Ted's former secondary school classmates, Heather (Granger) Kirkwood and her husband Jack, to stop at their home in Seattle for our first night on the road.  They are wonderful, welcoming, hosts.  One highlight of that trip occurred as we reached the mouth of the Columbia River before crossing the Astoria Bridge and discovered pelicans in large numbers fishing and flying around.  All along the Washington and Oregon coasts we found spectacular scenery, both similar to yet also different from our own British Columbia scenery, replacing the deep inlets with long beaches directly facing the open Pacific, punctuated here and there by great rocks on the beaches or just offshore in the sea.

Earlier in the summer, our other get away was a very special trip to Oliver for the fifty year reunion of Ted’s formers schoolmates.  Imagine that, a half-century since graduating secondary school.  Ted enjoyed reconnecting with classmates and introducing Tina and David to his old friends.  Southern Okanagan Secondary School is newly rebuilt and we enjoyed exploring around outside the beautiful building, suggestive more of a fine community college than of a secondary school, while reminiscing about the school Ted knew.

Catinka remains very much queen of our house, while Angela’s ducks continue to hold authority over our back yard.  Jemima and Rebeccah have slowed their egg production with the new year and stopped completely when they molted last summer.  We await egg laying resume.  Tango still remains convinced that he should not let any of us exit the back yard from January to August.  At the end of November Angela added a new pet to our menagerie bringing home Adam, a red haired standard poodle puppy. He quickly endeared himself to us all.

Ted continues to seek players to experiment with his invented team sports of Two Ball and Delta.  Lacking sufficient contact of his own among sports minded youth, he continued to approach schools as their Physical Education and intramural sport programs likely offer the best chance of drawing sufficiently large groups of players together.  This remains disappointing as no schools have taken up either game yet.  Ted also kept up a web presence for the games at http://twoballanddelta.org (although the site is currently down as he develops major revisions) and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/TwoBallAndDelta.  These continued to catch attention world-wide, but he still awaits word of anyone actually playing either game.  You are most welcome to have a look and draw the games to the attention of sport minded people you may know.

And now we look forward to 2015.  Recent weeks, of course, have filled us with Christmas preparations.  We hope yours have gone well and we wish you a Merry and Blessed Christmas and all happiness in the New Year.

With our love,

Ted, Tina, David, and Angela.

P. S. That this letter arrives on Christmas Eve is entirely deliberate.

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