Christmas 2021

Nadolig Llawen!            Merry Christmas!            Buon Natale!

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, continuing unusual, year.  May you enjoy a full and restful Christmas/New Year season.  2021 certainly kept up the flow of very different life experiences, including major changes within our family.

Angela experienced 2021’s greatest change. With COVID-19, she and her friends in the Dusty Babes Collective had to remain with markedly reduced work in their ceramic art studio in south Surrey near White Rock. The property owner from whom the Dusty Babes rented the site finally moved to redevelop it and the Dusty Babes had to vacate at the end of October. Much of Angela’s equipment, supplies, and works came home to storage with us. Through the spring, Angela continued her part time position as the lead ceramics studio technician for the Semiahmoo Arts Society in the South Surrey Recreation Centre, working Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and teaching ceramic art classes of limited class size to meet COVID-19 restrictions on Wednesday evenings. Late in the spring, Angela left that position to take up a new challenge and finished her work by training her replacement.

Angela’s new challenge? A big change, yet in many ways, not so big as she enrolled in a computerized three dimensional modelling program at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Angela’s artistic bent has always been primarily three dimensional. This BCIT course of study is very intense, demanding her full-time attention. With her first term, she worked entirely online but the second term meant taking in-person classes at BCIT. What Tina and I have seen of Angela’s digital creations so far impress us as amazing.

Losing the the Dusty Babes’ studio, leaving her employment, and taking on new studies do not limit Angela’s changes this year. She moved out in May as she and Christy leased a townhouse in Richmond that Adam found for them (They had been looking for a place of their own for a while when, while returning to Christy’s car after checking possibilities in Richmond and walking Adam, Adam insisted on turning up a street they had not considered. On that street, they found a small townhouse complex with a vacancy, just right for them, and it also allowed tenants to keep a pet). The three of them are now well settled in with Christy working her job with Microsoft from home and Angela working hard at her studies.

David continued private study on his viola, with Thomas Beckman, online through the spring but in person this fall. In September’, he grieved the sudden passing of his previous viola coach, Robert Hirschhorn Rozek. David remains a violist with the New Westminster Symphony Orchestra, but really missed in person rehearsing and performing under conductor, Jack (Jin) Zhang as disrupted by COVID-19. The orchestra assembled another online performance this spring. Much to David’s delight, this October the orchestra resumed in person rehearsals but without a concert for a live audience. instead, the orchestra videoed this concert for release in the New Year. Happily for David, the Camerata Strings ensemble resumed in September and gave a public performance earlier this month.

Apart from his music, David continues to enjoy his Monday and Thursday part-time employment with Meridian Farm Markets at their store in Tsawwassen. As a grocery store worker, David is among “essential” workers and continues to experience no loss of work as a consequence of COVID-19.

David’s ASD specialist psychiatrist will retire with the end of this year, leaving him with his local support counsellor at Alongside You. Tina and Ted remain thankful for such readily at-hand support.

Tina continues to enjoy complete retirement from nursing but her health remains a challenge as she continues to suffer increasing back pain that imposes increasing limits on her general activity. She accepted buying a walker, a great help when Tina has to move more than a few steps, and she qualified for a disabled person parking tag for our car. Tina received a long anticipated treatment earlier this month and looks forward, with hope, to her next treatment opportunity in the New Year.

With exercise and prescribed medication, Ted's health continues stable; generally he feels very well indeed. He did experience another bout of atrial fibrillation in the spring, Again, his heart doctors decided he needed cardioversion to correct it in April and again used external stimulation instead of making Ted’s ICD jolt his heart. Having dropped into persistant atrial fibrillation three times over the past few years, Ted’s doctors saw need for more active treatment, atrial ablation. In spite of having remained in sinus rhythm since the last cardioversion, Ted accepted an invitation to participate in an atrial ablation study and received the procedure in the middle of September. Otherwise, he is bothered only by occasional colds but developed Plantar Fasciitis of both heels during the summer, relieved with physiotherapy and a pair of Strassburg Socks.

Ted celebrated a landmark birthday, his 75^th, and received the pooled gift from the whole family, including his brothers, of an Apple Watch.

Ted continues to use long walks as his primary mode of exercise, usually twice daily with dog companionship, every day of the week.  These long walks allow Ted readily to exceed the recommended minimum 10,000 steps per day. Otherwise, Ted enjoys in his camera, often carrying it while walking the dog. His collection of photos, here around Ladner and south Delta, keeps growing.

With the current situation, we again did not take a get-away this year, as so many of us have been obliged to do. As we are sure is the case with the rest of you, COVID-19 remains the dominant unsettling factor in our lives. Public indoor mask wearing, physical distancing, and limited public gathering have all become our norm. All of us accepted the two COVID vaccinations through the summer and Ted received the invitation to take the third, booster, shot late in the autumn and readily followed up. Both Tina and David are now booked for their booster stots early in the New Year. Angela awaits her booster invitation/notification.

Another change: with Adam gone with Angela, we missed having a dog around our home. Tina particularly missed Adam’s company and we filled the gap with a puppy late in August. She is also a Standard Poodle, this time from a breeder in Langley, also red but with white markings. Belle fills our lives with her spirited dog personality and, enjoying long walks just as much as Adam, guarantees that Ted exercises.

The new puppy, Belle has grown a lot since Ted took this photo at the beginning of September.

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 Norman and Barbara and with John and Liz but COVID-19 restriction relaxation during the Autumn did allow us to get together with Norman and Barbara for a few occasions.

We share in the whole world’s experience of anthropogenic climate change. New meteorological terminology, “heat dome” and “atmospheric river” really hit home to us with extraordinarily hot weather at the end of June and early July and heavy rains late this autumn that isolated Greater Vancouver from the rest of British Columbia with flooding in the Fraser Valley and all mountain highways cut by numerous washouts. As the year ends, the highways are being repaired back into service.

As winter returned to us, we enjoyed 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 not as readily noticed as with other winters. Resident Bald Eagles have now returned to renovate their nests. Very soon, trees along Highway 10 will burst into our annual crop of transient Bald Eagles. At home, our bird feeder remains frequented by Chickadees, House Finches, Juncos, Song Sparrows, White Crowned Sparrows, Spotted Towhees, the occasional Nuthatch, Downy Woodpeckers, and Northern Flickers while Anna’s Hummingbirds use their feeder as frequently ever. Steller’s Jays enjoy our steady supply of in-shell peanuts less frequently ever since the cedar hedge on the other side of Ladner Elementary School was cut down for redevelopment of a single house lot into two homes. The Jays must have used the hedge as their roost. We continue to enjoy the George C Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary although COVID-19 has drastically limited our visits.

And now we look forward to 2022, to hope for COVID-19 decline, and a more normal year.  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.

Merry Christmas with our love,

Ted, Tina, David, and Angela.

P. S. This letter was deliberately intended to arrive on Christmas Eve and Ted completed the first draft in time but simply living and keeping a puppy dog  active held priority over revisions.

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

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!