Christmas 2019.
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. 2019 saw us simply living as a family with few changes.
Tina continues to enjoy complete retirement from ward nursing. With the new year,Tina continued playing her cello with the Camerata Strings adult ensemble in the VSO School of Music. Although she enjoys the new cello music and playing as part of an ensemble, Tina’s health did make her take a break away from playing with the group midway through autumn. She suffers increasing back pain that limits her general activity. Medical specialists have sent her through several tests and we both look forward to learning the results. Tina does anticipate returning to Camarata with her cello.
With exercise and prescribed medication, Ted's health continues as stable although he did experience another bout of atrial fibrillation in the spring that persisted into summer, Again, his heart doctors decided he needed cardioversion to correct it, this time using external stimulation instead of making Ted’s ICD jolt his heart. Otherwise, he is bothered only by occasional colds. Ted continues to use long walks with Angela's dog, Adam as his primary mode of exercise now, walking Adam twice a day, most days of the week. These long walks allow Ted routinely to exceed the recommended minimum 10,000 steps per day by a substantial margin.
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. Although they all continue to produce fine works of ceramic art, the Dusty Babes have not showed their works as actively this year as last year. In the Spring, Angela did show on her own at Surrey’s Darts Hill Garden Park. Angela remains an active member of the Potters Guild of BC.
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Angela’s imaginative ceramic sculptures in the Dart’s Hill Garden
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David continued private study on his viola with Robert Hirschhorn Rozek through the spring but did not return with the Fall. He continues as a violist with the New Westminster Symphony Orchestra, really enjoying rehearsing and performing under conductor, Jack (Jin) Zhang and a guest conductor. During the summer, David completed Level Two of the Orff Music Instructor training program. Late in the Fall, he found an opportunity to volunteer with the elementary school Music program with Mr. Lee at Ladner’s Hawthorne Elementary School. David continues to watch for opportunities in other orchestras, in particular for professional opportunities to arise.
David continues to enjoy writing fiction, with which he extends his imagination. Through the year, he continued 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 four years ago as a digital copy, continues to draw ongoing interest and responses on the GoodReads literary sharing site. David keeps the second edition available both digitally and as hardcopy on Amazon. Apart from his music and his writing, David continues to enjoy his part-time employment with Meridian Farm Markets at their store in Tsawwassen.
David’s ASD specialist psychiatrist and our minister at Ladner United Church (up until his retirement last June, the United Church of Canada requires retired ministers to completely severe connerction with their final congregations for a full year after retirement), together, continue to give David wonderful support. Tina and Ted feel deeply thankful for such readily at-hand support. He also accepted local support with a counsellor at Alongside You, here in Ladner.
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Relaxing lunch at Cusheon Lake with Dick and Lynn
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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 remain very busy with their construction contracting business, Form to Finish Construction. We had the good fortune to engage Evan and crew to renovate our back deck early in the Summer. Evan’s brother, Gareth enjoys his Assistant Professorship position at Western Oregon University and the responsibility to create a new environmental research laboratory. While well settled in at Monmouth, Oregon, Gareth, his wife Zoë, and baby daughter Rosy take brief opportunities to visit home with Norman and Barbara when we also share in their company. We look forward to seeing them again over Christmas. At Thanksgiving, Norman and Barbara with Evan and his girlfriend, Nicki, joined us before Norman and Barbara left for their Middle Eastern travel adventure that included the wonders of ancient Egypt.
Looking beyond ourselves, we gave close attention through the Canadian federal election last October. Ted remains troubled by the direction Canada’s federal government continues to take. Tina is impressed by the government’s new legislation in support of people with disabilities.
We also remain at unease with the actions of the current President of our neighbours to the south and his insistence on denying anthropogenic climate change. We share with many the shock at learning that President Trump called upon the governments of other nations to interfere in his country’s electoral process by digging up unspecified alleged dirt for him on a potential political opponent. As a consequence, recent efforts to impeach this President impress us as entirely reasonable.
We continue to share many Canadian’s concern for the plight of the many refugees from those horrible civil wars in Syria and Yemen and see in that suffering the first sign of the societal disruption that can result from anthropogenic climate change. Similarly, we recognize that increasingly variable weather into extremes are part and parcel with the changing world climate, giving cause to the substantial wildfires in California and now the even greater fire disasters in Australia. Our whole family follows Greta Thunberg and her efforts to spur governments into acting on the established science to avoid worldwide climate disaster.
Adam, Angela’s red haired standard poodle, continues to endear himself to us all. He does not get to see his “friends” as often but he loves to greet and engage in play when he does get together with any one of them. To Adam’s dismay, many of his “friends” still give up on his chase-me game as he runs too fast for them. Adam keeps Ladner well mapped in his head and his chosen routes when we walk are many and varied.
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Tina and friends (young male Red Winged Blackbirds at Reifel
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Ted has slowed his efforts 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 tried to approach schools since their Physical Education and intramural sport programs likely offer the best chance of drawing sufficiently large groups of players together. Ted feels disappointed that no schools have yet taken up either game. Ted also keeps up his web presence for the games, but has lacked activity to post to the site blog, or on Facebook. These continue to catch occasional attention world-wide, but he still awaits word of anyone actually playing either game. You remain invited to have a look and, perhaps, to draw the games to the attention of sport minded people you may know.
And now we look forward to 2020. 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!
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