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.
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Ted celebrated a landmark birthday, his 75th, 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!
