Nadolig Llawen! Merry Christmas! Buon Natale!
Christmas 2024.
From our home to yours, dear Family and Friends,
As we come home from a Winter Harp concert, it is our pleasure to share a little bit of our lives over this past year. May you enjoy a full and restful Christmas/New Year season. 2024 brought us mostly very routine living.
Angela, Christy, and their dog, Adam remain well-settled at their leased townhouse in Richmond. Christy continues working her job with Microsoft from home while Angela continues to seek opportunities to apply her new skills with digital modelling while expanding her portfolio preparation. She continues as a ceramics artist, throwing new pieces and showing with the Dusty Babes collective.
David remains active with his music. As principal violist with the New Westminster Symphony Orchestra, he retains special musical responsibility. We enjoyed their Christmas concert, this year as a full orchestral concert. David also continues to perform with the VSO School of Music’s Camerata Strings adult ensemble, most recently in performance at the Vancouver Playhouse earlier last month.
Apart from his music, David remains happy with his part-time employment with Meridian Farm Markets at their store in Tsawwassen. While the Tsawwassen store was closed for renovations, he enjoyed a brief reassignment to Meridian’s Ralph’s Produce store in Langley late last spring. David travel interest took him to Yellowknife to experience Summer Solstice with very long days and night twilight, no full darkness. He now looks forward to a trip to Florida earl/y in the New Year.
David ’s adopted vegan lifestyle remains important to him. In response to his ASD, David continues to see his local support counsellor at Alongside You. Tina and Ted remain thankful for such readily at-hand support.
Tina continues to suffer ever stronger back pain that increasingly limits her general activity and requires her to use a disability tag on our car and her walker when out and about. She particularly enjoys Ladner’s Shirley’s Walk as a walk she can handle. Tina now has a new surgeon for her back but has to meet a new weight loss target before surgery can be scheduled.
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Tina. David, Angela, Belle, and Adam along Shiley’s Walk on a lovely May Day yeah
With exercise and prescribed medication, Ted remains in good health, feeling very well indeed. He remains a participant in the atrial ablation study out of VGH and periodically wears a monitor for a few scheduled weeks. He, Tina, and David did catch Covid-19 in September but, being fully up to date with our vaccinations, its impact was mild. For Ted, he experienced three days of total exhaustion, then it was gone.
Ted continues to use long walks as his primary mode of exercise, usually twice daily and a shorter walk before putting Belle to bed for the night, every day of the week. He easily to exceed the recommended minimum 10,000 steps per day. With Tina taking up swimming as gravity free exercise, he resumed semi-regular swimming, getting back up to 2500 metre swims fairly readily. Ted enjoys his camera, often carrying it while walking Belle. His collection of photos, here around Ladner and south Delta, certainly continues to grow.
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Ted is the one invariably behind the camera and not inclined to take selfies so, instead, here is his view of Saturn from September 9th at 12:39 AM, a few days after opposition.
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Belle remains our delight, filling life with love and laughter by her spirited dog personality. She remains fascinated with balls, especially well lost ones she finds during her walks and carries home, filling the house with dog balls, tennis balls, lacrosse balls and baseballs! Her susceptibility to ear infection remained well controlled all year. Thankfully, with veterinary care and prescribed medication, last year’s frightening liver condition has not reappeared. Belle is her cheerful self
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 John and Liz. We get together with Norman and Barbara for a few occasions, especially when Gareth and Rosy came up from Oregon to visit them, but will miss them this Christmas with Rosy reaching an age that it is more appropriate to mark the occasion in her own family home with her grandparents visiting.
As winter returned to us, we again watched South Delta’s annual return of vast flocks of Snow Geese, many now continued on to the Skagit River delta and/or California’s Sacramento Valley. Trumpeter Swans are back but less readily noticed than last winter. Resident Bald Eagles returned early, starting to renovate their nests before the end of October but transient Bald Eagles have been slower to return. At home, our bird feeder remains frequented by Chickadees, House Finches, Dark-Eyed Juncos, Song Sparrows, White Crowned Sparrows, Spotted Towhees, the occasional Nuthatch, Downy Woodpeckers, and Northern Flickers while Anna’s Hummingbirds use their feeders as frequently as ever (we have a heated feeder for the very cold weather). Steller’s Jays continue to take our steady supply of in-shell peanuts. Three seem to be constantly together and we suspect they are siblings that must have hatched very near us last summer.
We remain attentive and concerned with events in our world beyond our family. The electoral decision by our neighbours to the south shocked and deeply troubles us. We continue to pray that peace may be restored to a fully intact Ukraine with the ignoble invader driven out. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict keeps us alarmed, such a complex problem! May Israelis find a way out from brutal suppression of their Palestinian neighbours and Palestinian terror extremists moderate their responses so both can find peace together. We accept an apparent end to the civil war in Syria with concern about the successful rebel group. How can that horrible civil war in Yemen and the new outbreak in Sudan resolve? May this season of peace touch all these and other conflicts.
And now we look forward to 2025. Recent weeks, of course, have filled us with Christmas preparations. We hope yours have gone well and we wish you a Blessed Christmas and all happiness in the New Year.
Merry Christmas with our love,
Ted, Tina, David, Angela, and Christy.
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The day after opposition, on the night of December 9th at 10:53 PM, Ted enjoyed an opportunity to connect his camera to his Dynamax 8 telescope and photograph Jupiter with its four Galilean moons.
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(Stack of 6 exposures on Olympus Pen-F at ISO 500 and 1/15 sec. with 2110 mm f/11 projected through 20 mm eyepiece) |
P. S. This letter was scheduled, with intent, to arrive on Christmas Eve .
Blwyddyn Newydd Dda! Happy New Year! Felice Nuovo Anno!
