In Flanders' Fields

In Flanders' Fields for today and every Remembrance Day

Christmas, 2019

Nadolig Llawen!  Merry Christmas!  Buon Natale!

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.

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. Angela teaches mainly adult classes which vary from those for absolute beginners to classes in more advanced ceramics skills.

Angela’s imaginative ceramic sculptures in the Dart’s Hill Garden

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.

Outside of her art, Angela continues her interest in sophisticated board games and computer gaming which she shares with Christy, enjoying relaxing time to play and be together each Sunday afternoon and evening. They both enjoy Adam’s company as he delights in their companionship.

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.

Relaxing lunch at Cusheon Lake with Dick and Lynn

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. During this stay, we were pleased to host Ted’s former schoolmates, Dick and Lynn Zandee, for a fine afternoon get tether.

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.

Tina and friends (young male Red Winged Blackbirds at Reifel

As winter returned to us, we are enjoying south Delta’s annual return of Trumpeter Swans and the vast flocks of Snow Geese. Resident Bald Eagles are now renovating their nests but, 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 Crowed  Sparrows, Spotted Towees, the occasional Nuthatch, Downy Woodpeckers, and Flickers while Anna’s Hummingbirds use their feeder more frequently and Steller’s Jays enjoy our steady supply of peanuts. We continue to enjoy visits to the George C Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary. 

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!

Welsh National Anthem just before Wales beat England 30 - 3.Saturday 16th March, 2013

Dad was born in Wales and remain proud of his birth heritage for his entire life.

In this Election, Will I Give My vote to My Current Member of Parliament?

Our federal Parliament has now dissolved and the 2019 election has been called. Every eligible voter, all of us, must decide to whom among the candidates in our own federal constituencies we will give our vote. Will I vote for my current Member of Parliament (MP) the return to the next Parliament as my representative? No, I will not.

Why not? Partly for the same reason that I could not vote for her during the last election. At the time I found much about her candidacy that attracted my vote. Yet, to me, the sovereignty-deleting ISDS provision in so-called free trade agreements then under negotiation or pending negotiation had to be a major national issue (see my post from that time). I questioned each of our then candidates on this matter. My then MP, a senior Cabinet Minister in the previous government, easily supported her government’s ready abrogation of our national sovereignty through ISDS and its inherent characteristic of raising international corporations from being subjects of their home nations and welcome guests within other nations to be, in effect, non-territorial sovereign entities (I called them non-territorial kingdoms) equal in stature with sovereign nations. As a candidate, my current MP never answered my question or commented on the issue and that turned my vote away from her. After the 2015 election, I learned why she did not answer or address the issue as, instead of the “Real Change” promised during the election, the new government, of which she became a part as a Cabinet Minister, proceeded to perpetuate the previous government’s support for ISDS. Dismayed at this let-down, I later wrote an open letter to my new MP, made a submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on International Trade, and an open letter to our Prime Minister with my concerns, all to no avail. Sadly and to Canada’s shame, that the renegotiation of NAFTA into the USMCA removed ISDS had nothing to do with Canada’s negotiating position but resulted entirely from American effort. TiSA, still under negotiation with Canada’s participation continues to include possible “backdoor” access to sovereignty-deleting ISDS. As a Cabinet Minister in our current government, my current MP continues to support subsuming our sovereign right to govern ourselves as a free and independent nation to ISDS.

As a more immediate reason why I cannot give my vote to my current MP, I look at the SNC Lavalin scandal. My MP supports our Prime Minister in spite of his interference in the judicial process, an unethical and, likely, unconstitutional action that, in times past, would have either brought on the resignation of a truly honourable Minister of the Crown or generated a cabinet or even caucus revolt to force such a resignation. Not only that, but my MP then accepted, however temporarily, the appointment to replace Jane Philpott at her Cabinet Ministry when Dr. Philpott took the highly honourable step of resigning in support of former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Reybould’s concerns over attempted Prime Ministerial interference with her authority concerning the judicial case involving SNC Lavalin.

So, to whom will I give my vote? Right now, I simply do not know.

When I vote, I vote the person; I do not vote the party. I will listen to whatever all our other candidates have to say on various issues. In particular, I will listen for strong affirmation of judicial independence from political interference and for strong acknowledgement and support for Canada’s independence as a free, self-governing, and sovereign nation not subject to corporate overrule via ISDS. I will look for commitments to support and/or enhance Canada’s existing health care system. I will also want to listen to candidates thoughts on local issues of a federal nature.

Above all though, and even more importantly in consequence of the growing environmental crisis, I will look for substantial intention to contribute to bringing Canada into a strong role in precluding the impending world-wide anthropogenic climate disaster and ending the currently proceeding anthropogenic mass extinction of living species. I will anticipate learning of intended action to transfer subsidies away from carbon dioxide and methane releasing industries and personal activity, turning those subsidies over to industries and personal activities that involve no carbon dioxide or methane release. I hope to learn of support for an industrial activity that isolates carbon for non-carbon dioxide releasing purposes or sequesters it.

Delta candidates, I await all that you have to say. Please say it with grace and intelligence.

Our Moon Close in Line with Jupiter

Our Moon at first quarter and close to conjunction with Jupiter through very thin high cloud on the evening of 2019, September 5 at PST 9:17:40 pm with Olympus Pen-F at ISO 500 and 1/50 sec. through E.Zuiko-T f=250mm 1:5 fully open at f/5.

Lying low to my south-southwest, the Moon and Jupiter showed very nicely through the very high thin evening cloud. At this magnification, Jupiter appears as a very tiny but definite disk and shows some colour in contrast with the white of the moon. Click on the image to view it in its full sized glory.

Just Our Figs

Fig in the Tree, Ready to Pick

Three Fig Harvest in one of Angela's Falling Blue Bowls