Tackling the Oliver Tower Viewpoint Trail

First things first. We had a job to do this morning. Preparing apples was different than at North Okanagan Valley Gleaners. We only had to remove the stems, cut out the scabs and bruises, and give the apples a quick rinse. Terry was one of the people coring the apples. Then the chunks were put into the dicer, spread on cookie sheets, and put into the dryer.

Our morning's work was finished so quickly, I suggested an adventure before we drove the 20 minutes back to Okanagan Falls. "Let's go check out the hiking trails above Fairview," I said. "It's going to be showery for the next few days."

Terry looked up his All Trails app, and found a trail. Parking at the bottom of a steep cliff, we gazed up and saw a well-worn path of scree, large loose rocks and sand. This is it? I thought. Talking briefly to a hiker striding down confirmed it. 

"You can go straight up here, or around where it's not so steep. I find it a great workout twice a week," he said.

We decided to just go up. "I just want to see what's on the other side of this ridge. You know, like the song":        The bear went over the mountain....

                  To see what he could see... 

                  And all that he could see...

                  Was the other side of the mountain..."

The first thought that crossed my mind as I plodded through the deep sand was I'm not as fit as I was on the White Goat Falls trail  ten years ago. Terry had been so impressed at the time, and called me a mountain goat. Today I had to stop every once in a while to catch my breath and still my pounding heart. Terry kept asking anxiously, "Are you all right?" 

Finally at the top of the gravelly part, we reached the ridge. That's where we saw the "other side of the mountain." You can see how difficult it was to wade through this loose stuff. 

Already the view from the ridge was looking spectacular

As the path levelled out, long-needled Ponderosa pine trees dotted the dry hillside. No sounds, but we did see and hear a covey of quail at the bottom of the hill. Here and there clumps of tiny, low-lying

Prickly Pear cactus peeked through the long grass.

 

Rusty remnants of an ancient fence

"Look up, there's the tower!"  

I didn't know there was a destination to this climb. I didn't know the trail was called the Oliver Tower Viewpoint Trail. But I made it up there, 3.7 km, 830 feet up, on the top of this "mountain."

From that vantage point, you could see all over the valley. 

Various trails meandered down the mountain, so it was much more relaxing on the way down.

When we got to the bottom, Terry again said, " You did great, I'm impressed!" 

For me, a little encouragement goes a long way!

Gleaner Adventure Part Two

 Let's backtrack a bit from yesterday's post, and explain why we're in the Okanagan, in November, no less. 

We weren't planning to be in this part of the world, at this time of the year, but an offer came up that we couldn't refuse. We were given a condo to stay in, with a suggestion that we work at the Gleaner's, the one in the south Okanagan that we hadn't been to yet. We liked that idea, so here we are. 

 We didn't know we would be thrust into the tail end of a week of actual soup mixing. This was an aspect of the whole gleaning process that we hadn't yet experienced . 

Here is a picture of the set-up we found ourselves in:

It's a metal shelf with a COVID shield separating masked people on both sides. Not exactly a conveyor belt, more like a shuffleboard. The white stuff you see is salt, to facilitate the buckets sliding down the "runway".

I'm there in my trusty purple cashmere work sweater, with Terry behind me. I'm scooping lentils into a yellow bucket as it comes shooting towards me, every three seconds! Terry is scooping dried carrots. Because he's only the third person in line, his bucket occasionally tips over, it's so light. I have to be on my toes to scoop my lentils before the next bucket comes sliding along. If too many buckets stall together, they're more likely to tip over. Eventually I get into the rhythm of putting out my left arm to intercept the carrot bucket, while scooping with my right hand into the lentil barrel. A man off to the side keeps his eyes on my barrel, always making sure it's full, so I don't have to strain my back leaning down too much. That's valuable servanthood on the sidelines. 

See the big square bin? It was two-thirds full when we started, and we went through about one and a half in a morning.

I was so thrilled with this fast-paced operation I refused all offers to have someone take my place, despite the fact that by the end of the morning the fingers of my right hand seemed permanently fused in place. And despite the fact that, as a newbie, I had probably displaced someone who regularly worked on the line. But they humoured me, and I toughed it out. We did have a stretch break after half an hour, and then a welcome coffee break. Despite the chilly weather, most of us sat outside bundled up in tuques and warm jackets. That's what you do during COVID, right?

The part I didn't see was the actual bagging.   The buckets, which now contained dried potatoes, beets, carrots, lentils, barley, peas, salt, and other mixed vegetables, were tipped through a large funnel, into sturdy plastic  5 kg bags, and sealed. I had taken part in this aspect at the North Okanagan Gleaners in Lavington., B.C.                                      

All these dried vegetables flying around creates a lot of dust, so we spent the next day washing walls and floors. I had to laugh to myself. When I heard we would be cleaning, I said to myself, But I'm not washing walls! God has a sense of humour. That was the very job I was assigned. I did my best to eliminate all traces of dust in my section of wall.

Stay tune for the next installment: apples! 

I can't wait.

The Blasted Church

 

A friend of mine who lives in Okanagan Falls, B.C. would drive by a certain landmark every day on her way to work. “The Blasted Church” she would read. “Oh, that's so sacrilegious! Why would a church be called 'blasted'?" Sure enough, there was a story behind this unusual name.

In the late eighteen hundreds, gold had been found near present day Oliver, B.C. A whole city sprang up. A small Presbyterian church was one of the amenities built to support a burgeoning population. When the gold petered out, the miners left the town of Fairview, and it fell into disrepair, becoming a ghost town.

Nearby Okanagan Falls had become a ranching and freight centre. The residents decided to transport the neglected church from Fairview for their own use. It seemed a daunting task, until an engineer suggested boarding up the windows, and lighting four sticks of dynamite, suspended from the rafters. The explosion from the dynamite loosened the nails, and the boards were easily dismantled to be transported to Okanagan Falls. The United Church in the town is nicknamed The Blasted Church, and lends its name to a winery as well.

The boards of the church were transported to Okanagan Falls in 1929 and reassembled.

Nothing exists now on the site of the once booming town of Fairview, except an information kiosk. Plans are to upgrade the 1 km walking path around the grounds, and to designate a few more landmarks. Terry and I walked around in the blustery wind.

The site of the original Presbyterian church.

Close up of the sign.

The story of The Blasted Church is a reminder not to judge a book by its cover! Or to jump to conclusions based on the outward appearance of something or someone.

 Samuel 16:7  The LORD doesn't see things the way you see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart. [NLT]

A Happy Re-connection

 During this pandemic, the pace of life has slowed down considerably for Terry and me. This is the first year out of the nine years since we've been retired that we've been home for the entire fall and winter season. At first I wondered how I would fill my time. Now I have too many projects. The most satisfying has been pursuing my dream of writing devotionals. For years I've kept a diary/journal. I would write down ordinary happenings that, to me had a spiritual significance. Sometimes the implications of an event didn't hit me till much later. I began writing with the idea of submitting stories with a monetary reward attached. That has had limited success. 

Then I remembered that God had spoken to me: 

"Publish his glorious deeds among the nations. Tell everyone about the amazing things he does." Psalm 96:3 (NLT)

So, now I write little stories for which I don't get paid. I'm surprised at how satisfying it is. I didn't used to be able to write a logical essay when I first went to university. It didn't help that I had to write my assignments in French, since I was taking a French major. Now I am mostly able to write a coherent sequence. I've been practising. Twenty-five years ago I learned a lot through a writing program with Long Ridge Writer's Group, which taught me how to write and submit articles to magazines. 

A surprising side effect of writing to PresbyCan Daily Devotionals, a site which publishes daily inspirational messages, is belonging to what they call a "community of Spirit-filled believers". It's been fun receiving encouraging messages from those who have read what I've written. 

The other day I had the biggest surprise! I got an email response via this site from a friend I've known all my life. She wondered if I was the same person she had gone to school and church with. I had tried to contact her four years ago when we were on a SOWER project on Vancouver Island for two  months, but hit a dead end. Now I excitedly e-mailed back, and we had an hour-and-a-half Face Time visit, getting caught up on the events of the past.

 Here we are as babies:

I'm on the left, and my friend, Edie McCaffery (as she was then) is on the right. My mum is rocking the barrel at my birthday party, probably when I was two.

Here we are when I was 21 and Edie was 22, in front of Edie's house in Port Alberni, B.C.

                                           

Now, nearly 52 years later, we've reconnected, just because Edie "just happened" to read one of the Daily Devotionals on the PresbyCan site! I can't wait for the day when we'll be able to travel once again to Vancouver Island, and visit my brother, our other "old" friends, and my newly re-discovered friend, Edie.

God is good!

Here's a link to an article about PresbyCan Daily Devotional's history. https://renewal-fellowship.ca/5027/  Its roots go back about 55 years, and this May is the official 25th Anniversary celebration of this website.

Where is that Snowy Owl?

 Since we are in Alberta for the winter this year, it has been Terry's goal to add Snowy Owl to his yearly bird list. This bird has been an important missing piece to The List for at least ten years, even fifteen. Three trips to the area broadly referred to as "North East of Calgary" by people on the Alberta Birds Face Book group yielded nothing. We had been looking in vain for the last couple of months.

After the last fruitless trip at the beginning of January, I was ready to give up. Terry brought it up again yesterday. "Are you ready for another car-birding day?" he said. 

    "Fine. But let's try going north this time instead of south." 

    "OK."

    "Lord, we'd really like to see a Snowy Owl today" I prayed for good measure.

    Terry pored over the map, plotting his route on less busy roads, avoiding the QE2, the freeway.  "Let's go to Vegreville."  Having a destination made it more of a fun trip; we would be able to see the world's largest Easter egg, a Ukrainian pysanka.

    We set off just before sunrise, which was at 8:29 this morning. I kept my eyes peeled on fenceposts and telephone poles to my right, while Terry watched his side of the road, as well as the road. 

     Snow Buntings was the first sighting of the day. Previously we've seen them as they wheel and fly up in a frenzied cloud  from the side of the road as the car approaches. They're so skittish we didn't positively identify them earlier this month. Today we saw them feeding in a grain field, and later, actually sitting together for a few seconds in a small bare tree. I got a good look at them through Terry's binoculars. This is actually a shot taken by our birder friend from B.C., Gary Davidson. "Our" Buntings against the snowy field, however, looked just the same.

      A few kilometres from Vegreville, I suddenly called out, "Stop!" I had seen a lump in a tree. We turned around and drove back..  A Great Horned Owl! We had seen and heard this large owl last March at the school in Tucson AZ, but only at night. Today it sat serenely on the edge of a grove of trees, and was even in the same spot on our way home again, an hour later. 

    "We're getting closer!" exclaimed Terry.

    About five km from Vegreville we hit the jackpot. "Stop!" I called out again. There on a pole in the middle of a field was a Snowy Owl! Our search was over. This is a female, so not pure white. Again, I'm grateful to Gary for allowing us to use his photo. "Our" owl faced the same way, and looked much the same, but was on a higher pole than this one. 

    "Good, we can have lunch now!" said Terry.

    AT Vegreville we discovered the temperature was -25 degrees Celsius, -33 with the wind chill, quite a bit colder than in Red Deer. Climbing out of the car, we only lingered long enough to take a selfie with the giant pysanka, then rushed back into the warmth to eat our delicious ham and Swiss cheese sandwiches on whole wheat buns. The sun shone in Vegreville, and we watched the metal egg partially rotate back and forth with the breeze like some sort of bizarre weathervane.

   

Weighing 5,000 lbs, and 31 feet high, the giant pysanka is constructed of aluminum triangles, set in place like a big, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

I was glad we finally solved our own puzzle: "Where on earth is that Snowy Owl?"

Thank you, Gary, for your wonderful photos.

    

The Dilemma of Christmas Baking

 Here are some of my thoughts about Christmas baking.

For years I agonized about the impossibility of duplicating our mum's wonderful Czech baking. It seemed so difficult to my mind. How could I translate those recipes which were in dekagrams to cups and teaspoons? In fact, there were no measurements for the smaller ingredients, like baking powder, various spices and lemon peel. In the European baking world, baking powder, vanilla sugar, and even the spices came in convenient packages, already formulated for one recipe. And what in the world was a dekagram? The recipe might read 7 dkg flour, whatever that was. My mother tried to convert the recipe to cups, but I felt that was only an approximation.

 The first scale I had was a heavy, clunky thing, taking up room in my cupboard, and needing me to carefully balance ingredients, waiting till the weight on the end of the bar was perfectly still. The whole operation seemed very difficult.

One year my brother, Ed, gave me a Christmas present that made baking so much simpler. It was a small metric scale, compact, with a measuring container conveniently sitting upside down on the scale when being stored. Despite the cracks this lid has developed from being dropped, measuring became a breeze. I learned to multiply the mysterious dekagrams by 10 to see how many grams of flour, etc., I needed. Even fruit is easily weighed, when a recipe calls for so many pounds of apples, for instance. My smartphone conveniently converts pounds to kilograms, which are easily converted back to grams.

In the old days, our family depended on Grandma to provide the wonderful baking. Even when I started to bake on my own, there came a point when I was reluctant to do so. Why bake, when butter and sugar was so bad for me? I imagined my arteries clogging with saturated fat. Sugar and chocolate simply gives me a headache, keeping me awake at night, and resulting in depressed thoughts and fuzzy thinking. 

My aha! moment came when I realized I was baking, not merely for myself, but for my family. With my mother gone, I became the baking Grandma. The boys now count on perník, pracny, and rohličky in their Christmas tins. That is when baking Christmas cookies became a way to serve them and bring them happiness.

These rohličky still need a dusting of icing sugar to make them complete, and to hide their freckles, because I used unblanched almonds for the first time. The other types of cookies are yet to be baked.

With all the extra time this pandemic brings, I may even bake Terry's favourites--butter tarts, Susan's Toffee Bar, and carrot pudding accompanied with his mother's special sauce. I don't have to eat any if I don't want to. That's the freeing part. 

It's all about others, not about myself.

Don't look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too. Philippians 2:4

Grandchildren Gallery 2020

Ellis with Stripey, the racoon

                                                                    Grandma and Nelly

  Stepping stones, 2020. From left: Matteo, 9, Elliston, 7, Alivienne, 5, Nellwyn, 3

                                                                                                     Someone has a birthday-Ellis is 7

Caleb, 18, and Emma, 16, with dad Christopher. Caleb has graduated from high school, and is taking a degree in video game design at La Salle College in Vancouver. So far, though, he is working online from home. Emma is working hard on her Grade 11 courses, from home also at the moment. 

The three cousins meet at Caleb's graduation party:

Caleb, Zachary, Emma. Zachary will be graduating in June 2021.

.

 Matteo poses with red foliage on our October hike.

Actually, the children were more interested in throwing rocks into a pond, than in walking around it.

Food always tastes so much better outdoors.

            

                                 "The hills are alive, with the sound of music..."

                                  A bed skirt turns into a girl skirt.

Grandma has been sewing, with some special fabric from Suzanne's childhood.

Livi is showing us the geocache their family had discovered.

 Zachary's school pic, almost 17!

My apologies about the formatting. The pictures are in random order; someday I'll learn how to make the presentation more interesting. Enjoy!