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.

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 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!

She'll be Comin' Round the Mountain

 This was our choice for a Thanksgiving weekend hike, about an hour south-east of Red Deer. 

On the top of the cliff the temperature was about 13 degrees Celsius when we started, so at first we wore all our layers. 

The road to the bottom of the river bed (our same Red Deer River) was blocked off, so instead of driving down it, we took the "short cut", wending our way down amongst the hoodoos.

 That took 40 minutes. There were plenty of trails, in between the hoodoos, but you had to watch your step. We could've walked down the road, but this was more interesting.

I always pray that God would make me "as surefooted as a deer, enabling me to stand on mountain heights." Psalm 18: 33.  

 

Deer tracks imbedded in the soft sandstone.

 

 

We didn't stay at the river very long, as Terry was sure he had found the direction to go on his All Trails app.

The sun didn't shine all day, but it was much warmer at the bottom. I shed my sweater. Terry keeps his down jacket on.

The trail winds through low Wolf Willow bushes onto a grassy meadow.

This chicory flower looks a little misplaced.

Cacti even in the badlands of Alberta!

                                                                    Lichen on a rock.

The trail seemed clear here, and so much easier to walk on, but at some point, we made a wrong turn, and ended up making a complete circle. Not the one we were supposed to make on the All Trails map. We opted not to climb to the top of the buffalo jump. It was much higher than the bluff ahead of Terry, and stands as a dry island overlooking the river.

Some of the irregular terrain we hopped over on the way down.

We chose to return to the parking lot via the road. Once we found it, that is. One foot in front of the other, but I made it! The health app said we'd climbed 41 stories. 

 Leaves in the deep ruts like a river of gold. The road is supposed to be "under development," so vehicles could access the picnic area and boat launch, as they had in the past.

                                                      The Red Deer River meanders along.

Our meanderings took us 7.1 km (4.4 miles) , and we walked 12,800 steps. That's enough for one day!

By 2:00 pm I was eating my delicious tuna wrap with garden lettuce. Temperature had climbed to 18 degrees Celsius. A satisfying day!

French Camp Revisited

Birthday Dates COVID Style

Birthday dates this year with the grandsons was an opportunity to finally use the Grandparent Paddle-passes we had ordered the children for Christmas. The boys' reactions were so different. Seven-year-old Ellis begged to go closer to the spray of the fountain,

 Ellis' day was sunny

Matteo's day threatened rain

while two days later, nine-year-old Matteo put up his  umbrella just in case a few raindrops landed on him.
















Fortunately, for this second journey around Bower Ponds, the rain held off beyond a few spits. Awesome to see baby fluff balls swimming with their duck parents

Goldeneye babies rest on the dock

 Twenty-one teenaged geese swam with a parent [caregiver?] at each end to keep them in line. A muskrat sat near the bulrushes calmly chewing the fresh green leaves. Grandpa and I couldn't find the nest we had seen the first day, close to the edge of the water.













To avoid sitting in a restaurant, we chose a take-out lunch. It seemed funny to us to eat McDonalds pancakes at home. Grandpa's pancakes are so much better, in my opinion. But these came with their own generous container of pancake syrup, and were eagerly gobbled up by
each boy and Grandpa.

Ellis asked to play at our house with the LEGO, and didn't call it girly LEGO this year. The boys hadn't been over for at least six months, because of our being away, and the isolation situation, so Grandma's LEGO was a novelty again. His imagination took off, and he adapted a cake in the Birthday Party set and set it in front of Teddy, the hero of the latest story for the grandchildren.

Seven tiny animals gaze up at the tall candle on the cake

Ellis knew Teddy would like to ride down the banister.

Matteo took the entire salon set apart (it being the most complicated set) and put it back together lickety-split. My job was to find pieces, but he usually grabbed them faster than I could find them. 







I was impressed that he would run back up three flights of stairs and find our unit by himself, to retrieve his unfinished mango juice.
He knew how to text his parents, on my phone, that he was on his way home. He's growing up fast, and is a tall nine-year old.

Matteo

When the boys got hungry again, they sampled their uncle's birthday cake, and watched a tall sparkler burn down in the dark of the laundry room.

                                                       







That was cool, as we didn't see fireworks this year.

Happy birthday, Matteo and Ellis!