Odds and Ends

One of the Weirdest Sights We've Seen

I thought I had a story all ready to go for today but when I went to get the pictures to scan in to go with it I came across some other pictures that made me decide to go with that story instead.

The May 24th weekend (actually the one that Victoria Day is celebrated on - the Monday closest to the 24th) is also known around here as the start of the gardening season. Now this always means the garden centres are packed with customers to the point that sometimes you can't even find a parking spot and sometimes police are required to direct traffic around them. One year we thought we'd get a head start and take the Friday off work (giving us a 4 day weekend) and get over there a day ahead of the zoo.

I was busy cleaning up from breakfast and John decided to go get gas while he waited for me to finish and be ready to go over to the garden centre. He was back in no time flat - I thought he'd forgotten something like maybe his wallet but no he rushed upstairs and came down with his camera in hand and told me I had to come see something. I couldn't imagine what and kept asking him what he was taking me to see but he wouldn't answer - guess he didn't want to spoil my reaction. We walked around the corner & just down to the other end of our street where i was totally speechless and dumbfounded to see this.

What's really weird is this is a subdivision with tons of kids around and very curvy roads so he should have been driving slowly but the driver (who just lived 3 doors down) somehow misjudged his turn, hit some landscaping boulders and became airborne right into the top of the garage.   The owners evidently wanted to make sure it wouldn't happen again and put some extremely major boulders in that little garden after that.

This has been my contribution to Storytelling Sunday that started over at Sian's blog last year. She's changed it a tiny bit this year which she tells you about here.  February's stories can be found here. So why don't you grab a nice beverage and enjoy the stories?

Oh and btw, thankfully no one was hurt - just a lot of property damage.

 

Family Visit

I don't know what's with this post - I just can't seem to get with it and get it done.  I started this 5 days ago but I'm hoping I'll get it done & off today.

This post (my 800th one) is more than a week overdue - I've been so busy setting up the new scrapbooking area and getting it all organized that it seems I haven't touched my blog until yesterday when I did my Story Telling Sunday post.

A  week ago Thursday we had an overnight visit from P-Man, Miss M and their parents (otherwise known as my niece and her husband).   It was great but way too short.  Hope sometime they'll be able to stay longer.  They got here around 4 and were on their way by 11 the next morning.  (:  

Miss M has changed so much in the year since we last saw her but then again she's only 20 months (as of the 4th).  She follows her big brother every where and has to at least try what ever he is doing.

 
 Poor P-Man - as soon as he arrived he told me he'd forgot his Leapster.   I think he thought he was going to be bored visiting his "old" Great Aunt & Great Uncle.  But once they got out onto the deck and into the backyard things seemed a wee bit less boring but you sure can't tell it from this picture.

It was so nice out that day that we actually ate outside - well the kids did.  Somehow J just doesn't like eating out there.   I think it's because of the bees and other insects that seem to arrive as soon as food comes out.   P-Man got really interested in our bug zapper and before long had figured out how it worked.  Nothing gets by that boy.  :)
 

 Mum (my niece) checking out what Miss M is doing.

 
Love that smile!

 
Daddy reading from the Pushkin Fairy Tale book that we got P-Man in St. Petersburg.

 
Looks like sliders were just the ticket - but next time softer buns.

 
P-Man definitely has his Mum's red hair.

After everyone else went to bed my niece and I had a reallly great chat till we noticed it was midnight.  :)

Friday I had hoped to take them to the Halton County Radial Railway Museum as I thought P-Man would really like that but they decided that they wouldn't have enough time as they wanted to get to see her cousins in London as soon as they could.  Oh well maybe next time.  So instead after P-Man watched Lion King

 
 
we headed off to the park around the corner from us where the kids had fun climbing, swinging and sliding.   Course Miss M had to try everything her big brother did.  First though we tried the smaller slide - ok enough of that.

 
 
 
 
 
Finally P-Man found something that Miss M didn't try.

 
Ok, who needs shoes?

 
Oh - a new game - fill the shoes with sand.

 
Let's swing from the rings.
 
Me too!

 
Surprised Mummy by liking the swing.

 
Hmmm, she takes pictures like a scrapbooker.   Maybe I can get her interested.

 One of the pictures my niece got while she was lying down in the sand.
 
The next two pictures are taken by niece as well.

 
 

All too soon they thought they should be leaving and on their way to her cousins for the weekend.  Hope next time we'll have a bit more time to visit.

Yeah - She's Here!

We have a new little and I do mean little Great Niece.   My sister phoned me just before 9 PM last night to tell me that 3 weeks and a couple of days early, little Miss K (that's what she'll be called on here) had made her entrance just a short while before that.   She weighs 3 lb 3 oz. and that’s all I know for now.   Mum (Julie) is recovering and the last I heard Daddy (my nephew Jeff) was with Keira in the NICU watching over her incubator.  As my sister told me, Jeff said “Mum she’s awfully small”.  Hope to hear a lot more today.

A Surprise Meeting

 

On Lisa’s wedding day she thought she’d surprise her Grandpa.   One of the guests at the wedding was Terrance’s old boss and the up and coming political star of Dad’s party.   Once they knew that yes he would be attending Lisa and Terrance asked him if he’d meet her Grandpa telling him all about how he’d been a life long member of the party.   He immediately agreed to the surprise.

Even as Dad was losing his sight and was very deaf one of the must sees of his day was Question Period from the House of Commons.  We often wondered how he could even hear what was going on but he constantly showed that he got everything that was discussed.  That’s how important his politics were to him.

The day of the wedding arrived and Dad was so proud and happy to be attending his “Susie’s” wedding.  She’d arrived so late in his life that he often said he’d never get to see her get married.  After the service John & I got him bundled into his coat and wheeled him towards the elevator which meant we had to go past the room where Lisa, Terrance, the bridal party & both sets of parents were having a toast before heading off for more pictures.  As Lisa greeted her Grandpa, Terrance walked up with the surprise.  I bent down to tell Dad who was coming to meet him when Dad blurted out to him “Why aren’t you running?”  Nothing wrong with his eyesight that day - he knew exactly who he was and it was obvious who Dad’s choice for leader was.  As for the answer to Dad’s question that will have to come later.

As happy as he was to meet him it didn’t overshadow his joy at Lisa’s wedding and being with his whole family but he sure talked about it from then till he passed away a short 2 months later.

A Love Story

As Valentines Day draws near, I thought the perfect story to tell for this month’s Story Telling Sunday would be about my parents and with my sister agreeing here it is.  We’ve heard the story loads of times but I thought I’d put it in writing.

Many, many years ago, the early 1920’s, a young boy was smitten with the young girl who had just moved in 2 doors up from him.   She had just moved to Canada from Scotland and didn’t know anyone.  He was ever so shy but so wanted to ask her out.  How could he do it though?  His father found out about this and took the matter into his hands, asking the young girl’s father if his son could take the girl out.  And so their first date was arranged – they’d go to a matinee.

We never did hear what they saw or where they saw it but what we did hear from Mum was how they parted on that day.  They walked up the street from the streetcar talking and came upon Dad’s house first.   Now we always thought Dad was a gentleman but I guess he hadn’t learned one thing what with it being his first date.   He turned and thanked her for the date and walked into his house leaving Mum out on the sidewalk to walk to her house alone.

You would think with such an inauspicious start that would have been it.  But no – they continued to date for quite a few years.  Of course by then Dad knew to walk Mum to her door before heading to his. They’d go  to movies and hockey games among other things all the while walking to them or using the streetcars to where they wanted to go.

Finally in 1929, just days before the collapse of Wall Street, he proposed.   They thought they’d get married the next year but with the depression in full swing it was 1933 before they got married.  Their happy married years were marred by the Second World War – Dad enlisted as soon as war was declared in September 1939 and went overseas in January 1940.  Mum wouldn’t see him again until July of 1945 when he returned home.  At one point during that period she went 13 weeks with not a word from him or about him.  She joked in later years that her hair turned white then.

Everyone who knew them always spoke of their love and devotion to each other.  Their love affair continued until 1976 when Mum was sadly taken away from us.  But in Dad’s case his love of his childhood sweetheart continued until his death in 2004.  He never remarried and always spoke of her.  It was a great comfort to us when he did go that he was back with the one and only love of his life.
 

Yesterday & Today Course Bringing Back Memories

I'm taking this Ali Edwards workshop over at Big Picture Classes and one of the assignments in week 2 is to go through your old pictures.   I'm having so much fun doing this.  There aren't very many pictures of me when I was a child and teenager (once my Dad got his movie camera it was pretty well forget about still pictures) but the ones I have are really bringing back memories, like this picture for instance from the early 1960's.   It's just before going to my confirmation at church and looking at it I remembered my Mum making that dress for me and all the memories from that night.  She was really good at sewing while I am practically useless at it.  :)  But I did pick up her talent for knitting.

 
 

Gail's Christmas Club 2 Pictures

I found some pictures to share that should have gone on my Gail's Christmas Club 2  post from last Sunday.  They were on slides and I had digitized them earlier this year.

Dad's perfectly tinsled tree.

 
The bowing tree
 

JYC 2010 - Day 4 My Perfect Christmas

What’s my idea of a perfect Christmas – well that is really easy.   One where my entire immediate family is all together – my sister and brother-in-law, niece & her family, nephew & his family and us.  I don’t care where we are, just that we are together.  We could be at any of our places just so long as we were all together.  The last time we were all together was Christmas of 1993 when the 2 of us & Dad flew down to Halifax to spend Christmas with them and Lisa & Jeff were still in school.

There would be a light coating of snow on the ground, but only for Christmas Day.  Another thing I would like in my perfect Christmas is to go to either the Nutcracker Suite or to the Rockefeller Center Christmas show that the Rockettes put on.  I think that either one would be so neat to see.

JYC 2010 - Day 3 (A Little Bit of a Catch Up)

Ahh – Christmas cards.   I love getting them and the day of Day 3’s prompt about Christmas cards we actually got our first one for the year.   I was a bit worried about opening it this time as the return address label was just in Effie’s name.   Had something happened to Bill and we hadn’t heard?  Thankfully all was ok and it was just that the address labels were all in Effie’s name.

Now back to the cards – for a few years I made ours and really enjoyed doing it but boy was I ever pushed to get them out in time, especially the ones for friends & relatives in the U.S.  I don’t think some people realize all the thought, time & effort that goes into making something home-made.   But after getting a couple of comments about homemade cards being cheap, I thought you know it’s just not worth the effort if people don’t like it.  So now, we’re back to sending out store-bought cards but I must say the number is definitely down from what we used to send out – we’re down to about 25 with a few old friends getting a newsy little letter/note included of what we’ve been up to this year.

The cards are bought and even the stamps ($.57 within Canada & $1.00 to the U.S – boy has that ever shot up).   Now to just get them done before Friday the 10th so that we meet the deadline for mailing to the U.S.

Gail's Christmas Club 2

This is the second installment of my Christmas memories for Sian's Christmas Club (see my post from last Sunday).

With all the Christmas tree decoration boxes up in the living room waiting for me to attack them I started thinking of decorating the trees when I was a child.  It's one of my earliest memories of Christmas.

It always started with Dad going out & getting the tree – it had to be a Scotch Pine (for some reason that I never knew).   We'd think we'd found the perfect tree, but no our picks were never quite tall enough for him - he always seemed to pick a tree that there seemed to be no way it would fit in the house, let alone in the living room.  It would sit outdoors on the front porch for a day before coming in the house but before it came in he'd end up out on the porch chopping off some of the bottom of the tree just so he could get it in the door.   Finally it was in and then came the problem of getting it just so, it had to be perfectly in the centre of the living room windows and carefully tied to eye-hooks screwed into the bottom side of the sills so that there was no danger of it tipping over.

Mum would unwrap the decorations – a lot of them very breakable unfortunately (but that`s another story).  Dad would tell us what decoration he wanted and we`d carefully carry it over to him while he put it on the tree (as we got older we were allowed to actually put decorations on too).  But the biggest thing was tinsel – he was definitely a perfectionist & placed each one on there individually.  It took a very long time!  But boy was it ever worth it when he was finished.

The funniest thing one year though was with all his making sure the tree was absolutely perfect if you looked at it from the hallway & got a side view of it - it looked like the top of it was bowing toward the dining room where we would eventually put the nativity scene in future years. 

Unfortunately I don't have any still pictures of our trees from those days  because once Dad got his movie camera the other camera got completely forgotten about.  (: