While I do get to relax and do a lot of reading and cooking sometimes takes time, if I want to go anywhere I have to go across the canal (the house is on the Island). Since I have been here it has still been the rainy season and there has been only about one or two days without rain. So, to cross the canal (about 25 feet) in the rowboat that does not have oars but a single paddle I have to first bail the boat: a chore I really don’t like.

Photo credit: Wayne Church III

Last week, though was a busy week. Monday I went across twice – once to do some grocery shopping during a lull in the rain and once I went across on the caretaker’s boat to get some money my landlord had sent so he could pay the internet bill and get that reconnected.

While I don’t mind washing my “smalls” and tshirts, shorts and nightgowns, I really find it difficult to wring out towels and sheets – and get them dry on the laundry lines between downpours and there really is nowhere to hang up large items inside the house. Tuesday, I went across to drop off my laundry at “Tres Laundry Mat”. For $15 BZ – about $8 or $9 CAD, Terese will do a load of laundry – using my scent free laundry soap and no softener – and dry and fold it. Actually, I think the work is done by her daughter (grandaughter?) Shakira. If it is in early, done the same day. Mine, once across in a day is enough for me and I leave it for the next day to pick up.

Wednesday, my trip across was to pick up the rental car I had booked to go to Dandriga for my visa extension. I took advantage of the opportunity to do some grocery shopping at a farther away grocery store that has a better selection than those down this end of town – which are much less expensive but don’t carry some things!

Thursday, of course was my adventure to Dandriga and back – and then the joy of getting home to find the internet was back!

Friday, except for making a fresh pot of yoghurt, I gave myself the day off. Yesterday saw me doing tshirts and nightgowns and hanging them up between downpours and actually getting them dry.

I try each day to do something useful so today I bailed the boat and took the garbage across the canal to the container for the (early) Monday morning pick up. As I got back there was a big crack of thunder and the rain started again ….

The other useful thing I did was to clean the plastic chairs on the front porch that were filthy, grubby and looked awful. Not a perfect job but I cleaned them down with bleach and a scrub brush and put them out in the rain to rinse off!

Having done useful things today, I think I will take leftover kedgeree from the freezer and have it with a Shopska salad (tomatoes, cucumbers, green onions and grated feta cheese) for dinner before a desert of delicious coffee coconut ice cream I found the other day when I had the car and could get it home quickly!

Happy Sunday!

Yesterday’s project was a trip to the Immigration Office in Dandriga to get a Visa Extension – having rented a car for the day.

When I picked up the rental car on Wednesday afternoon, the “covers everything, we don’t even have to do the walkaround” insurance was available so off I went. I stopped for groceries on my way back to the rental.

I also stopped into the Digicell office (my local cell, pay-as-you-go, provider). Given that my internet had been out from Sunday morning (a story for another day) I had used my Canadian cell phone – which charges $15 CAD per day for “roaming” – to call home as I had been totally out of touch. Then I got a message Wednesday morning that I owed $118 Belize (about $80 CAD) and if I did not pay up I risked being cut off. Turns out = not my charge and they would put it on “Garth”‘s account where it belonged and that I still had $18 BZ available. After the hassle of the internet being cut off, I had thought that my local cell had been incestuous with my Canadian cell in some sort of I-phone way and that I was going to pay, big time. What a relief to find Garth, not I, was going to have to deal with the problem. ps – don’t know Garth!

Thursday morning, I bailed the boat (yet again! It rains most days here in the rainy season) I headed across the canal and found this fella on the dock

What was not available when I picked up the car was the GPS I had ordered! I do not have a Belize map, Google maps won’t work on my local cell phone (which is, perhaps, a 2G model of more than 10 years ago) so I had to figure out how to get to Dandriga, a place whose airport is familiar from quick stops on the baby plane from Belize City to Placencia but otherwise unknown to me.

So, what to do? I drove into Placencia and stopped at the local police station where the very pleasant desk sergeant gave me very good directions: head up Placencia Rd to the first roundabout out of town, turn right to the first T-junction, turn right and then turn left at the Ecumenical School and follow that to the Immigration Office. Well, all was well until I headed down the Ecumenical school road and got thoroughly lost. So, I stopped in at something called the Belize Amnesty Office (they work with migrants to help them take advantage of an amnesty for being in the country illegally – something I was trying to avoid). They gave me directions that got me to the Immigration Office where I spent 5 minutes filling in paperwork, 5 minutes paying the whopping fee ($100 USD) and 5 minutes while the Visa Officer filled in and attached the Visa Extension to my passport.

Mission accomplished I headed back to the car — only to find a ticket for $50 BZ (about $33 CAD) for “failure to stop at a stop sign” on “St. Vincent Rd”. Well, most of the stop signs were behind trees but I managed, I guess, to see all but one. That, or the cop thought my rental car/tourist/foreigner status was fair game! The ticket threatened all kinds of things if not paid within 30 days and I was so unamoured of Dandriga that returning to pay the ticket was not something I really wanted to do. So I set off looking for a police station to find out where to pay the ticket and got myself thoroughly lost.

Giving in to being lost, I saw a police truck at the side of a road and two policemen probably picking up their lunch from the bbq stand. When I showed them the ticket and asked where to pay it, the more senior one started giving me directions. He soon realized I did not have a clue of the geography of the town and told me to wait a couple minutes till they had their orders and then to follow them. I did. I would never have found the place so his kindness was much appreciated.

The ticket office was a hole in the wall with a small opening in the glass where one could hand over documents and cash. The area in front of the office was under a huge, well-worn tarp – gift of the People of the United States, through USAID under “hurricane relief”. Given the sun, more than happy to wait my turn sitting in my socially distanced chair under the tarp.

I then went back to my chariot and headed back. Dandriga was not a very inviting looking town – much bigger than Placencia but with worse roads, one way streets and hidden stop signs. Most of the people I saw were locals trying to make a living but I did see a few, white, grey haired, dreadlocked, leather-skinned expats wandering around. Kicking the metaphorical dust off my feet, I managed to head back to Placencia. I stopped en route at a Chicken Fi Wi store and cafe for a much needed potty break and a cup of coffee – nescafe, hot water and powdered creamer – and managed to get thoroughly lost before hitting the right road and getting back to Placencia where I filled the car and returned it – mentioning casually that I was not impressed with the “sleeping policemen” of Placencia. I managed to hit only one: I never saw it at all as it was just in the shadow of a large tree and had no yellow zebra stripes like the others. I was only going about 25 kph but, boy, that was a bounce! Saw no damage to the car so was happy!

All in all, I have no inclination to return to Dandriga. The only food joint, besides the roadside bbq’s, I saw was the Chicken Fi Wi and, as a pescatarian and coffee afficionado, no need to go back. Next time, I may take the caretaker of this property’s advice and take the “hokey pokey” (water taxi) to Independencia and a taxi from the dock to the Immigration Office and back – he says it is cheaper and it sounds like more local colour!

The car rental guy drove me back to the laundry nearby my rental where I picked up the clean load of laundry, walked back to the dock, loaded the boat, relearning not to get my fingers between the dock and the boat (yup, I have a big bruise under my left index finger nail) and got back to the rental to find my internet was back on! A very good ending to a day that, at times, was trying.

Not sure why, but every year I wonder, once the garden is planted, whether it will ever get busy so that I can get harvesting … and every year it does so so quickly that I am suddenly having to go-go-go to harvest. Needless to say, every year is different: the weather is different, the seeds are different, some things get started (and start well) while others, not so much! This year is no different.

Yup, those are big bowls – 21 quarts of gooseberries from our 3 bushes harvested this year. Last year was only 8 quarts – so we gave 2 quarts to a neighbour to make jam, made a batch of jam ourselves, ground some up to make yoghurt-gooseberry popsicles (I love them!) and put the rest, whole, in freezer bags of the correct size to make pie filling. This was after spending hours topping and tailing them! But so worth it.

While they don’t grow in my garden, we love strawberries and go to pick them at a local pick-your-own to make jam and crushed strawberries, again for yoghurt-strawberry popsicles. I have some one cup plastic Ball jars that I use to freeze the fruit – then pop them out into a large freezer bag so I can reuse the Ball jars!

I started this a couple of weeks ago, and, as predicted, immediately got go-go-go harvesting. We now have been picking blueberries – making jam and putting several quarts into the freezer (just put in container and freeze: wash as they come out and you are good to go) for our grandson’s favourite: Grampa’s waffles with maple syrup and blueberries – one in each square! We hit our local roadside stand when our raspberries failed in the dry and heat so we have some raspberries in the freezer. We also picked up half a bushel of #2 cucumbers and made 16 quarts of dill pickles and picked up 15 lbs of carrots and made GG’s Dilled Carrots that we love. The shelves in the “cold room” under the front porch are filling up!

We are now eating primarily from the garden. The photo above shows zucchini casserole with zucchini, dill, parsley and green onions from the garden; salad with lettuces, arugula, peppers, broccoli, tomatoes that were home grown; parmesan bean salad using our beans and onions; spicy cucumber salad; stewed tomatoes and peas from our garden. The salad dressing is blue cheese – homemade. We can sure tell at this time of year that it is August. Yesterday was local corn on the cob after we put the corn from 4 dozen cobs in the freezer and peach custard pie from local peaches after canning 20 quarts. My cold room overfloweth.

The roma style as well as the beefsteak tomatoes are now starting to ripen as well as the eggplants – tonight’s dinner will be burani bonjon (a spicy Afghan dish of tomatoes and eggplant with mint yoghurt sauce) over rice and a green salad with cumin tahini homemade dressing … ah, the joys of gardening.

In keeping with my decision to write as the spirit moves me rather than in keeping with a theme, my topic today was a memory that came up elsewhere on social media. One advantage of what I did in the foreign service was that after I retired early at 55 I continued to work as a contract foreign service officer doing contracts ranging from 6 weeks to 3 months in various parts of the world but could turn down a contract or choose not to work between contracts i.e. work part time, do the fun part of my job that I enjoyed but have far less responsibility. It has been wonderful.

So, the memory that came up today was leaving 10 years ago for a 6 week contract in Santiago, Chile. While I did have to work Monday to Friday, I did have weekends off and, if there was a statutory holiday scheduled I might even have a long weekend, travel and see the country I was in. It happened that there was a long weekend while I was in Santiago and having got that far I saw no reason not to hop on a plane and head to Rapa Nui – also known as Easter Island – for a long weekend. I was also very lucky since flights are sometimes cancelled due to weather but mine, both going and returning, took off and arrived right on time. The experience began at the airport where the line up to check in was long … and consisted mostly of islanders returning home after shopping trips to Santiago and pushing huge carts containing almost every type of goods imaginable – including the kitchen sink – to be checked in as “excess baggage”. With my weekender suitcase I appeared to be a real anomaly. Eventually, all was dealt with and the plane took off!

Having rented a small room with access to kitchen facilities, I spent the first afternoon just walking around Hanga Roa, the main town and, in the evening, visiting the Ahu Tahai moai at the harbour while the sun set.

The next two days were in the company of a delightful New Zealander tour guide you had married an Easter Islander. The first day he took me on the South Coast Tour which included the Rango Raraku – quarry – as well as various sites where the final moai were placed on the shoreline.

The second day we headed out on the West Island Tour which took us to an early Islander village that overlooked two small outlying islands, the volcanic lake Rano Kau, and yet more moai.

I saw so much in three days and took so many pictures knowing that it was highly unlikely that I would ever get back to Rapa Nui. I wish I could go back but the experience is something to savour and I do. How the Polynesians found this island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is largely hidden by the mists of time but, having seen the coasline, they must have been very brave.

After our honeymoon we settled down, me working as a nurse and Sahib continuing his employment, and had three daughters. Our travel was mostly camping at Provincial parks in Ontario with one trip to Portland, Maine via Quebec, Vermont and New Hampshire and home via New Brunswick and Quebec. Busy years, needless to say.

Then I decided to go back to school – starting part-time and then full-time I completed a BA (Hons) in Religious Studies and went on to an MA programme. However, we were running out of money so I wrote, on a whim, the foreign service exam. To my surprise, I passed and over the next 15 months we went through the hiring process: interview (passed), security checks (passed) and medical exams for the whole family (passed) until I was offered a position as a Foreign Service Officer. We carefully considered the options and decided it would be a good move for the family: travel, adventure, good schooling, better salary for me while for Sahib, whose employment looked very iffy, an opportunity to do something new.

So, after finishing all the MA course work, we left academia behind and we sold our house and packed up all our stuff which the government moved to Ottawa for us. And, there we stayed for 18 months – buying a house and settling in a bit.

After completing training assignments and courses at headquarters, it was time to have 6 weeks training in an overseas mission. In my case, it was to be Port-au-Prince, Haiti and I was looking forward to the warmth and sunshine of the tropics in January and February. Unfortunately, there was a coup in Haiti and my overseas training was reassigned to Paris and off I went.

It was different working in Paris but still fascinating. My hotel room – with a small kitchenette with microwave and bar fridge – was in the 8th Arondissement near our Embassy so I could enjoy walking back and forth, especially at noon for lunch. The staff that I worked with who were training me were very friendly. I got out and saw more of Paris, climbing the Eiffel Tower, Versailles, and museums galore. I enjoy dining at the restaurants on the Champs d’Elysees, and simply wandering the streets and taking it all in. I went back to the Louvre to see the Turner gallery – but it was closed and the paintings off for repair/maintenance. Sadly, it rained for 40 of the 42 days I was there and the Seine was flooded higher than the walkways at the sides. The Batteaux Mouches were parked since they could not fit under the bridges of Paris the water was so high!

I still have the letters I wrote to my family while there – and the letters they wrote me. We certainly missed each other and the children were sad they could not go to Paris themselves. I took some pictures but all I had was a poor quality disposable camera so they are not very good – and less so after scanning them into the computer 20+ years later. My first actual solo adventure where I travelled by myself, found my way around and saw what I wanted when I wanted. I have since had plenty of opportunity to travel alone and have learned to like doing so – finding travel companions – or not – in many places of the world.

After travelling to the Netherlands, I knew I really, really wanted to travel. Unfortunately, I had little opportunity until 1975 when I travelled with a friend to San Francisco for 10 days. No pictures survive but we got around and saw Fisherman’s Wharf and the Golden Gate Bridge while visiting her cousin near Santa Rosa where I bought a cream coloured sweater with attached scarf for the princely sum of $25 USD (the Canadian dollar then worth $1.05 USD) that I still wear as my Spring/Fall go to outerwear. The buttons have been replace and the scarf resewn on but otherwise it looks brand new and keeps me warm on cool days.

Following that trip, I went back to college and graduated as a Registered Nurse when there were very few jobs in Ontario for nurses. I was offered a job in Alpine, Texas and went down during Spring break to look the town and the job over. I found out they wanted me to work straight nights, as charge nurse (only RN) in a 63 bed hospital with ICU, CCU, Labour and Delivery as well as regular beds – that was two hours, by road ambulance, from El Paso where they would send complex patients. I felt that a newly minted RN (me) would definitely lack the experience required for the job and turned it down. Alpine was a lovely town and the Big Bend National Park nearby was impressive. I just was not ready for that kind of challenge. Instead, I joined the part-time “pool” at the hospital where I trained and took a part-time job at a nearby craft store until I got hired full-time at the hospital 6 months later.

Still wanting to travel farther than San Francisco and Texas, I then applied to CUSO for a position as a nurse in Sierra Leone and was well along in the application process when I started dating the man who became my husband. We had known each other since we were small children and attended the same church and schools. I dropped the application and we married three years later. Needless to say, we wanted to travel and, for our honeymoon – which we thought then was our last hurrah as travellers – we went to Paris for a week followed by a week on the Côte d’Azur. Our reason for choosing the Côte d’Azur was a series of books, the Lanny Budd books, by Upton Sinclair that, in large measure took place on the Côte d’Azur.

We had a lovely time exploring Paris on foot and by Metro: visited many museums including the Jeu de Palmes, the Berthe Morrisey museum, the Louvre – including the JMW Turner exhibit where I fell in love with his paintings, Versailles, the Champs-Élysées, restaurants serving moules et frites. As part of booking our trip with a travel agency, we booked two nights on arrival and one prior to departure at a central Paris hotel. I was so jet lagged the first day that Sahib went out for a solo walk and found the Hotel Malar where we moved after the second night and to which we returned after cancelling the original booking.

Having explored Paris, on my 30th birthday, we (instead of blowing the bank dining at Maxim’s as we had planned) took the Train Bleu overnight to Beaulieu sur Mer – a central spot on the Côte d’Azur discovered while reading Gourmet magazine! On arrival in Beaulieu sur Mer, Sahib sat on our luggage at the train station while I walked up to the nearby Hotel Victoria (found on a map at the train station) and arranged our room for the week! It was a lovely old hotel, huge room and lovely balcony (too cold to sit on, though, in February) which is now, as we discovered returning for our 30th anniversary, a very upscale condo building with no entry to mere plebes.

Sadly, the rest of our pictures were slides that are gone. However, we had a lot of fun hiking around the area after heading to the “Codec” for wine, baguette, gorgonzola cheese and sausage or pate for our picnic lunch. We hiked around Cap Ferrat, Eze, Nice and Juan-Les-Pins (home of Lanny Budd), visited the villa of the Ephrussi Rothchilds and the Villa Kyrios, rented a car and went to the glass blowing factories of Biot (I still have a mini pitcher we bought my great Aunt Molly who needed something to hold her milk for her tea and a picture of a deer we bought my mother in an antique shop as well as a five candle candelabra in silver that was our main souvenir) and Monte Carlo – all in a week of exploring the area. We also had lovely dinners at a restaurant in the side street near the hotel called Les Agaves. Our introduction to French cuisine was well enjoyed – especially bouride (a clear fish soup) with aioli.

After that trip, we planned to start our family and never expected to travel to that extent again … wow, were we wrong!

I have itchy feet. I love to travel and I really think my mother’s adventurous spirit had much to do with it.

I was born in Belleville ON where my father was working for Northern Electric installing the radar at a nearby military base. When I was 10 months old the job was done and he moved on to install the radar at the airport in Gander NL – and my mother and I soon joined him after my first ever plane ride. According to my mother, this was on a Canadair North Star – as the DC4 was known at the time. I gather my first flight was very unpleasant for my mother as not only did I cry throughout but we were both quite sick due to plenty of turbulence. Later my father moved on to a military base near Morin Heights PQ where my brother was born. He then left Northern Electric and went to work for Westinghouse in Hamilton ON. For a small town farm girl, my mother had already travelled pretty far!

She stayed a housewife but when I was about 7 or 8 she started volunteering for the African Student’s Foundation at nearby McMaster University and became their “secretary” for a couple of years until she applied for and became McMaster’s International Student Advisor/Lounge Secretary. Her job was to supervise the International Student Lounge, arrange get togethers and resources for the international students and, in August and September, help the students with everything from pick up at the airport in Malton to finding accommodation to figuring out class schedules. By this point in time I had already been given my grandfather’s and my great-uncle Harry’s stamp collections and become fascinated by stamps and the countries they came from. My mother’s new job was a joy to me as she mailed out, with early information that went to the international students, postcards to be returned with arrival information as well as information on whether the student needed accommodation to be found. Needless to say, some of the students ended up spending a few nights in our spare bedroom on arrival.

In those days, many of our international students came as Commonwealth Scholars while others were independent or children of former Commonwealth Scholars returning to their parent’s alma mater. Once Mom was done with the postcards she gave them to me and I plundered them for the stamps. Many African countries were represented, India, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), Pakistan, Singapore & Malaysia.

We often had the students to our house or the International Student Lounge for potluck parties and I really enjoyed the wide variety of new foods they brought to these events. Sometimes the students would spend Christmas with our family and I have a photo of all of our family and two students from Nigeria who came to dinner. Other students became even more part of our family. One, Stan, was a geology major and went to work in a mine in Sudbury. We were devastated when he was killed in a mining accident but a scholarship established in his memory is still awarded at McMaster University:

The Stanford N. Katambala Earth Sciences Prize

Established in 1965 by contributions from friends and associates of Stanford N. Katambala, a Year 3 Honours Geology student from Tanzania, killed in a mine accident in Northern Ontario in September 1964.

Another student, Alfred, from Kenya, became a part of our family spending summer holidays and Christmas and Easter vacations with us. I am not sure what work Alfred got on campus but he would go into work and come home with Mom. He had stories of Africa that were fascinating and one Christmas a cousin of his, who was a student in Maryland came up for Christmas with us – and gave me a manicure kit in a green leather case. Unbelievably, all these years later, I still have it! She eventually joined the Kenyan diplomatic service and served in Washington DC and visited us once more while there. Alfred went on to Glasgow where he completed a law degree and married his wife Ruth and their first child was born. My parents travelled to Glasgow for Alfred’s wedding and entertained us for years with stories of Sauchiehall St. and Glasgow. Eventually, Alfred, Ruth and their child returned to Kenya where he set up what is still a prominent law firm in Eldoret, Kenya that is continued by his son.

My mother, in a brave move for one of her generation, travelled alone to visit Alfred and Ruth and their family in Eldoret, in 1970. Her stories of the airport in Cairo en route – the heat and the soldiers with guns surrounding the plane while it refueled – and the rough state of the roads in the hills of Kenya simply whetted my appetite and longing for travel.

In the meantime, my family had moved away from Hamilton and, in our new town, become involved with the Experiment in International Living which then wanted to contribute to international understanding through placing students in homestays in other countries. We hosted a number of students from the UK and India and I applied, when I was 17, for a homestay in The Netherlands and was accepted for a 2 month homestay in June and July. They still exist – see http://www.experiment.org and appear to do much more than they did “back in the day”. Before I went, a Dutch colleague of my father’s gave me some Dutch lessons which I really enjoyed since I was then studying French, German, Spanish and Latin in my high school.

. There was a one week orientation session at Upper Canada College where we met our team leaders (I am not sure my parents ever realized they had turned their 17 year old daughter over to a male team leader that was 19 … however he was fantastic and far more mature than one would expect a 19 year old to be). The group heading to the Netherlands was the team leader and three of us: myself, someone else from nearby in Ontario and a girl from Newfoundland. And then we were off! My parents picked me up from UCC and drove me (and one other participant) to Buffalo NY to catch a charter flight to London that had been arranged for our summer contingent of exchange students headed to various European, African and Asian countries. Our charter flight was overnight and delayed by an air traffic controllers strike so we arrived in London mid-morning and boarded a couple of buses at Stanstead Airport with UK hosts from “the Experiment” on board – and taken on a whirlwind bus tour (no getting off) around most of the major tourist attractions in central London then dropped off at our hostel for the night. Next morning we were introduced to the continental breakfast and then boarded a train to Dover and the Ostende ferry. We crossed to Ostende in Belgium on a very rough crossing where everyone else was leaning over the rails while I was so tired I curled up on the luggage racks and slept. From Ostende our small group took the train through Brussels, Luxembourg and on to Rotterdam where we got off and headed to a hostel. We spent a couple of days in the company of the local Experiment liaison person visiting museums and Scheveningen Beach and The Hague. Then we attended a week long camp in Enkhuizen followed by a week long camp in Appeldoorn: all filled with international students. So much to learn and see and do!

I then had a 4 week homestay with a family in Enschede in eastern Holland which I really enjoyed – meeting other young people, attending classes at a local secondary school, travelling to visit the Nordoost Polder, Groningen, the Canadian cemetery at Holten and a wave pool (somewhere!) that was filled with salt water and had a wave machine! I also attended a family anniversary party of my host family and learned to enjoy Heineken at local bars as well as visiting across the border in Germany one day. So much has faded but I had the time of my 17 year old life and it certainly was but an introduction to the travel I have done since!

Flour continued to arrive to the point where I think we now have over 50 pounds of various flours! As a friend pointed out, if this were April 2020 when stores ran out of flour altogether, we could have started a black market in flour.

Before the last lot of the flour arrived (whole wheat, all purpose, chick pea and green banana – yes, they make green banana flour for the gluten free crowd) there was an actual delivery of flowers:

A small bouquet of daffodils and baby’s breath for me and red and white roses for Sahib!

After that arrived, my youngest called and “fessed up” – including that she had sent the florist one of our wedding pictures showing the sheaf of daffodils I carried 40 years ago and the florist copied it in miniature for today! Lovely.

Then dinner on the back porch in 25 C weather! Cauliflower curry, rice, salad, blue cheese dressing and fruit salad with homemade wine – much lighter than the baked chicked, potatoes of some sort, a veg I have forgotten and apple pie with a sharp cheddar.

So, our youngest (now almost 35) was visiting for the weekend a couple of weeks ago with her two of our eight grandchildren and I noted that today is our 40th wedding anniversary. I said that I thought it was an achievement our children should recognize while Sahib was not enthusiastic (as he isn’t in celebrating special days of any sort!). I thought, at the least, I should get flowers!

Well, in the ongoing Pandemic World, our three kids, like most normal people, have learned to shop online effectively – even from thousands of miles away in Canada (VCR area, Edmonton AB, and Burlington). They have also roped in my brother and his wife in Edmonton and a friend in Germany! I don’t know who sent what beyond the Amazon delivery from my brother and his wife yesterday that gave a foretaste of things to come:

Yup, my flowers became flours! And, I should have plenty of good baking days ahead since this is the haul starting at 10 am and about every other hour since until now at just after 3 pm:

I would not be surprised were there more to come (maybe even some flowers beyond those on the e-card sent by my brother?)!

We actually had a celebratory dinner last night since our favourite restaurant is closed Sundays and enjoyed a feast of sushi that we opted, in these 6th wave of Pandemic times, to pick up and bring home!

And, looking at this picture, I think about past travels – both for work and pleasure – as I note the table cloth and napkins made from fabric bought on our 30th Anniversary trip to St. Paul de Vence, France, placemats bought in Bogota, Colombia on a work trip, jade chopsticks and rests bought during a work trip to Beijing, China, a ceramic tile I painted in Ankara, Turkey while visiting a friend, the hotpad under the bottle of wine that was my grandparents and which sat on my mother’s kitchen for years after their death until it came to me, the grass hot pads under the daffodils from our garden – one of which was, again, my grandparents, the rest of which were bought at the Naschtmarkt when we were living in Vienna, Austria, the wine glasses that were wedding gifts and the chairs that were a fixture in my Great-Aunt Molly’s kitchen in Toronto as I was growing up! So many, many memories – all in one photo!

With thanks for children with the wit and savvy to make our day special!

Stay at home orders, lockdowns, masking, quarantines … Covid brought us many things and took away many things – travelling, visiting friends and relatives, someone besides one’s spouse to talk to.

To fight the feelings of isolation, we began, at the end of 2020 to look for a new member of our family! We finally found one to adopt from a rescue and we picked her up on New Year’s Eve about an hour away and brought her home. She was rescued as a small kitten from the streets with an estimated birthday at the beginning of September 2020 so she was almost 4 months old when she arrived chez nous.

What a scared little thing she was. She had been fostered, with her brother, in a loving home that had one very mature cat who was “queen of the hill” and several loud dogs. She and her brother were kept in separate quarters so they could be adopted separately. We had bought a cat carrier and masked up and left the carrier on the porch and the foster mom took the carrier into the house and returned with our little girl! We put her in the car and then drove about an hour to home.

We put her, her litter box and her food and water bowls in a spare room and closed the door so that she was not overwhelmed with the move or the freedom – and we would not have to look in every nook and cranny to find her! She spent most of the first few days hiding under a dresser in the room but eventually crawled into the doll’s cradle where there was a hot water bottle and I found her asleep there.

We slowly allowed her access to the rest of the house – initially the first floor where she would hide smack in the middle under a bed or the couch or a dresser. I made sure to find her and pick her up several times a day for a cuddle and pat where she soon proved to purr like a motorboat. It took about a month or so but she soon got used to us and allowed us to be her “people”. Her litter box eventually found a home in the basement while her food bowls went to the kitchen. She certainly makes her food preferences clear: we had to promise the rescue that she would get only wet food with perhaps a “side” of kibble and we have kept that promise. She likes “pate” style food (forget chunks or gravy!) and likes beef, chicken and turkey and definitely refuses to eat fish or seafood in any form! She likes water to drink and kibble on the side. Best of all, the kibble she likes is made in Canada and has anti-hairball stuff in with it. If she does not like the main course (like when we tried her on various formulations) she will eat the kibble instead! She also eats it between meals when her wet food is gone.

How did she get her name? Well, I had a cat – “Punkin” that I got in 1977 from the SPCA and that I adored. She was a tortoiseshell and bright as a button. When we lived in the country she was a great mouser and, unfortunately, in pursuit of mice she one day was in a bit of a car accident: not finding her as I came home I searched the house for her and eventually found her huddled on the cistern with obvious injuries. She must have streaked into the house and gone to lick her wounds earlier in the day. Got her to the vet, stitched up and she survived for another 5 years but obviously she had kidney damage and she passed away from kidney failure in 1987. I always said if I got another cat I would name her (definitely a girl but fixed) Kitu shortened from “Punkie Two”. Kitu started life named Maddie but that does not sound like a cat’s name – not that Kitu appears to recognize her name! She is more likely to answer to “good girl” than Kitu.

One of the toys the foster mom sent along with Kitu when we picked her up was a spring. Made of plastic, our house is scattered with them. You can step on them and they go flat and don’t trip you up like many balls and other toys you can have for a cat. And, if that cat is Kitu, you can toss the spring along the concrete floor in the unfinished half of the basement and she will happily chase it, bat it around and then bring it back to you to do it again. Great exercise for her and fun for us!

She also likes to crawl up under the quilts on our beds and have a good long warm snooze!

And, she chooses mostly to be my cat (as opposed to Sahib’s) and follows me around the house and often will curl up for a nap nearby – where she is right now while I have written this!

She has brought joy and comfort into our lives and we are very happy we chose to adopt her!