These entries were added from bottom to top. Our Facebook family group is taking over some of the function of this digital diary, because photos and news items are being shared there with great immediacy rather than finding their way to this page. 

    Dec 1st, 2011.  We had a busy month of November which included visits by Mom and Heather, and Peter.  We visited Brian in Barrie, and Rob in Prince Edward County again.  We enjoyed our jazz choir, where I surprised myself by opening up my vocal chords to belt out some tenor solos.  I played my last tennis games with the final cold-weather hold-outs.  The garden is cultivated, turned over laboriously by hand and shovel for the winter, ready for the frost to help open the soil.  Lara came to stay with us as she transitions to becoming a Torontonian.  Spanish classes continued and I had a lot of fun sharpening my skills with verbs, and learning to sing a few Spanish songs.  I played my guitar for the very first time in public, as we played and sang Las Mañanitas to our classmates, and the following week I played piano accompaniment to Quiéreme Mucho.

    Nov 6th.  Haul-out was a busy weekend at the end of October lifting all the sailboats onto their winter cradles, and preparing our own boat for winter storage.  My niece Lara has moved into our guest room, and she will live here while Deb and I go west and south.  This week Mom and Heather will fly here to meet Rob.  Mom will be seeing her first born son for the first time in sixty years.  My brother Peter will visit two weeks later.  Apart from that, we're just singing, I'm doing more genealogy work, and we're organizing the yard and house for our winter absence, doing little repairs and packing things away.

    Oct 24th.  It's been a two busy weeks of getting to know Rob, Cynthia and Elisabeth, much of it online.  The family has engaged in a whirlwind of postings of photos and banter to a "secret group" on Facebook.  Too much to read, at times.  We spent the weekend of October 14 to 16 in Prince Edward County with Rob and Cynthia, and Elisabeth came here for an evening to meet Deb and me, Lara and Andrea, who was also seeing our home and neighbourhood for the first time.  We have yet to meet Jennifer, but have seen a video of her 140 kilometre walk to Toronto in support of medical cannabis.

   In other news, the kittens went back, but not before the mommy cat gave Deborah a fierce bite on her wrist which had to be treated with antibiotics.  We've dropped the mast on Awelyn, erected the cradle, tarped Tiger Moth, and steadily worked at fall projects in the garden.  When I'm finished, I will have moved a very large raspberry patch and a number of other bushes and plants in order to create a bigger and better space for our staple "crops" next summer: tomatoes, beans, squash, swiss chard, garlic and the usual herbs.  And strawberries, of course.

    Oct 11th.  My summer is officially over.  We sailed on Sunday, and it was, fellow sailors claimed, the most perfect sailing day all season. Yesterday there wasn't enough wind, and today it was cool and foggy on the lake, so we decided to spend the day dropping the mast. We worked at that all afternoon to the sound of machine gun fire a couple of hundred yards away where a film crew was shooting an episode of Nikita.  Our stretch of waterfront is in constant use by film crews.


   It will be colder going forward, and we'll be busy with other things over the next couple of weekends: meeting my new older brother Rob and his wife Cynthia, and my two new nieces Elisabeth and Ryan, and her sister Jennifer, Kevin and their children.  They'll get to meet Lara and Andrea who will both be in town for the weekend of Lara's birthday.  And now, this just in - literally, as I typed this: our new cousin Brian, current wife Theresa, and his 26 year old daughter Lorna.
It's been a sad but miraculous month so far. 




    Oct 4th.  We've had a delightful visit from one of the couples we stayed with in Australia, Kerry and Dave.  They were here for two nights, capping off a seven week trip through N. America.  It was their second visit to our continent.  We thoroughly enjoyed their company.  Dave is a former Aussie footballer, and they fiercely support the Geelong Cats.  On the last night before they left, in true Aussie fashion, they sat up until 4 a.m. to watch the finals projected on my living room wall.  Geelong won, thank goodness.





    Yesterday Deborah got a call from Toronto Animal Services.  Their nursery roof caved in, which was strange, on such a new building.  Deborah agreed to bring home another Mommy cat with three six week old kittens.  They are very cute, and quite diverse: charcoal black, tan and orange-red.  None of them seem to have a strong feral gene, and the mother is quite calm in her new surroundings, and relaxed around us, which is good.  We haven't locked her into the guest room, but she stays in there with her kittens most of the time anyway.










    Sept 30th.  It has been a terrible six weeks.  In mid-August, my sister Heather phoned to say that it was time to go back west again to see my father before he died.  He had contracted pneumonia, and they had to suspend his chemo treatment.  At his age, after more than two years of fighting multiple myeloma through two previous failed attempts at chemotherapy, there wasn't much hope he'd survive even if he did overcome the pneumonia.  She thought that his death wasn't imminent, that we might have a few weeks to spend with him, so we drove, but I was anxious and full of foreboding, so I drove long and hard.  We covered the whole distance in two days and a couple of final hours on the third morning.  Deborah and I arrived at his bedside in the Cross Cancer Institute, but he was very weak and under morphine.  He was too stoned and weak to respond to our presence, but we believe that he knew we were there and showed some evidence of that. 

    Forty minutes after we arrived, the nurses came to give him a fresh morphine injection, an increased amount.  Less than three hours later he took his last breath.  Exhausted by the drive, I was stunned at the sudden turn and it took several days for me to begin to breathe normally.  There remained a sort of humourless "sad spot" in me, a depression which lingered for some time. 

    I spent three more weeks helping Mom with work that needed to be done at the house, and sorting through the boxes of sixty years of paper that he'd hoarded, a job that is far from over and includes sifting through many boxes of audiotape, videotape and 8 mm films.  He'd converted the bulk of them to dvd at great cost recently, but I can't bring myself to let the rest go until I'm sure he hasn't missed any.  I did find two trays of slides that he'd accidentally discarded when he shifted all of his first fifty years of periodicals collection to storage in the garage.

    Back in Toronto two weeks ago, we began catching up to our garden.  I set up a fresh bed in the front yard and I'm moving plants around.  We have a harvest of tomatoes, raspberries, squash and swiss chard to eat, and lots of home maintenance chores we'd put off.  We need to make sure the house is dry and secure for winter.  We still haven't sailed our own boat all season, although we've been out three times on friends' boats earlier in the summer.  We have friends here from Australia, a couple we stayed with as couchsurfers last winter.  We'll celebrate Octoberfest at the yacht club tomorrow evening after we drop them off at the airport for their flight home.  We each have a voting poll to serve as District Returning Officers on Oct 6th in the provincial election.  My niece Lara is coming here the last week in October, and her cousin Andrea will be here as well over that weekend to visit her, us and the great metropolis; I'm learning to edit video, we've had Deb's Dad and new lady friend over for lunch, and we'll get back into bridge, and possibly a tennis game or two before it gets too cold to play any longer.  We've resumed Spanish lessons, and our once-a-week darts/games evenings at the club.  The sailboat comes out of the water for the winter at the end of October.
Until now I've had no desire to update my digital diary, and I've lost my musical mojo completely since Dad's death, but I'm trying to get back into the mood: we've rejoined the jazz choir and have a good selection of songs that we're working on.

    Sept 19th...I think.  I expunged this record temporarily to save Mom precipitous embarrassment in case someone read her news here first (Peter's caution) and added it back to my diary more than a year later:

    This morning I finally got an email from the Canadian Adoptees Registry confirming that we have a match.  It's an exciting moment, but we understand that it may be an emotionally difficult moment for our elder brother Robert and that it may take some time to gradually get to know him and our new nieces.  We wait with great anticipation to connect for the first time in sixty years with an eldest brother that we've never known and didn't even know existed until exactly a month ago.  This stunned me at least as much as Dad's death, coming as such a complete surprise.  Meeting our brother promises to be a tremendously emotional event for me and my siblings, one of wondrous joy in stark relief to our pain over Dad's death and the disappointment that he kept this secret to the very end. What a horrible time it was, sixty years ago, when so many young mothers felt compelled to give up their first child in our puritanical, coercive, repressive society.  A lifetime of heartache for my mother (and probably for my father, although he kept such thoughts and feelings tightly to himself) might finally come to a close as a result of the Open Records legislation enacted in Ontario in 2009.

    Aug 15th. A decade ago I crewed once a week for three years on a racing Express 30 called Midnight Express, and I introduced Mike and Janet Bauer to the skipper, Bill Wrencliffe.  Mike's been crewing for him ever since, and is now in the process of buying the boat from him.  He invited me along to crew for him on his first cruise as "the skipper". We had a fine sail to Lakeshore Yacht Club on Saturday, about 26 kilometres or 14 nautical miles.  22 boats from our club went there for the weekend, about 80 people, while some of their boats went to our club for the same social event.  We ate and drank too well.

    Aug 7th.  The heat and humidity continues, although not as bad as it was in July, when we broke a few records.  We had an Island Party all day yesterday, and the four yacht clubs competed for a cup.  Deborah and her partner took first place at the euchre tournament, earning points for our club.  I captained the darts team, and although my partner and I came second last, one of my team's pairs came first.  There were sailing races, dinghy races and other competitions.  Our club took the cup for overall points to hang onto for a year. 

    Deborah will go to Montreal to visit her Mom and sisters from tomorrow until Friday, so I'm bach'ing it and should have lots of time for music and for sailboat and home maintenance chores.  I've joined Rod Smith and Sheila Brand-Bennett to form a trio doing cocktail sets of songs from the maritimes, songs from the 20's and 30's from England and N. America, some comedy songs, some shanties, and some Beatles tunes.  We have keyboard, guitars, ukulele and trumpet between the three of us, and the three part harmonies are excellent so we'll do a few a capella songs, some with just hand percussion.  We had one exploratory session, collecting song ideas, and I'll have a second rehearsal with Rod tomorrow or Tuesday.  Sheila is a former professional singer and musical theatre actress who now teaches with the Toronto school board;.  She has been our conductor in the jazz choir since last winter.  Our first project is to perform Birdland on stage at the CNE on August 30th,  This is already booked as a small ensemble part of the larger jazz choir performance.

    Aug 3rd.  Over the weekend we enjoyed having my niece Lara as a house guest.  She arrived July 29th.  We ate tomatoes, zuchinni and raspberries from our garden with Deb's Hainan chicken, and we toured the neighbourhood, including the yacht club and lakefront.  We visited Rosetta McClain Garden where we took a series of lily photos for my sister Heather, the lily afficionado.  Lara had her first Chinese dim sum from-the-cart lunch, and we visited Kensington Market, an iconic Toronto neighbourhood, on a "Pedestrian Sunday", when they close off the streets. It's sort of a current version of the Yorkville that existed when I was a teenager, before Yorkville got yuppiefied and went boutique and commercial.  Enjoy the slideshows: the lily photos are mine, of course, but the Kensington Market photos were submitted by many other visitors to the market.

    July 28th.  We went to the McMichael Gallery, where we immersed ourselves in the Group of Seven and Marc-Aurele Fortin, a Montreal artist who I admire in spite the miserable circumstances of his later years.  Married at 61 - at that point, I'd have to ask, "Why bother?" - and later, diabetic and vulnerable.  He lost both legs and then his sight.  He endured abuse by a 25 year old agent, aide and power of attorney who burned thousands of his works for some mysterious reason - perhaps she thought she'd boost the value of the remaining collection by making them more rare.  Fortunately many hundreds, at least, remain.

   We picked up Rosalinde, an artist couchsurfer from Victoria who stayed with us for a few days last month, and took her with us.  Apart from that we've just been playing tennis, bridge and darts, weeding the garden, and other random chores that pop up.  We're making a little headway in the basement, eliminating excess cargo.  We spent a whole afternoon at that.  We'll have a garage sale when we have a weekend with nothing else happening.
 
    July 21st.  We have just returned from a couple of weeks with family in Alberta.  It was a very pleasant trip.  Dad was weak when we arrived but perked up with the help of radiation, dexamethazone and fresh hemoglobin during our stay.  He is on a new therapy using thalidomide.  It is very expensive, but after some anxious days while his medical insurance refused to cover it, we got word that the drug company themselves will subsidize it 100%.  We enjoyed reconnecting with siblings, nieces and nephews, and uncles. 
   
    We all did yardwork, eavestrough and garage work and some setting up of handrails and other medical aids for Dad in case he gets weaker as time goes on, or has weak days.  With fragile bones, falling is a significant danger, so handrails in the washroom and back stairway are important.  It has been a cool and rainy spring in Alberta.

    Here in Ontario, the opposite holds true.  We returned to a heat wave, and temperatures in the mid-thirties, mid-forties with the humidex.  Today was forecast to hit a high of 38/48.  I watered the garden and spent some time weeding until the heat drove me back indoors.  Our garden has been taken over by crabgrass.  On the other hand, we have awesome tomatoes, zucchinis and raspberries, swiss chard, arugula, and the occasional lovely strawberry still fruiting.  There's nothing better than chilled Romanesque zucchini slices with ranch dressing on a day like this.

    July 2nd. Yesterday we went to a live performance of Edith Nesbit's The Railway Children, for our 22nd wedding anniversary treat.  It was a bit tame as theatre, based on a children's story and filled with Edwardian language, manners and morals, but we enjoyed the unique staging which included a vintage steam engine named Vicky as a bonafide walk-on character.  It was staged in a locomotive round-house, and was quite a spectacle.  The audience sits on both sides of the tracks and the actors deliver their lines on the train platform, and on special platforms that wheel in and out along on the tracks, while the locomotive steams in and out at various points in the play without interfering with the play itself, so the whole audience gets to see and hear all the actors equally.  We sat in the third row up from the stage.
 
   Afterward we hiked up to Ontario Place to enjoy Canada Day fireworks.  They fire them from a barge just off-shore.  I've always joked that I'm so Scottish I got my father to marry us and picked July 1st for the date so we'd always have free fireworks.

    It was an ordeal getting home, though.  Public transit couldn't handle the crowds.  Streetcars and buses were all late, and jam-packed with riders.  We finally got home by 12:40 a.m.   Next year we'll watch the fireworks from our boat again, or drive down and capture a parking spot early in the day.

   We fussed with our brand new Tohatsu motor on the sailboat, which purrs like a kitten, but the electric start button wouldn't work.  We finally concluded, with the help of dock neighbours, that I'd blown a fuse in the electric start circuit of the motor while trying to hook it up to our dual battery system aboard the boat.  While at the club, we pull-started the motor and managed to step the mast and put on our boom and sail.  Soon we'll get out on the water for our first sail of the season in our own boat. 







    June 30th.  Here is our latest couchsurfing guest: Rosalinde from Victoria.  She's holding the sign Deb used to find her at the airport. She's enjoying the ROM, the AGO, and touring eastern Canada.  She leaves tomorrow morning early for a three day tour of Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec City, and she'll also make a trip to New York from here. 

   I've done some landscaping over the past few days, moving flowering plants, irises, ornamental elephant grass and sea oats to the front yard from the nursery area in the back.  Later I'll shift the raspberry canes over to one side to grow more and better tomatoes and beans in our back kitchen garden.  I will build a special oval bed in the centre of our sunny front lawn for the peonies, tiger lilies that are taller than I am, plus some day lilies, some irises and cana lilies, and tulips around the outside edge. 










    June 26th.  Today is the 60th Anniversary of our tennis club.  We'll have a big party at the clubhouse.  Yesterday we picked up our new outboard.  We'll mount that tomorrow, and get onto the next task of prepping and stepping the mast, attaching the boom and raising the sails for the first time this year.  We painted the last bedroom wall yesterday.  Afterward, I mowed the lawns, and came across a mouse - actually just the front half, a gift from Jasmine, our outdoor cat.  I had to find a place for it so I could continue mowing.  Fortunately, there was a perfect choice: several years ago Deborah bought a mouse plant, and labeled it.  Something ate the first two leaves as soon as they emerged, and she covered it with a downspout cage to try to protect it, but it never recovered.  The cage, and the sign, have been there ever since...so of course I was able to tell her that I thought she should check her mouse plant, that something was finally actually growing there.  It was a bit gruesome, perhaps, but it was worth it.




    June 23rd.   In a burst of energy likely inspired by the fact that the big decorating job is almost over, we began painting the final bedroom today.  The ceiling is done but the walls will take two coats, so two more days should do it.  There are other projects: flooring, shed-shingling, plumbing, etc - but nothing so Herculean as repainting the entire interior.  So we might soon get back to simpler retirement joys: reading my stack of books, playing music at home, learning Spanish verb conjugations, and sailing.

    I did finally get the outboard back on the sailboat, but it wouldn't run - no spark. I think I must have burnt out an electrical component when we were trying to adjust the idle.  We didn't notice that the impeller had broken and there was no cooling water running through the motor until it had really overheated.  I finally gave up on this 27 year old motor and ordered a new 9.8 hp 4-stroke Tohatsu; we're waiting for them to phone and tell us it has arrived at the dealership.  I can't wait to get the new outboard on and step the mast - we might be able to join a club cruise over the Canada Day weekend.

    We've been eating a bowl of strawberries from our garden every evening for a week now, and serving them as dessert to BBQ dinner guests.  We got a good June crop this year.  Some of the plants are "ever bearing" and should continue to give us fruit through the summer.  I should plant more of those.  Placing actual straw under the "strawberries" as mulch was successful.  It limited the weeds and helped the soil retain moisture, and the loosely packed straw allowed airflow, giving the berries a high and dry place to rest and ripen. 

    The raspberries will come soon; the blossoms have already turned into little green berries.

    June 18th.  I was planning to finally put my outboard back onto the sailboat and step the mast today, but Murphy struck: the bathroom medicine cabinet came off the wall last night.  The anchors had probably weakened when we removed it for painting.  After a late start, we visited three stores but couldn't find anything we liked better than the one that fell, which matches our other two bathroom cupboards, so I rebuilt the specially designed hinges of this one and remounted it while Deborah took the door in for a new mirror.  That took up most of our day.  We have guests coming for BBQ supper, so I spent the rest of the afternoon racking ginger wine and cleaning equipment, and doing gardening chores, including watering.  We've had a warm dry stretch of weather lasting several days now.  On days like this, I yearn for a more nomadic footloose and fancy-free existence, devoid of yard work and house maintenance.  Life's too short to live out one's few golden years this way.  Now I know why guys get grumpy in their declining years.

    June 17th.  On Wednesday we had our last choir and big band rehearsals for the season. The band had a party at Mike Sanderson's house.  He's the guy at the left in the photo on this web page for Moo'd Swing.  This group has played at Roy Thomson Hall.  He plays guitars and mandolins and such with that group, but he plays trombone with us. They have nice sound samples on their website. 

    Last night our choir performed at the ETT annual awards dinner at the Liberty Grand ballroom, down on the CNE grounds.  We drove the Indy 500 track in our Suzuki to get back out of the grounds on the way home, which is a bit of a fantasy thrill, quite frankly.  The Liberty Grand is a truly grand, spectacular building dating back to 1926.  We've been invited back to perform on stage at another event on August 30th during the CNE, so I guess they liked us. 

    Our last Spanish lesson for the season is this evening; and our last two bridge afternoons next week, although we plan to start going to an evening bridge drop-in.

    April, May and June are always very busy months.  I often feel like I have a full time job just keeping up with all our yard work and gardening, home and boat maintenance, taxes, medical appointments and volunteering commitments, while trying to squeeze in all the additional things we do just for fun.  We hope the next three months will be a little more relaxing. 

    June 13th.  After a busy weekend that included the AMSF AGM Director's meeting and dinner, having guests in our home for two nights, our HYC Sailpast Salute to the Commodore followed by the dinner/dance, and Sunday spent doing party clean-up and my six hour OD duty, life is returning to "ordinary".  We've spent the day heavily pruning a couple of trees, one of which blocked sun to our neighbour's garden and our own, while the other allowed tempting access to our roof to the local raccoons.  Three raccoons in the tree in our backyard had a loud session a few nights ago.  Toronto is the racoon capital of the world.  We now have a huge pile of boughs, branches and leaves to cut up and dispose of.

    I have Monday night house league tennis this evening.  Through the coming week we have some final band and choir events of the season, including a band party and a concert and dinner for the jazz choir.  Between those events, bridge games and medical appointments, we'll put the outboard on the boat, and if it runs smoothly, we'll step the mast; and we'll complete our interior painting project.  Yesterday Deborah bought a 3/4 size classical guitar, a Beaver Creek, from a friend.  I called it her "six-string ukulele", but it seems easy to play for her small hands, and it looks and sounds nice.

    I've added five more photos to our tulip folder, which is more than just tulips now; these ones aren't tulips, but they're a good show.  The Starburst Clematis, peonies and white irises are dramatic. For some reason I missed getting a photo of our dark purple irises, and our Black Locust tree which fills with blossoms and perfumes the entire neighbourhood for one week in June every year. 

    June 9th.  I should have knocked on wood when I wrote that "nothing out of the ordinary" was happening.  Yesterday we had a heat record for June 8th, and at 7 p.m. a violent wind and hail storm knocked down huge trees, rooftop business signs and power lines all over Scarborough, including the mature maple tree on my neighbour's property right across the street.  Every block on our neighbourhood had limbs sheared off or entire trees uprooted, snapped off at the trunks.  The clean-up will go on for a while. 

    The kittens went back for adoption this morning.  Today we await the arrival of two guests who are billeting here for two nights while attending the AMSF charity AGM and annual dinner, which we will also attend.  Saturday is Sailpast at HYC, and then things -hopefully - will get back to "ordinary".

    June 7th. I replaced the impeller on the Honda four stroke motor, which was an interesting challenge.  We haven't had a chance to run it on the boat yet.  But we've spent a day downtown at the AGO, made progress on painting the house, had Sol and Marcie over for lunch, took our neighbours and other friends out for dinner.  We've kept up our Spanish lessons, music, darts, bridge, started up the tennis house league, kept a series of medical appointments, and all that stuff.  Life continues, nothing out of the ordinary but nothing wrong with any of it.

    May 22nd.  We've had many days of rain, and not many days of sun.  The garden is planted, and we are painting the house - painfully slowly - but we haven't sailed our own boat yet because of motor woes.  We sailed with our friend Don Davies yesterday instead.  It was our first incredibly beautiful, sunny day in almost two weeks.  I'll have to open my own motor and investigate a non-functioning impeller.  I'll watch for any used long shaft outboards that might come onto the market, and I'll explore the possibility of converting to an electric motor on a sailboat of this size, which will probably happen next November once the boat is out of the water on its cradle if it happens at all.

    May 8th.  We've had two sunny days in a row, and that means back-breaking work in the garden.  (Rainy days mean painting inside the house.)  We have turned the soil, weeded, done some transplanting, mowed the lawns for the second time this season, and tomorrow we'll plant low bush beans, swiss chard, buttercup and butternut squash, zucchini, basil, leeks, onions, and rocket.  We'll plant red potatoes if we can find the variety we want, and tomatoes.  Deborah has picked up several varieties of cherry and regular tomatoes, including one heirloom variety.  We've battled the raspberry canes, which left me bloodied but unbowed.  The strawberries have white blossoms so we'll soon be tasting those, and we have lungwort, primrose and the tulips.  The dandelions have arrived.  Deb attacks them with alacrity every spring.  All the annuals are emerging: the sunburst clematis, and all the border bushes.  The front hedge is turning green. 

    We continue our two afternoons per week of bridge school and club play.  Monday evening house league tennis has begun.  Deb is back to her choir and I'm playing piano in the Montcrest Big Band rhythm section .  I have to practice my charts through the week.  Wednesday evening is darts night, and we have begun Friday evening Spanish lessons - and wouldn't you know it, the instructor assigns homework! 

    Yes, we're very busy...and we haven't even begun taking our own boat out on the lake, or having bbq's at the club.  However, we will be sailing tomorrow: our friend Sean has just bought a new 36 foot Hinterhoeller sailboat and brought it home to Bluffer's Basin last Friday, and he has asked us to crew for him as he puts her through her paces and gets used to the boat.

    Between spring cleaning and yard work, house painting, gardening, taxes and getting the sailboat ready for the water, April and May are the two busiest months in the year down here on the suburban Ontario homestead.  June, July, August, September and October are the months when we just have to maintain what we've accomplished, and enjoy the fruits of our labours.

    May 3rd.  Deborah's diary entry: it was touch and go about getting the boat ready...down to the wire. Unfortunately we could not wait as the crane was scheduled. Luckily the 100 km winds that week happened on Thursday.  If they'd happened on Saturday, we would have had to re-schedule the crane for another day. Luckily Saturday was a glorious day!! The only problem was the motor and so we are sitting at the end of the dock instead of where we usually stay (motor starts, but stalls..carburetor problems). We need the tow boat to drag us back to our slip, but it has been too busy and too rainy so far. For example today I had my bi-annual mammogram.     The kittens are so cute (see below). When I go into the room and talk to them they all come out of the carrier. Actually I am somewhat surprised that they are not out exploring on their own...but maybe that is because they were so much younger than any other litter I got. (Steve believes it is because the mommy cat is so extremely attentive that they never seem to have any compulsion to leave their den)
    Steve: I spent all of yesterday morning at the truck dealership getting a diagnostic done.  My hybrid batteries are still under warranty for two more years, so I was hoping I'd get new ones, but they appear to be fine and we just got the computer codes reset.  I probably caused the error code by not shutting them off when I went away and let the truck sit for two months, according to the manual.
    In the afternoon I picked up another truckload of firewood from a friend who cut down a big ash tree.  We have painting to continue, and new piano music to learn for the big band.  Deborah made turkey dinner and her usual enormous pot of turkey soup on Sunday.  Today we returned to the teachers' bridge club.  Lots going on.

    April 28th: As of last night, when a fifth trumpet player returned to the Montcrest big band, I officially became the piano player instead.  The weather has been frightful - 100 km winds overnight, and many days of rain and gray skies.  We got the boat ready for launch, now only two days away, during a couple of weather-windows; but not the motor, yet.  It'll be a weekend of work and partying at the yacht club, and house league tennis begins this Monday evening.  The kittens have finally started emerging from the cat carrier on their own, invariably in search of their mother, who almost never leaves them alone, but if she does, they'll pursue.  This morning she was visiting us as we awoke, and I heard a tiny thump from the guest room as one of them fell an inch from the lip of the cat carrier to the rug below.  The mother raced out of the room like a shot to get the little miscreant back into its den.

    April 24th: This morning the mommy cat made her big move; but the gray kitten gave her away.  We heard a single kitten crying, and went to look to see why, but the kittens had all vanished from the guest room.  There was, however, a lump under the red feather half-duvet covering the bottom half of our bed.  The lump moved. Deborah spoke to the lump, and the mommy cat's two enormous eyes appeared just under the edge of the duvet. Deborah turned the duvet back, and found all four kittens there with her.  The gray one had moved a few inches away from her, perhaps disoriented by its new surroundings, and had begun to mew - "ratting her out", so to speak.

    It's been a sunny day.  I've mowed both lawns for the first time, moved some tulips from the spots in the lawn where the squirrels had decided they ought to grow, and painted the other half of the sailboat cradle.  It has been two-tone (half-painted) for a few years.  Once it gets stacked, a week from now, it'll be out of reach for the rest of the year, except for a week at the end of October.  My crew job during launch is to stacking all the cradles.  We're going to have moose steak for supper, courtesy of our newfie neighbour Brent. 

    April 23rd: the weather has been gray, wet and miserable all week, making it hard to think about sailing, gardening or other summer pursuits.  This afternoon it is supposed to warm up and the sun will shine a bit, so we'll go down to the boat and begin prepping it for Launch Day, which is racing toward us, scheduled for April 30th. 

    We've completed painting the walls in the living room a very bright white with the tiniest bit of silvery-gray in it, which gives us vibrant colours when we use our projector on the wall in the evenings; but the projected whites are almost too brilliant.  A different gray with more charcoal in it would have improved the contrast, but we're supposing that in a little time, soot from the fireplace will create that adjustment naturally.  That's two rooms painted.  Six to go.

    The current cat mommy is very friendly, but Deborah has created a monster.  The cat has been polite, only visiting us in our room before we sleep or when we wake up, but she was in our room this morning, exploring, and Deborah invited her under the covers between us.  When I got up I saw the four kittens in their bed in the spare room, but seconds later Deborah swung her legs out of bed and almost stepped on the gray one - whose eyes have just opened overnight - mewing loudly where it had been dropped on the mat beside our bed.  The mommy cat had decided that she really liked the dark, warm comfort of the space between us under the covers, and was trying to move her kittens there.  We closed the bedroom door on her to prevent it, but two hours later she was at the closed door once again, standing up and trying to push it open, caterwauling with the gray kitten at her feet.

    April 18th.  After a couple of weeks with us, our young Tibetan/Canadian family was able to find their own apartment, so we filled up the truck and helped them move in.  They left us with freshly washed walls, so now we're painting.  We can't put it off any longer.  Deborah brought home a fresh litter of four kittens with their mother cat from the Toronto Humane Society.  They'll be with us for the next seven weeks.

    April 10th.  We've had house guests for a week. Carrie is the niece of a friend.  She went to Dharamsala to study Tibetan translation, and came back two years later with a Tibetan husband, Tenzin.  They have an eight month old baby girl, Dawa.  They're trying to get established in Toronto.  We've freed up the second bedroom in our little cottage, which we were using as an office and walk-in closet, for them to stay in while they look for an apartment.  Tenzin is working long days, putting in a four hour round trip commute to Mississauga to unload and sort ongoing cargo from planes, and Carrie is looking for a position.  She was a recreational administrator for the YMCA prior to her Dharamsala adventure, so she should find something soon.

    I've had a dental implant drilled and pegged in my jawbone.  Tenzin and I have cut firewood and done the spring cleaning in our yard.  There's no snow left.  The grass is greening and the trees are budding.  The temperature is 22 degrees today, with a howling wind.   Deborah and I have been to bridge together.  Deb has been back to choir, and I've found a new jazz/swing band to play with - not too big, about seventeen players, mostly saxes, trombones and trumpets, plus a drummer and a bass player.  They're short a piano player, so I'll cover that as well as one of the four trumpet spots. 

    Deborah will be away all this week visiting her Mom and sisters in Montreal, and I'll wash walls, work in the garden and maybe get some painting done while she's gone.
We are settling back into our Toronto life. 

    April 1st.  We are just back from two months in Australia, escaping the ice and snow in Toronto.  We went from the aforementioned minus 18 to plus 42 in Sydney, a 60 degree temperature change.  The week we arrived was the hottest they'd had in 140 years.  The details and photos are in a travel blog kept on blogspot.com - here is the link: Australia 2011. 

    Jan 22nd...Deborah's birthday!  
    It is minus 18 outside, just like an Alberta winter.  We went out for an early Chinese buffet dinner and then dropped in "unannounced" on Greg, Christine and Liam.  We managed to surprise Deborah completely.  We toasted her with bubbly and this cute birthday cake made by another friend, Alison Dowling:

(Alison is from Queensland, so all the proceeds of her cake business are currently going to Australian flood relief)

    Jan 20th.  We arrived home from our second two-week stay in Varadero yesterday.  We came in on the red-eye, got to bed by 5:30 and slept until noon.  Today we're feeling normal again.  We stayed at the "Sunbeach" resort.  Be careful how you say that name.  Don't pronounce it like the guide did on the bus from the airport.  It is really 2 1/2 stars, not 3 (don't trust the TripAdvisor star reporting), and we actually preferred the 2 star Mar del Sur resort we stayed at in November, for several reasons.  We were not thrilled with the front desk management of this hotel, who we witnessed being dishonest, rude and unprofessional in the extreme to some guests with a very legitimate complaint about their bill.  It looked like the staff had no customer service training to prepare them for their role, and no policy to fall back on when things didn't add up or they'd made a serious mistake and inconvenienced a customer.  A few of the other staff were also pretty grumpy, but the hotel tends to cater to a young and rowdy clientele, kind of like a permanent Spring Break crowd.  I can see why they get grumpy but at the same time it serves them right.  The food was somewhat better than Mar del Sur, at least. 

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