August 9th, 2008
It's been two years since I
made my last digital diary entry, and a busy two years
it has been. This time I'm going to incorporate
links to photos or websites that illustrate elements of
the letter, rather than putting the photos themselves
right into the page. Click on the word links for
anything you might be interested in viewing or learning
more about, and use your back button to return to this
page. I will keep any photos fairly small so that
they won't take long to load; and if you follow any bad
links, please let me
know.
I began curling two winters
ago, driving out to Annandale for a men's league every
Friday right after school. I was pleased to
discover that I enjoyed it quite a bit, and it was a
good outlet from the stress of the work week. I also
began training that winter for dragon boat racing.
Last summer, after we attended
the family summer camp out and the wedding of Davin and
Erin, my nephew and new niece-in-law, we returned to
Toronto where I participated in several dragon boat
races. My team, "Principalship",
won several medals, including the Education Cup medal.
One day between races at Marilyn Bell Park, a hungry
young green budgie flew into our waiting area and
surrendered himself to me. I brought him home, and
he turned out to be a wonderful bird with a lot of
character who developed a lot of affection for us over
the winter and became very tame. I named him Puff, as in "Puff the Magic
Dragon".
Deborah and I did some
day-sailing on our Mirage that summer, and I continued
to play league tennis once a week. We couldn't
sail further afield because Maxie had become quite old
and could no longer safely negotiate the docks and the
boat. I played three dates at the casino in Barrie with
my once-a-week rock band, Random
Notes. We went to Kingston for a wonderful
first Hunter family reunion (my mother's family).
In August I returned to Alberta
to drive up to the North West Territories, to "do the Nahanni" in a canoe with my brother Peter, nephew
Dylan, and three of Peter's white-water canoeing
buddies, Jeff, Brian and Ed. That was a big trip, and a
big event to recognize Peter's 50th birthday. My
brother compiled our photos into a dvd. There were
223 photos and I tried to upload them to a
google album but only 206 would upload, and those
that did are not in his carefully collated sequence that
told the story of our adventure sequentially. The
photos are fun, but in random order, which renders the
google album attempt a bit frustrating.
I returned to a second year as
vice-principal at Robert Service Sr. P. S., under a new
principal. It was a busy year for me. In
addition to my VP duties, I taught a split grade 7/8
class with 15 ESL students ranging from brand new
arrivals with minimal language skills to students with
some degree of fluency who were virtually
indistinguishable from regular Canadian kids, at least
in terms of their oral language skills. I taught
all morning five days a week with no teacher prep time
built into my own schedule, and I did my own home room
and remedial class in the afternoon. I delivered
the full grade 7 and 8 curriculum in English, math, art,
music, dance and drama. It was much more than a
1/2 time teaching load, although I was still expected to
be a 1/2 time VP. I put in long days, and spent at
least one day of every weekend in the office.
Deborah taught grade 2 for the
first time after a career as a self-described "grade 4
specialist". She remained at the same school,
Oakridge P. S., a very large but a very good school on
the south-west edge of Scarborough.
Through the winter, I curled
for the second year, this time with a mixed league
closer to home, at East York Curling Club. I was
invited to participate in a bonspiel,
which was held at Annandale.
We had to put Maxie down on Valentine's
Day, when we returned home from work to realize that she
was extremely ill, and she had finally become too old to
recover from it. She was two months short of
fourteen years of age, which is close to a record for a
Great Dane.
I became very ill myself in
March. Following a routine biopsy, I was attacked
by a terrible infection that the prophylactic antibiotic
hadn't successfully screened, and spent my entire March
Break, eight days in total, in a Scarborough General
hospital room overlooking Eglinton Avenue. Deborah
shoveled almost record snowfall on our driveway at home
in order to get her car out to come and visit me
daily. It took me a further few weeks at home to
complete my recovery.
This summer Deb and I went to
the family camp out in the Rockies again, and we
continued down the very scenic and winding "Sea
to
Sky" Highway 99 to Campbell
River, where my youngest brother Andrew has moved to
manage the Story
Creek Golf Club. We visited with him and
with my parents,
who arrived at the same time, and took in some local
sights. The annual chainsaw wood carving contest had
just been held, and we got to see all the amazing carvings on the
beach.
We visited Stefanie, Silken and Una on
Salt Spring
Island for the third time (we saw Arnd here in
Toronto upon our return), and then went to Gold River on the
west coast of the island, where we visited the Upana Caves and
surprised a bear on the path back to our car. We
stopped at a fish hatchery on a drive up to Tahsis, and
then took a trip on the
Uchuck III up to Kyuquot. The scenery was
spectacular, inside the fjords and out on the open ocean
for one stormy passage that lasted for a few hours on
the first afternoon. The freighter takes supplies to the fishing lodges, lumber camps, fish farms and
remote communities up the coast. We stayed
overnight in a bed-and-breakfast at Kyuquot,
which has only one short four kilometre road over the
hill to a nearby lumber camp. The community is
spread out over a series of
islands, and everyone gets
back and forth in small boats. We returned
to Gold River on the freighter
the next day. That was a memorable trip that we're quick
to recommend to anyone.
We drove my nephew Kenton's car
for this trip - a Toyota Matrix. It had excellent
gas mileage, and was very comfortable for long
distances. We saw goats, deer, elk, bear, and even
a cougar very early in the morning at the Lion's
campground just outside of Gold River, as we drove down
to the dock to embark on the Uchuck III. I had
some great photos, but I lost half of them through what
I can only describe as a "techno-idiot" push of the
camera menu buttons. Why is there more than one
meaning for the word "format" on a camera?
On the way home we stayed at Harrison Hot
Springs Resort, arriving in Harrison just in time
to enjoy a sand sculpture international competition and
a music festival on the beach just steps from the front
door of the hotel. We soaked in hot pools for two
days before continuing our journey. We stopped at
Miette to soak in another hot pool, and compare the
experience. We stopped in a few other communities
on Vancouver Island and in the Rockies. Back in
Edmonton, we visited my siblings, rode Ed and Heather's
horses Blue and Tex, and went to dinner theatre with Mom
and Dad.
Upon our return to Toronto, we
began enjoying our garden again. It had exploded
into something out of the Little Shop of Horrors during
our three week absence, the result of record rainfall in
Toronto, three times the normal amount. Our
weather while camping out west had been exceptional,
sunny and perfect the whole time. We haven't needed to
water the garden more than once or twice. We have
tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, lots of butternut and
buttercup squash, Romanesque zucchinis, peas,
raspberries, sunflowers, and all sorts of herbs, flowers
and flowering shrubs. We had a bowl of
strawberries every day after work through June.
We took a sail in our Mirage to
Oakville for the four day long weekend. We got caught in one
downpour in the middle of the lake, but we steered
by GPS until we could see the coastline and the
entry to Oakville harbour. When the weather
cleared we went in. We had a pleasant
weekend. We visited the Oakville Club,
although we actually had a slip directly across a
narrow channel up Sixteen Mile Creek, at the Oakville Yacht
Squadron. We went to the Erchless
museum which is on the waterfront, which told
the story of the settling of Oakville and the
founding family. It had a fun exhibit on
teenagers 80 years ago compared to now, and an
exhibit on Oakville's status as a terminus of the
Underground Railroad from the U.S.
There was an Emancipation
Day picnic in the park on the same day. They
were trying to bring back an annual tradition from
140 years ago, with speakers, drummers and a local
steel drum band, and the author of I've Got A
Home in Glory Land, which tells the very
dramatic life story of the creators of the Toronto's
first cab company. It was created by a black
couple from the U.S., escaped slaves, whose official
yellow and red cab colours later became the official
colours of the Toronto Transit Commission. One
of the fascinating things about that park was the
horticulture: I counted fifteen fairly large banana
trees.
This week I played with my
rock band on the patio at the Georgian Downs
racetrack and casino in Barrie on Thursday evening,
for the second year. We had a great time and
felt very good about how we played. We were
"tight" (in a playing sense, of course, not a
drinking sense...or a wardrobe sense). The
crowd was small this time because of the weather,
but stayed on their feet dancing through all our
sets. Deb and I stayed in the log cabin at the
local KOA campground for the second year. We
were going to pitch our tent, but it was during yet
another four day stretch of thunderstorms, and we
felt more comfortable under a wooden roof.
For the
rest of the summer we'll be connecting with Toronto
friends, day-sailing, playing tennis, working on the
house and in the garden, and beginning to go into our
respective schools by about the middle of the month. I
have to help interview for new staff, and get my
office set up in my new school, Cedar Drive P.
S. I'll be upgrading their website this
fall. We've got a few yacht club socials coming
up. We'll be watching the Olympic events on our living
room wall, and I'll be playing at the Barrie casino
again on the 28th for a bigger event, followed by a
few more gigs through the fall at various places.
I look forward to a
calmer year at my new school, sharing the
vice-principal's duties with one other, and teaching
about 1/4 time. I'll be curling again, and with
Maxie gone from our lives, Deborah and I will probably
get to travel somewhere south at Christmas and at Easter
once again. We might be scouting for retirement
locations, since she has fourteen more working months to
put in before her official retirement, and I have
decided to retire at the same time. It'll be three years
ahead of schedule for me, but it makes sense for us to
be able to time our retirement together, to travel and
to learn a new retirement lifestyle together.
We're not sure what we'll do yet in our retirement: sail
in the Bahamas or in the Caribbean? Drive south at
Christmas and become "trailer-trash" six months of the
year, or find a winter home in Spanish-speaking Central
America? Go to the Pacific - Australia, the Cook
Islands, Fiji? Teach overseas, if we can find the
right situation? Tutoring (online and off),
professional website maintenance, playing music, writing
stories, "soft news" or travel articles? Sailboat
salesman? Crew on OPB's ("other people's boats"),
or courier boats for other people? International
courier travel? House-sitting or vacation-managing
in exotic locales? Trading houses with other retired
couples for a few weeks at a time? There are
websites that help you arrange all of these
things. We won't run out of ideas. We'll end
up doing some combination of a few of them, no doubt.
We wish everyone a wonderful
balance of the summer, less rain if you live here in the
East, and a great year ahead.
Yours truly,
Steve and Deborah Gilchrist
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