Victoria...Prior House Inn and the Butchart Gardens

We stayed in a lovely B&B in old Victoria, next door but one to the Government House. A super location and a charming house. All the right touches with ironed sheets and attention to details. We have stayed in a number of wonderful B&B's in North America and this one albeit a 5 diamond etc didn't hold up with the breakfast menu. For the price it could have been more interesting. We appreciated their open house policy to polite dogs and welcomed our Ginger. But, it certainly was nice to be so close to downtown where we went to a terrific Italian restaurant for dinner. Zambris I think it was called. Very ordinary stripmall location but excellent food. We highly recomment this.

Then we went to Butchart Gardens

Our camera took some beaut pictures of this famous garden. I was impressed with the colour of the season. I thought there would be a predominience of yellow but the rainbow of colours was stunning.
Below, Bryan was enjoying Ross Fountain

A Sequoia I didn't know they could grow here...only 100 years old. Give it a another 1000

I guess this says it all about Victoria.

Sidney Friends and the Salish Sea Museum

We met old friends Joyce and Alan and we could have talked all day. We enjoyed a lovely lunch at their 'local' by the sea and reminised. Old friends are precious and especially old family friends.They took us to the new museum the Salish Sea Museum and we entered the portal and enjoyed the wonderful displays

A day in Port Townsend

The Wind Kid and me. I think she was once a bird.

We took a ferry across the harbour and drove to Port Townsend. One of us slunk out of work for the day. :o)). And we were glad he did. We needed a full chorus for 'Take me out to the ball game...." The shortest singer in the group knew all the words and the hand gestures and the names of all the players.

More wind please.

The stutue of Liberty and her daughter.

Some people just can't get enough wind.

We ate lunch in Port Towsend and icecream sodas and sundaes and Dan's ersatz twizzlers in the car but we still had room for a feast of salmon, chicken, and ribs when we got home. The weather was perfect and the town was cute. Still no marine mammals from the ferry.

"take me out to the Ball Game.....take me out to the crowd....buy me some peanuts and cracker jacks, I don't care if I ever get back...."

We heard little Kat sing that song about 100 times and truth be told each time was cuter that the last. She looks shocked that I knew the words here.

Arrival in Seattle

Thank God for GPS. Without a calm intelligent voice directing us along the cats cradle of freeways through Seattle and surrounds to Chez Cassidy we would still be fighting and calling each other nasty names. The was effortless of course. However the downside is that we don't really learn our environment and I lose the compass points. All my years of girl guide training to always know where I am by the sun and the stars was apparently a waste of time.

Sweet little Kat turned 2 and we were privileged to be invited to her birthday party. She was napping when we arrived as she had just come home from her 2 year check-up and jabs. This usually makes a little kid a bit cranky if they react but Kat was a cheerful, smiling, laughing showing off little fire cracker.

She gave us knucks and high fives and now we do elbows and lots of kisses. She is the best little hugger.

Kat at the bat.She just cracks me up. She taps the ground and swings the bat in readiness and holds over her shoulder. She would swing her hips if she had any. Then crack! She makes contact with the ball. Man! that kid can hit!!

We must teach her to tap her cleats with the bat!! She knows all the words to "Take me out to the Ball Game" and will sing it endlessly if asked. (I think she has been to a lot of Mariner games)

Off to the areospace museum today. Boeing has put together an amazing collection of aircraft from prototypes of the very first contraptions to fly to the latest Mars lander. All of which by the way, and this is an astounding fact of which Dan reminded me, all of this took place over a time span of 60 years. I will post pics later...off to bed now because we are off to Port Townsend at the crack of dawn (possibly 10:15 am tomorrow)

It Just Never Ends

Back to the old house after dropping Heather off at the airport early in the morning, I packed and packed and then a prospective tenant that Barry had introduced to the property arrived to view the house. We hadn't intended to go that route, but it is for a short time, possibly 6 months and then we will sell it. It is a bit like ripping off a bandaid for our parents. We don't know whether to do it quickly or slowly let things go and they get used to the idea of not living in the house, which to them became a living thing. I don't know which is the best way to go.

The tenant was to be in on the 28th....that is 12 days from now!!!! So I packed like a madwoman. I worked until it was quite late and dark out and crawled back to Barry and Brenda's house, threw my aching bones into bed and passed out with the cat.



I ask my daughters to forgive me for when I am an old lady if my memory becomes faulty and my opinions are entrenched and my humour is impaired. I just ask that they treat my kindly and not shout too loud and take a deep breath and not to say what they are thinking.

But do not let me save stuff.

Today I took Mum over to the house so she could say goodbye. She found an envelope with some old pages torn from a calendar in a pile of books that I was in the middle of sorting.
She said "The pictures are pretty, they are of animals in the mountains."
I let her think she had saved them and then I threw them in the garbage when she wasn't looking. Tomorrow she won't remember.




Dad had his eye surgery and the operation was a success. The surgeon put a soft lens in gratius. Usually the provincial government charges $300. and the great unwashed are given a hard lens. That pleased Dad, he was able to put one over on the "man".
He is spying birds in the sky, noticing leaves on the trees and signs two blocks away. He can tell the time. He can eat without spilling food all over himself. He can watch TV and he can play his stereo
Today he found his hearing aid (it had been lost for a week) and he located his keys. He felt like a new man.
All he has to do now is get his other eye done and his life will be binocular.
He will probably lose something else in the mean time and then it will all start all over again. He lost his walker last week. Barry told me, he said "Did you know it is possible to lose your walker?"

We laughed.


We found lots of photos of him during the war, his uniform, medals, his RAF cap. There is only so much we can store and archive in conservation.

We found the book written of his war experiences, telling the story of his peril at sea when he was shot down. If any family member wants photos please get in touch with me and we will arrange for you to get them.

Dad is getting frail. Everytime he goes to dialysis he is weaker when it is over. I am hoping that for a little while at least, he will be able to see and hear clearly and just for a little while he can enjoy what life he has left.
It seems that the Forteo is working for Mum, she won't admit it. It is hard for her to be positive about much, but I have definitely noticed that she is not complaining about being sore and aching and her back is not fracturing with the slightest bump. I sure hope this hormone is growing bone material for her and reversing at least for a little bit, the horrible osteoporosis disease that has had her in its grip for so long.

During the time our parents were growing up, it was a very popular activity to 'scrap book'. Not the kind of scrap booking that people do today. Our parents pasted everything in big books of newsprint. When the books are taken out and the pages are turned after sitting in a closet or an attic for 50 years, they crumble and the observer gets an asthma attack. ( I did)

Our mother has a fascinating book of her early career as an operating theatre nurse. She saved everything and the collection is an interesting glimspe into pre/during wartime nursing.

Well, I am going to go look for that pesky little cat right now. She is just a sweetheart but has a penchant for going out 'catting' at night. The little brat doesn't come in until morning sometimes and all night I worry about her because there are coyotes in the area.

We are off on Monday morning for a long deserved break. We will visit little Kat for her birthday at Chez Cassidy Mohr and then off to the island where Bryan has booked us into a B&B for a surprise and then visiting old friends (the Andersons) for lunch and then up island to stay with our pals Louise and Mike where I will be going kayaking and Bryan will no doubt be drinking wine and brandy. Yahoo!!

Continuning story.....

Heather and I flew to Vancouver last Saturday and Barry picked us up ( A TAD LATE). We went directly to the Delta house (Mum and Dad's old house) and began to face the mess. We started with the garage.

We swept out spider webs and wasp bodies and some other unidentified corpses and started to shift the junk. We had moved a book case to the garage and began to set it up as a display for a garage sale. At the beginning we were quite liberal and anything we thought had even the smallest value went on the shelves. Towards the end of the day we had dug about 5 garbage bags of, for lack of a better word 'crap', that Mum had squirreled away and saved.
The book case quickly filled up and then we became very choosy. We binned more junk and the little old storage shed is filling up fast

Professional packers had been hired by the disaster rescue crew to store all of Mum and Dad's belongings until they could be placed back into the house. They didn't know at the time how glad we were that we had found a way for us to get the old folks out of the house and into an independent living arrangement. They were never going to move back in.

The garbage bags piled up...we soon had an unwieldy pile of 15 or so bags.
We were exhausted and went back to Barry's house to cook our dinner and collapse on the couch.

It rained and rained and rained and we blissfully slept like logs. First thing on Sunday morning we were up and off down the freeway back to the house in the rain. The garbage we had left in the driveway was soaked and heavy and had not shrunk overnight.

The days dragged on, one room after another we excavated a life time of stuff, squirrelled away into secret cupboards and boxes and bags and corners. We dragged, carried, shifted the stuff to the garage and slowly we assembled a thrift shop, junk store estate sale jumble sale garage sale out of 66 years of accumulated unnecessary stuff.

It was as if they were saving it for another life time. In the next life they will have lots of luggage straps and if the opportunity arises they have a chinese calculator ( the numbers are in chinese characters), they will be able to add up all of the dead razors and electrical cords.

As their bodies changed size the clothes that were no longer able to be worn were stored away. Not given away, who knows our parents might get younger and will once again be able to wear the hiking boots and north sea fisherman's coats.

A trip to the Calgary Wildlife Rehabilition Centre

We took a trip out to the Wildlife Centre in NW Calgary where our client Naomi works. She showed us around and we walked up to the corral where the little rescued deer were. One of them had been brought to the centre only moments after birth. When she arrived she hadn't even stood up yet. They are thriving there and are sharing their sanctuary with 2 little mule deer fawns who were too skittish to come out of the tall grass for us to see them..

Naomi feeds them goat's milk and treated them to some apples when we arrived. The fawns have unbelievably cute little faces and were fond of licking each other's mouths.

Fortunately they will soon become adolescents and will be eager to escape the confines of their safe enclosure and will reject any human contact.

But, for the moment we were visiting substitute moms and they allowed us to touch their warm sweet little bodies and pet their soft heads.

This little baby hare wouldn't look me in the eye. He tried to make himself invisible.
There was a new recruit volunteer starting when we arrived but the staff of two is pushed to maintain a hot line of over a hundred calls a day with rescue queries and new arrivals.

Ducklings of various ages and a mother.

The Centre operates out of a tiny little house way up on the NW end of the city by the Penitentiary, it obviously runs on shoe string budget and I am sure they would love to be the beneficiary of more generous donations.