|
|
|
|
|
|
| ||||||
|
|
2003 Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
We never actually got a chance to tell you what happened in 2003, so we thought we’d better tell you. 2003 started off alright, nothing too unusual.
I celebrated my 50th
birthday on March 7, it was very low key, the girls,my mom, Brant and and I went out
for dinner.
On April 8, 2003 we celebrated Shannon and Carly’s 21st birthday. Later that month a friend of ours, Susan Falk, held an art show in white Rock. Carly had started BCIT Marketing in September 2002 and Shannon was still going to Kwantlen College, working towards her teaching degree. They both finished their school year in May. In
August we attended Gary Johnson’s annual garden party, then the same week we
went to Lynden Fair.
We hadn’t bred any of our llamas as there was no market left to speak of, but we had bred our alpacas, and we had three male alpaca crias born in 2003, all boys. First Misty, then Princess in August and finally Daisy in September gave birth to wonderful baby boys. They have all turned out to be extremely nice.
I
Meanwhile, I was working very hard getting our new program at BCIT up and running - it was scheduled to start November 2 – http://filmflex.ca All was going well with everything then one day I got a bad phonecall. On October 1, Mom discovered that she was getting low on her prescriptions, so she and Shannon went to a walk in clinic to get a renewal. As Mom crossed the carpet to sit down, she caught her foot an a piece of floor trim and fell. She had broken her left hip. Then we got to experience close up and personal the horrific state of medicine in B.C. today. Shannon wouldn’t let them take Mom to Langley Memorial Hospital as it is a complete disaster. Instead she was taken by ambulance to Peace Arch Hospital in White Rock. The next few hours passed in a blur but it soon became clear that she couldn’t get her hip set, as there was no operating room time available. So my 87 year old mother got to lie in bed all night with weights on her foot to keep the leg straight. They weren’t able to do the surgery till late the next afternoon. I found out later that another friend had also fallen and broken her hip the same week. It took five days and a transfer from one hospital to another before HER hip got fixed. Brant meanwhile had taken the dog and gone to Vancouver Island for work the same day my Mom fell. So Mom was in the hospital for ten days, and I was busy getting ready to do this brand new program at BCIT. When she was released from the hospital, we had a homemaker for a short time each day but Shannon and I basically lived with her night and day to help get her up to the bathroom, get her dressed, etc. About ten days after she got out of the hospital, she woke up and didn’t feel well. She kept telling me she felt tired so when her physiotherapist came I talked to her about it and we decided to take her to the hospital. I good thing, as she was actually having a heart attack. A blood clot from her hip had hit her heart. For a few days things were very tense, but she started feeling better, and I got to hire my instructors for FilmFLEX and order all the equipment, from a seat on a park bench outside Peace Arch Hospital. Gary had come down from Terrace for three days but he had to go back very soon. Eventually we got the FilmFLEX program started, and Mom came home. It’s been a very long road to recovery for her – by Christmas I was able to go back to work but we could no longer have dinner in our own house, so we moved all meal preparation to her house. I haven’t cooked a meal in my own kitchen for over a year. Meanwhile, also back in October, Brant’s friend Dean Stoke drowned in Tonga. Dean was down there with his sailboat and something went wrong. He will be missed. So my Mom was starting to get better, and Brant’s parent’s celebrated their anniversary on November 4th. On November 19, Carly and I went to my 30th Anniversary BCIT dinner – I started there in November 1973. After dinner, we got a call from Brant – he had been staying with his parents in North Vancouver. His mother had had a “slight” stroke and had been taken to hospital by ambulance. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as slight as originally thought. Her conditioned worsened dramatically a few days later. While Myrna took a turn for the worse, we got word that a dear family friend, Mike Ridout, son of Cec and Rita, was very sick in Victoria with a mysterious illness. On December 1, at 3 a.m., Myrna passed away. Mike died at 5:30 p.m. the same day. Myrna’s funeral took place on December 9, 2003. She was cremated and her ashes were later scattered at Kye Bay. There is a memorial to Myrna’s life at: http://www.xanadufarms.com/Links/myrna.htm We had been trying since 2000 to get some changes to Zero Avenue, the road we live on. Over the years, the traffic had gotten faster and faster as drivers, finding a rural road with no speed enforcement, drove like lunatics to get from “A” to “B”. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, we were woken on December 17th by the news that a young man from Sardis had been commuting to work on Zero Avenue at 7 a.m. He was driving westbound, but he was going so fast that he ended up in the eastbound lane, and hit a grader truck head on. He hit the truck with his small car so hard that it knocked the front wheels of the grader into the back wheels. His speedometer was frozen at 168 kmph. He was killed instantly. Two days later, one car rearended the car ahead right in front of our house. This time the rear car caught fire and burned in the road, right in front of us. The speeding driver in the car managed to get out before it burned. It happened right beside the school bus stop, shortly after the children had gotten on the bus. Needless to say, these two incidents made us push all the harder for change. You can see more about the problem at: http://www.xanadufarms.com/savezeroavenue Brant and Carly went to Debbie and Doug’s for Christmas while Shannon and I stayed with Mom. We had our Christmas dinner on Boxing Day, with Russell Wilson and Rod Nichol as guests. It started to snow about December 27 and continued on and off till December 31st. New Year’s Eve was very quiet – I think we just barely managed to stay awake till midnight. And that was 2003, a year we’d rather forget.
| |||||||||||||
|
Send mail to
thandel@shaw.ca with
questions or comments about this web site.
|
