Xmas 2006



2006 Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!


Beside our pond on a cold evening

When we last left the Handel family in December 2005, they had just had someone come up their driveway and steal their beloved van. In early January 2006, we finally got it back. Seems that the thief had just driven it up to north Surrey and dumped it. The keys were still in the ignition. The big excitement in January was Trudy and Carly going to Las Vegas to attend the National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE), both for the first time. It was quite an eye opener – it’s amazing how many different approaches people take to sell their programs. It was Carly’s first time in Las Vegas so we spent the first night there walking around the streets till about 3 in the morning. It’s a great place to visit but you need a long rest when you return.


Mom sold the farm in Creston in mid February, almost eight years after she left there. It had been rented for part of the time, but it was in many ways a relief to have it sold. The first sale to a neighbour fell through, and she ended up with an even better offer from someone in Cranbrook.


She celebrated by buying a new car - the first one she'd ever had! It's a Dodge Caravan with all the bells and whistles. She especially likes the heated seats.


February saw another graduation ceremony for the FilmFLEX program at BCIT. It’s always interesting to see what the students come up with for their final projects – there’s a lot of talent out there. One student sold 7,000 copies of his final project.

Then Carly and Trudy left for Kelowna, where they represented BCIT at a student recruitment event. The drive up there was something else – the Coquihalla Highway was a complete white out.



We also had our first alpaca of the year born – a “surprise” baby born in February - possibly a hillbilly romance. Anyway, he was very cute and we named him Vincent Van Gogh because he was little early and one ear was a little twisted. It straightened out eventually but the name still stuck.



In March, Marty came to visit on her way through to Seattle. She was going down to do some judge's training at a horse show being held there.



The “bad deal” that we’d made with an alpaca breeder was still causing problems – after a court case we finally settled and our twelve female llamas came back home in March.


In early March, Trudy went to Kamloops to attend an aboriginal conference. She ended up there alone for her birthday on March 7th.



Then Trudy was off to Chemainus, an aboriginal community close to Ladysmith on Vancouver Island for a student career fair.




At the end of March, Shannon and Trudy spent a couple of days at Fibrefest International in Abbotsford, where Shannon had a booth. Her glass work just keeps improving.





Essie and Trudy went to Mt. Vernon in Washington state for the tulip festival. It's quite amazing - nothing but acres and acres of colour. You can drive all the way around the fields.


In April, Carly went to Chicago to work in the B.C. Biotechnical Association booth. She had a good time, and phoned and said that the “wind blew all the time”. Guess it lived up to it’s name as the “windy city”. Shannon got to be an only child for her 24th birthday – she said it felt very strange.


Since Carly missed her own birthday because of the conference, Shannon and Carly had another birthday party when she got back - they sang karaoke at the Sandpiper pub in White Rock.




Later in April, Trudy’s brother John, Anne, Mandi, Raymond and Cody came to visit for a week. They had a lot of fun seeing the sights around Vancouver.




That same month, Brant and Trudy went to see Brooks and Dunn – what a good concert.


At the end of the month, Carly and her boyfriend Darryl went down to California to visit Darryl’s sister, her husband and son in Los Angeles.

On May 7^th, Essie, Shannon and Trudy went up to Merrit to meet a breeder, and pick up our new dog – a six month old apricot royal standard poodle named “Princeton”. What a sweetheart he turned out to be. He is one of the most gentle dogs we’ve ever known. He has his own page on the website.


In late May, we had a surprise for Essie – Gary was able to get down for her 89^th birthday celebration. She was very happy to see him, as it had been quite awhile since he had been able to visit


Mom had needed a new roof on her trailer for a long time, so we finally found a contractor who set to work in May to change over her roof and add a carport.





In June Brant and his brothers, dad and cousins went on their annual fishing trip – this year they went to Bamfield. They caught some fish but they weren’t as plentiful as they’d been the year before. However, everybody had a good time and returned tired and windblown.




Aunt Jean and Uncle Norm stayed at Mom's for a few days in June. They were here for their 64th anniversary and for Father's Day.




We were very happy with Princeton, our new dog, but he was very lonely. He had been brought up around a lot of other dogs, and suddenly he was alone. We liked Princeton so much that we phoned his breeder and purchased a second dog, his full sister –we named her Virginia Woolf – Ginny for short. She was born on May 2^nd, so it would be a few weeks before she would be ready to go. Finally on June 28, Brant and Trudy drove up to Merrit to meet the breeder again (the breeder actually lived in Vernon) and pick up Ginny. She was too cute for words – a little darker apricot, but very similar in colouring to Princeton. We were soon to learn that she was the brains in partnership. Anything that Ginny could get into, she did, with Princeton as her willing dupe, sort of like the duo in “Of Mice and Men”.


Trudy went to the Fraser Valley Llama and Alpaca club annual summer party. This year it was held at the old Finning Estate in south Langley. When the Finnings owned it, it was 160 acres which has gradually been sold off. There is now 40 acres remaining of the original estate, but it's quite breathtaking.




Mom and I go down to White Rock every July 4th to watch the American fireworks - you can get a great view from there. The sky was a really neat colour as dusk approached this year.


In early July we celebrated Brant's birthday with a family barbeque. The weather cooperated and it was a great afternoon.




In June and July, we have to shear the alpacas, and any llamas that have a very heavy coat. Since I was doing the shearing, somehow we didn't get any pictures of it! I'll have to do better next year. We sheared about forty animals, with the aid of Shannon and Carly, Brant and our boarder Dianne, a lot of pop, water and beer, and the brawn of Shannon and Carly's boyfriends, Pete and Darryl.

In July we started doing some improvements on the house. This work was to last longer than the construction of the pyramids. We started out by digging a trench to the gates for power (cable for power still not down there in December). During the trench digging (digging through Panama) the contractor ruptured the gas line between the house and the barn. We found out all about emergency procedures at BC Gas. He also dug through two water lines, a sewer line (twice), a phone line and dented an electrical conduit. At least we now know where they're all located.


We had a bunch of things we wanted to do, but the most important was the roof. We needed to replace our aging and disappearing roof with something else, so we chose metal. Thus begins the long and painful "telling of the roof story". Suffice to say that it wasn't finished for ANY of the wind storms we endured, and it still isn't quite finished as we sit here in December. We won't mention the 2 by 6 foot skylight sailing off the roof in December (somehow it wasn't screwed in!) and landing where Trudy had been standing five minutes earlier - almost like a scene from the Wizard of Oz. We also wanted to have a carport and a couple of covered porches built. They turned out great (well, almost great - we have a flooding problem in one as the drain is the highest spot - go figure!). We decided to add a carport off the back, a couple of porches on the front, and renovate the livingroom and bedrooms. We were quite thrilled with a lot of the stuff that he did, but the plot thickens later on. Trudy had theoretically taken July off, so she got to be there for some of the start up of the construction.


East side before


East side after


Front view before


Front view after


West front view before


West front view after


Back view before


Back view after


Living Room before renovation		Living Room during longest reno in the world
Living room - we had new windows installed and the wall straightened out. It's added about 100 sq ft to the inside of the room. Unfortunately the contractor left in the middle of the job, so it still looked like this at Xmas. He started this part of the renovation in late September. Trudy did the glass block wall at the end after the contractor left the 6 ft by 5 ft opening covered by a tarp - she finished it two days before the temperatures dipped to minus 11 in November.

Speaking of house remodelling, Trudy went by the old house in Burnaby - the people that bought it made the garage into their home office, closed in the sundeck and made it into a sunroom.

Brant and Trudy built that fence around the house in 1975 - amazing it's still up!

At the end of July, Mandi gave birth to a baby girl - Kaylee Caroline Essie. This is Essie's second great grandchild.


July was also baby alpaca month. We had bred our females to a suri male as part of our "agreement" with a breeder. The agreement fell apart, we ended up in court, so these are pretty expensive babies - but very cute.




Ginny the poodle managed to get caught in the fence and twisted her leg, so she was on bed rest till she healed – then she was off like a shot again, with Princeton bringing up the rear.

We bought two male suri alpacas in July – suris are different from regular alpacas and the previous owner had never shorn them. The older of the two, Rulfo, had to be hand shorn and we removed over twelve pounds of tangled, sweat soaked hair off the poor guy. Amazing that he had survived Saskatchewan summers without getting heat stroke. He is going to be one of our new alpaca herd sires so in 2007 we may have even more suri alpacas.


Rulfo before shearing		Rulfo after shearing - 12 lbs lighter

Parcy - the other suri male - one year old

August was pretty quiet – Mom and I went to the Chilliwack fair.



We went to the Lynden Fair a couple of times and Brant and I saw Merle Haggard in concert.



Then in September, Trudy and Brant went to see Heart at the River Rock Casino. Some things never change, and Heart is one of them.


Later that month, Trudy was in charge of the Langley Agricultural Advisory Farm Tour. Each year the committee comes up with a theme for the tour – this year was “Stayin’ Alive” – how farmers can continue to farm in todays’ economy. We visited a number of specialized farms and ended the tour with a dinner at a local farm. Everything went well and everyone enjoyed the tour. Trudy was pretty tired by the time it was all over, and has decided not to be in charge of future tours – it takes place at about the worst possible time of the year for her in terms of what she has to do at BCIT.


In October, Brant and Trudy went to the Coliseum to see Bob Dylan in concert. It was quite an experience to see a music legend like Dylan.

Aunt Frances and cousin Pam Sallaway stopped by on their way back to Victoria. They had taken a week to drive to Alberta and visit some old friends in Pincher Creek.



Our contractor almost finished the roof by the end of October – then he left. And didn’t return for a long, long time. Meanwhile, we had a bunch of windstorms which took off a lot of the roofing that he hadn’t finished securing. It also took off the tarp he’d left in place of roofing, and flooded the bedroom below, wrecking the ceiling and floor.

November was in interesting month. Trudy had some health problems and had to take time off and slow down a bunch. She will be off till January 2007, so she got a chance to read a lot of books and watch a lot of movies. November will go down in history as one of the nastiest months ever for bad weather. We had it all – snow, wind and rain, over and over again. The weather became bitterly cold – two days after Trudy completed the glass wall in the living room that had been left unfinished by the contractor.


On November 25, it started to snow, and by the time it stopped the next day, there was just over two feet of snow on the ground.








Literally just as the snow started, Brant and Trudy set out to see the Rolling Stones at BC Place stadium. We often thought about turning around and going back but it seemed just as bad to turn around as to keep going, so we made it to the concert. What an event! The Rolling Stones concert was amazing. It’s incredible to think that those guys just keep going and going. The drive back from the concert was also a pretty amazing event. It was definitely a wild ride home through the snow, but we did make it home.






On the evening of November 26^th, the shelter behind the big barn collapsed due to the snow load – with an alpaca (the deaf one) inside. Shannon, Brant and Trudy had to push and pull to get the alpaca out from under the fallen building, but she was OK in the end.


It also blew a small metal building into little pieces in another field.


The worst part about the weather was the continuous, never ending power outages. They would be hard enough to take if you lived in town, but where we live, when we lose power we also lose our water as we’re on a well. We spent hundreds of dollars on battery backups so that Essie could have a couple of lights at her house, and Brant and Trudy had some computer security. Finally we had had enough, so we purchased a 16,000 watt generator that goes on and off automatically if there are power problems, and runs on natural gas. It should be delivered in early January 2007, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed till then to avoid power outages. Here are some stories about our weather this year - we managed to be the #1, #2 and #9 stories in Canada.

So that brings us to December, with more storms and more power outages. Sigh. Trees uprooted, fences and houses smashed. Ah, yes…..our renovations. One day the wind started to blow, and another piece of the new roof (not screwed down) came off. Trudy walked in the house to phone Brant and tell him about the roof, and five minutes later, a two by six foot skylight sailed off the house, landing where Trudy had just been standing, and leaving us with a two by six hole in the roof, just before a rainstorm started. The contractor fixed it temporarily but will now have to replace both the skylight and part of the roof that it hit.

The mother of all storms mercifully missed us to a certain extent. It didn’t miss Stanley Park, where over a thousand trees were knocked down. They say that the park will never be the same as many of the trees that were destroyed were several hundred years old. The same storm brought down a tree on Debbie and Doug’s new sundeck on the house they were renovating.



So here we are, almost ready for Christmas. Or are we? Ah, yes…..the contractor. Remember when he started renovating in July? He still isn’t finished. From mid October to mid December, we had a wall of plastic and two by fours right down the middle of the living room. Imagine living with this for two months!





He’d been MIA from the end of October to the first week in December then appeared only intermittently. Finally in mid December the wall of plastic and wood was taken down, and we’ve made some progress, but we’re nowhere close to done so this should be an interesting Christmas.

Carly was on Vancouver Island with Darryl's parents for Christmas this year, but she came back for Boxing Day and we opened her presents then. She is continuing to work with the Biotech Department at BCIT as their Marketing and Program Assistant, and is having fun. She is also getting close to finishing her BBA at BCIT, on top of having already finished her Dipl Tech in Marketing a couple of years back.

Shannon was with us for Christmas. She has just finished her BA in English at UCFV, and is now going to take a year off before doing the teacher training (PDP) program there. Right now she's doing a lot of glass bead work (she is Miss January in the glass bead calendar this year, and there will be an article about her in a glass magazine soon). She is still living at home with us and she helps alot with the animals, etc.

Oh, well. We've thrown down the old carpet, put up the tree, and it is Christmas anyway.


We’ll dress up the dogs in antlers and tinsel, and everything will be fine!










The weather is back to "normal" and everyone is doing fine. On December 28, we had our first full sunny day since.....October 15th.




Hope you all have a happy and healthy holiday – keep in touch and have a good 2007!








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