100!

Today is Oma's 100th birthday!

This picture is from her 99th birthday party.  Hopefully I can get another one today when we go visit to celebrate with Oma.

It is almost mind-boggling to think that she has been alive for 100 years.  To look at her fingers, to think of her heart that has been beating for 100 years.  And what a testament to God's faithfulness to her, and also to Opa and all our family.  Oma has often that "The Lord is good" and expresses her great desire that her children and grand-children and great-grand-children be able to testify the same.

We're looking forward to seeing Oma tonight, as well as my extended family.  Most of Oma's family lives close enough to visit her, but a few will not be able to come, as they live out of province or out of country.

It is our prayer that God will continue to be with Oma, to sustain her through each day, for however many days He has yet for her.  We love you Oma!

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas from our family to yours, from our home to yours.  May the celebration of our Saviour's birth give you joy and hope for today, tomorrow, and great hope for a great future.

R&K

Funny Story

I work at a small Christian bookstore.  My parents are also involved in the running of this bookstore.  We have a few spinners in the store, used to display some of the books.  Today, one of these spinners had the misfortune of tipping over, and it got a little bent out of shape by the fall.

Since one of the roles my Dad fills for the bookstore is General Handyman, I sent him a text, here's a few excerpts of our conversation.

Me: "Are you coming to the bookstore tonight? Do you have any sinner straightening tools? One fell and suffered a bit."

Dad: "Sinner straightening tools?  There's Bibles and other good books!"


One little missing 'p' makes all the difference.  But oh so funny in the context of the bookstore.  I'm still laughing!

Spaghetti Day

Give thanks to God for He is good!  In His goodness, our garden produced an abundance of tomatoes this year.  We had four plants, two romas, one round slicer plant and one cherry tomato plant.  The two roma plants produced abundantly, and I was able to put many many tomatoes into the freezer.

This many.  (Actually, one or two bags were from other sources).

About two weeks ago I had a day with nothing scheduled so I deemed it to be 'Spaghetti Day'.  I started with a neat and tidy kitchen.  And the 13 or 14 bags of tomatoes, most of which were cored and scored.

The first step was to peel them all, a process that went quite smoothly, just running the frozen tomatoes under water and the skins all but fell off.  The results were this:

and over 2L of tomatoes skins!

Next, it was time to stew all those tomatoes.  All four burners put to work for this part of the project!

I sure used a lot of dishes!  For the peeled tomatoes I had used all my large plastic containers, and for the hot stewed tomatoes I rummaged through my cupboards for anything glass or metal - it is almost surprising how many I have!

All in all, I think it came to be about 27L of stewed tomatoes, of which about 19 went back into the freezer for a future day.

The remaining 8L were combined with this:

To produce this - yummy spaghetti sauce!

And to make sure I'm not painting an overly rosy picture...check out this dirty stove.  This was after I had half-cleaned it at least once.  The pans are so full that they spill over so easily when stirring!

We had spaghetti for supper that night...it was good but I had had enough of spaghetti and tomatoes by that time of day, so I will enjoy it more another time, as there's many spaghetti meals in the freezer!

Patio Door

As  you saw in my previous post, the screen door on our patio door had a cat-sized hole in it.  However, the door itself was also in poor condition as there was condensation between the panes of glass (not so noticeable in the summer as in the winter).  Those facts, coupled with our plan to slowly do various improvements to our home, mean we now have a new patio door!  It has actually been installed for over a month already but I wanted to blog about it so that we have a record of when the installation was done.

Since I am blogging about it, I may as well include a few before and after pictures!

Before: Outside

 Before: Inside

After: Inside

We decided to replace the sliding door with a terrace door, so the "door" on the left (above) is fixed and the door on the right is a swing door.  There is still a sliding screen door which is why the one side looks white and the other side looks grey.  Since the door swings out, the screen is inside and Harry can't rip another hole!  (At least not as easily!)

After: Outside.  We (meaning Robert! :) ) will probably paint the door to match the siding.

 

 

Thank you to Carl from Advantage Windows & Doors for his fabulous work - we are loving our new door and are thankful that we had the opportunity to get this upgrade done this year.

Harry

I'd like you all to meet Harry.

I'm sorry, please excuse his bad manners.  I asked him to please turn around and look at the camera.

 He condescended to turn his head slightly and give me a malevolent glare.  But on another day, he was all smiles for the camera...

Sort of, anyways.

Harry is our neighbour cat.  He lives next door, and spends a lot of time outside, making the rounds of the neighbourhood.  He and Mindy like to have "discussions" together, and he often comes to see if she's by the back door...or the front door ...or one of the windows...  we hear him meowing out there more often. 
He's not very people-friendly and I usually can't get too close to him, but once in awhile he will come join us if we're sitting on the back porch.

Speaking of our back porch, it has a screen door, of which the bottom portion looks like this:

Questions as to how the tears came to be will have to be directed to Harry, and pleadings of innocence must be ignored.

If I fold back the torn portions, it makes a nice cat-sized hole, see?

It seems that Harry had some method to his madness, when he first started creating that hole last summer.  A few weeks ago, I walked into the kitchen only to see a grey tail go past the edge of the cupboard.  Our Mindy-Kitty does not have a grey tail.  Harry had just marched into our home through the hole he had created in our screen door!

We managed to chase him out before the Mindy-Kitty awoke (some guard cat she is!) and we're even more diligent to keep the patio door closed if we're not providing careful surveillance.  Because if it isn't the Mindy-Kitty trying to sneak out, it is Harry marching in!

The good news for us is we are upgrading our patio door, and anticipating the arrival of the new one any day now... and that will include a new screen...on the inside so Harry won't be able to attack it as often!

Camping!

On Friday night, Robert and I went to a local conservation area for a night of camping.  I've been aching to go, so off we went!  We packed up in Rob's pickup - even for one night of camping, you sure need a lot of stuff.  I may or may not have a tendency to over-pack.

We had a good time, it was nice to getaway even for such a short time, to have a campfire, to just be outside.  I love camping!

(Don't you all take a dehumidifier with you?)

Our campsite...we hadn't used our tent in quite a long time, it is bigger than I remembered. 

This morning, we went for a walk, there was a lookout over looking the lake.

And some trees that had been much attacked by woodpeckers!  Some of these holes were pretty big!

We had to be off our campsite by 1:00, so we next went to my parents place, where it was a busy afternoon.  We took a load of stuff to the dump for my parents.   (Including the dehumidifier - it hadn't actually come camping with us, we'd dropped it off at my parents' already on Friday night.)  My Dad is working on building a new shed, so my brother helped with that, and there was also a pressure washer on the premises, so it was put to use as well, cleaning patio stones.

To finish off our day, we brought home my parents' camper trailer, we have more camping planned for this summer!

Quebec Vacation - Part 4

Wednesday morning we had another early start, as we had a long day of driving ahead of us.  We were leaving the Quebec city area, and heading somewhat west, and definitely north, into more remote areas of the province.  However, we had plenty of excitement before we left the park too!

 

We were getting ready to eat breakfast (just like Tuesday morning); I was peeling a peach.  Suddenly Rob said to me "Karen, there's a bear, get in the trailer".  My heart rate quadrupled instantly as I hurried to grab as much foodstuff as I could and run into the trailer.  I didn't get make much progress before Rob said 'Its okay, he's leaving'.  I had quickly looked when Rob first mentioned the bear, and once he was leaving I turned to really watch him. 

 

He had just been meandering down the campsite road towards our site, not really in a hurry.  But once he decided to leave, he left in a hurry - he was galloping away.  It was a full-size bear, and it was really neat to see.  But it took quite some time for my heart rate to return to normal!

 

After our breakfast, when returning from the bathroom, we met another woman who was watching a porcupine.  He was a cute little fellow, and although they are rodents, he looked like a little bear, especially his feet.

 

I had forgotten to take a picture of our campsite while it was setup, but here we are, all ready to go on Wednesday morning.  The sites in this park were very nice too.  We also had electricity in this park, but the nights were not nearly as cold.

On the road again!

Wednesday night, after about 9 hours on the road, we arrived in Reserve Faunique La Verendrye.  This park was very large, and similar to Algonquin - one road going through, with some homes/resorts, even a small village along the way, and lots of very rustic camping.  We stayed in a campground that was a little less rustic - there was running water!

 

However, it really felt like it was a former logging camp, and when the loggers were done they quickly set up some outhouses, put some stones in circles for fire pits, and called it a day.  Thankfully the campground was quite empty, so it was fine, but we would not have liked it very much at all had there been a lot of other campers.  Our fire pit was practically on the road, too.

 

It was a park for fishing, rather than camping.  There was some seasonal camping, and I think most people who camp there had a boat and would do a lot of fishing.

We spent Thursday in the park, have a rather lazy day.  It was disappointing that the  park wasn't as nice as the others, where we could have found more to do, but it was nice to have a day off after all the driving. We read and made popcorn, then we burned all our campfire wood and relaxed by the fire.

Friday morning, Rob took the picture above just before the sun came up of the lake with the boats, and then we were back on the road.  Quite early, I think we left by 7:30 or so, and just in time, because it did start raining shortly there after, and we had rain off and on all day.

Some time after lunch we crossed back into Ontario - it was nice to be back in English speaking territory!  (Notice though, that I took a picture of the French 'welcome' sign; there was an English one too!)

 

Our destination for Friday night was Arrowhead Provincial Park.  We arrived late afternoon, and since we were only staying the one night, we decided to leave the car and trailer hooked up again.

 

We went for a short walk down to the beach, just to see it.

 

We had no sooner gotten back to our campsite than it started to rain.  Really rain.  We could stay cozy and dry in the trailer, but it was getting on supper time.  Now, "supper" that night was just hotdogs, but they still did need to be heated.  Eventually, we set the stove just outside the trailer door and quickly fried up some weiners.  The dirty pan and dishes just got put back into the cupboard.  (But don't worry, they were washed when we got home).  The rain slowed, but didn't let up.  We played a game or two, but we did not have electricity at this site, only flashlights to give us light.  So we ended up going to bed very early - about 8:30.  But then Rob woke up around 2:00am, and I woke up not long after that.  Rob wasn't likely to sleep again, so then neither would I.  So, after laying there for a while, we decided to just go home!

 

The only reason we could do it was because the car and trailer were still hooked up.  We had taken very little out of the trailer, just the stove, water jug and a pail.  So, we came up with a game plan, rearranged things inside a bit, to make appropriate space for the wet items coming in from outside.  I made a couple trips to the car with our pillows (I wanted to have a nap when we got home!) and some snacks, and then waited in the car while Rob put the trailer down.  Three minutes later he joined me in the car, and we were off!  We were as quiet as we could be - even closing our car doors in unison, so hopefully we didn't wake up the campers around us.

 

We arrived home around 7:30, and I quite quickly crawled into our own bed for a nap.  Even after my nap, we had plenty of time to unpack, and we even had the trailer all cleaned out, and vaccuumed by later that afternoon.

 

And that was our vacation!  It was really good to get away for a week, and to see some more of this grand country we live in.  Truly, we serve a magnificent Creator-God.

 

 

Quebec Vacation - Part 3

On Monday and Tuesday nights we stayed in another national park, parc National de Jacques-Cartier.  This was another beautiful park, in the mountains, lots of trees, lakes, and rivers.  And wildlife!

 

On Tuesday morning, we were just ready to eat breakfast when we noticed that the campers across the road were clearly seeing something in the bushes.  A few minutes later they came by, armed with an enormous camera, and told us there was a moose in the bush.   They were French, and we were most impressed that they knew the English word for 'moose' - I don't know what a moose is called in French!

 

We could not see the moose clearly, as he was in the woods, so there were a lot of trees in the way, but we had plenty of time to observe him, helping himself to his breakfast.  It was a male moose with a full antler set and a "beard".  They sure are big creatures! 

 

After awhile, we left the moose to his breakfast, and went back to our own breakfast.  Then we headed back into Quebec City.  On this day, we planned to spend some time in old Quebec, seeing what there was to see.

What there was to see was narrow cobblestone streets, old, buildings, the city wall, and lots of restaurants and shops.  It was a really neat place, and a very European flavour to it all.  Including a 'foreign' language! :)

In the picture below is the restaurant where we had lunch - we wanted to eat on a cobblestone street!

 

We also wanted to go see the Montmorency water fall, which is not far from old Quebec City, so we headed there next.  We parked at the top of the falls, but there is the opportunity to take stairs down to the bottom.  We opted against the stairs - just look at them all!

The waterfall itself.

 

Then we headed back to our campsite; the park was about 45 minutes north of Quebec City.  We were running low on food, so we ventured into a grocery store to pick up some items.  Everything in Quebec is very French.  Neither Rob and I can claim any fluency in the language; I studied it in highschool (which was many years ago) and Rob had only studied it a bit in grade school.  However, we never really had any trouble.  In the stores and parks, people switched to English readily, although some definitely knew more than others.  For basic needs, I know the vocabulary to communicate even if I can't string sentences together, but there never really was any need for that.

 

This last picture below is along the road in parc National de Jacques-Cartier, on our way back to our campsite.