Year In Perspective

Now that I'm on a 2 week holiday, it's a good time to reflect on the past year.

Firstly, it has flown bye faster than Tiger's 3 iron in his wife's hands!

It's been a year of many ups and many downs. The ups occurring each time we get to see our kids and grand daughters, the downs with so many friends suffering from illnesses and a few passing away.

All our children (including our daughters in law of course) seem to be well settled into their jobs and the future looks good for them, and this is obviously a relief in these economic times. The oldest girls, Anna & Julia, have started real school and have their whole education ahead of them....lucky for their teachers, I think! Meanwhile Claire and Monique will be learning from them and should find schooling easier, I suppose.

Kate has moved house and seems to be in a good place at the moment and travels all over Canada for her company.....

This has been a quiet year regarding vacationing, other than visiting our family in Kitchener/Waterloo and family and friends in Toronto, we have not travelled further afield.

The year did start with a bang when we celebrated New Years Eve with Sabrina and Brian at the Rex in Toronto. We all had a good time, listening and dancing to some great Reggae music.

The down side of the year saw the passing of Jackie's sister Shirley, a photography friend Fred Abela and of course our good friend Ron Marks. The latter 2 suffering and succumbing to the dreadful A.L.S. desease.

We are also watching our friend and Rabbi, Joel Wittstein struggle with his deamons and to call him a hero is probably an understatement. He and Ailene are fighting a difficult battle and he has tremendous support from his congregation. We visited him last week while he was in hospital for about 10 days and, although very week, he showed signs of the Joel we know so well.

The year is hopefully ending well with a Wienburg/Wirick Boxing Day gathering and then Margie and I are repeating our New Years Eve celebration at the Rex as we did last year.

We are also looking forward to taking all 4 grand daughters to the Wizard of Oz at the Grand Theatre on Sunday.