In the teaching profession, our year always began at the end of August or the beginning of September so New Years didn’t mean very much to me but this year is different.  Today is truly a day of reflecting on a wonderful year just passed and looking forward to the one ahead with anticipation.

Looking back, we reflect on our retirement at the end of June and all the celebrations and accolades that went along with that.  We spent lots of quality time with family in 2007 including a DeBock family reunion in August.  This was also the year that I learned to operate a combine and helped my friend, Louis, with harvest.  What a great time that was!  It was also during harvest that we learned that we’re going to be grandparents in the coming year as our daughter, Melaina, is expecting a baby boy in May!  Though we’ll be far away when he arrives, we’re absolutely delighted!

As I look ahead, I’m reminded of the exhilaration I experienced as a little girl whenever I had the opportunity to be the first to leave my footprints on an area of fresh fallen snow.  A new year – a new beginning.  How exciting!

Of course, we look forward to our time in Japan with excitement and anticipation and wonder that this dream we’ve had for so long is really coming true.  As I question what else the new year might hold, I’m reminded of a line from a song that says “I don’t know what my future holds, but I know who holds my future” and I am secure in that knowledge.

May 2008 be a wonderful year for you and yours!

Last night, we had the privilege of sharing Christmas dinner with Lita, a live in nanny from the Philippines who came to Calgary two months ago.  Prior to coming to Canada, Lita was nanny/helper to our friends, Tess and Charles, in Hong Kong helping care for their four young children, Sebastian and his triplet siblings, Jasper, Sela and Carys.  We first met Lita two and a half years ago when she came to Canada with Tess and the children for a summer visit.   We saw her again this past summer when the family was once again in Canada.  This time, we also met her husband, De.  De continues to work in Hong Kong and their 3 year old daughter is in the Philippines where she has been cared for by Lita’s sister most of her life.  Lita will have to work in Canada for 3 years before she is able to sponsor her husband and child so that they can finally be together as a family.  As a mother, I find it hard to fathom the sacrifice involved being separated from her own child and caring for other people’s in order to eventually build a better life for her own.

Over the years we’ve picked up a few Christmas traditions from friends of other cultures.  About 25 years ago, I went Christmas shopping with a friend who was born in Holland.  We stopped at a little Dutch import shop in Edmonton to pick up chocolate initials, one of her family’s special Christmas treats.  I decided that they would make great stocking stuffers and one of our enduring Christmas traditions was born.  Some years they’ve been easy to find but other years the search has been long and difficult.  Not once, though, have we failed to find them in time for Christmas.

Today I’m making French Canadian tourtiere, a delicious meat pie.  It’s one of our traditions that was born several years later when we spent Christmas in Cranbrook with our dear friends, Joan and Rod and their boys.  Every Christmas Eve, Joan, who was of French Canadian descent, served tourtiere for supper.  Though I had never made it before, I found a recipe the following year and we’ve eaten it for Christmas Eve dinner ever since.

I wonder if next year we’ll find something Japanese to incorporate in our ensuing Christmases.  I understand that there is very little Christian influence in Japan and that Christmas is, for the most part, simply a commercial endeavor but perhaps there will be something that we can adopt.

Happy Christmas to all!

December and Christmas seemed to sneak up on me this year.  I think that’s because it took a long time for the reality of retirement to really sink in.  Being a teacher, I was used to the long summer break.  When fall rolled around and I didn’t go back to school, it seemed as if it was still summer at least until winter arrived!

At first, as I Christmas shopped, wrapped gifts, started baking and decorated the tree, it seemed as if I was just going through the motions but now that Christmas is just a few days away, the excitement of the season has caught me once again.  Perhaps it was the nativity play at church last Sunday evening where the littlest angel fell asleep onstage or maybe it’s been the Christmas music filling the house the past few days.  It could be the cards and letters arriving in the mail each day catching us up with news of friends and family or maybe it’s the scent of the white spruce Christmas tree and the taste of mandarin oranges and shortbread.  Most of all, though, it’s probably the fact that we’re off to Calgary tomorrow to celebrate Christmas with our daughter, Melaina, and her husband, Aaron.  Our son, Nathan, will be joining us there.  This will be the very first time that we’ve celebrated Christmas in one of our children’s homes and I’m really looking forward to it!

We’ve been spared the terrible winter storm that ravaged eastern Canada and the Maritimes over the past few days.  In fact, we’ve been enjoying a fairly pleasant winter so far.  There’s plenty of snow but the daytime highs have been mostly in the -10 to -15 C range which really isn’t bad at all.   This morning we woke up to a coating of hoar frost on the trees and the sun shone brightly most of the day.  I can appreciate the beauty of a day like this one but still I am not a winter person so it is with great delight that I have been checking the Tokyo weather each day lately!  Daytime highs have been between +5 and +15 C and the days have been mostly sunny!  Apparently, there’s lots of rain in the spring followed by a summer that is very hot and humid but I think I’m going to like winter!

We booked our tickets this morning so we’re one step closer to leaving for Japan!  We fly out of Edmonton early on the morning of Sunday, February 24th.  After a 3 hour layover in Vancouver, we’ll fly nonstop to Narita International, the airport that serves the Tokyo area.  That flight takes approximately ten and a half hours so it will be late evening our time when we arrive but taking into account the sixteen hour time difference, it will be mid afternoon the following day there!

As many of you know, drama is a passion of mine. Richard and I have been actively involved in a local community theatre group for several years. The group is presently in the midst of preparing Arsenic and Old Lace for production the first weekend of February. Because we were away when auditions were held and because we were in the midst of applying for positions in Japan and didn’t know if we were going to be around for the actual performances, neither of us took onstage roles this time. I volunteered to help out behind the scenes. Little did I know that that would mean stepping into the director’s shoes when she was called away to Arkansas to be with her mother who is very ill! It’s a bit outside my comfort zone as I haven’t directed adults before but we have a great cast and it’s been going quite well except for the fact that one cast member with a lead role has been having a great deal of difficulty memorizing her lines. She suffered a stroke less than a year ago and it has impaired her memory much more than she realized. She’s been doing a wonderful job of bringing the character to life but is very distressed over the fact that she can’t remember her lines. Today I agreed to be her understudy; to memorize the lines and be ready to step into the role if she can’t do it. In spite of the fact that it’s a very large role, I’ve been at every rehearsal and have heard the lines over and over again so I don’t think they’ll be too hard to memorize but I sure hope Mary Jane is back soon and that nothing else goes wrong in the meantime!

We’re often asked these days what we’re going to do with the house while we’re away.  Since we do plan to return to Sedgewick, we’re keeping it and have arranged to have Chrissy and her husband, Buck, move in and take care of it for us.

Chrissy first came to live with us in 2002 when she was in high school.  She was a kid who needed a home and ours was a home that needed a kid.  Our youngest, Nathan, was about to leave for college and I didn’t feel ready for an empty nest.  She quickly became part of the family and holds a very special place in our hearts.  We often hear of grown children leaving home only to return again.  That’s been Chrissy.  After two years of college in Calgary, she came back for the summer of 2006.  At the end of that August, we celebrated her marriage to Buck.  They were both with us for awhile earlier this fall and are now renting a tiny apartment here in Sedgewick until we leave.

We plan to store some of our furniture as well as the contents of our cupboards and closets in the basement while we’re away so that Buck and Chrissy can move their own things in.  That has necessitated a major clean out!  It’s amazing what you accumulate after twenty-six years in one house but over the past month, we’ve become pretty good at getting rid of stuff.  Many loads have been hauled to the local thrift store and the garbage men must be wondering what’s going on as the weekly pile by the street has been much bigger than usual.  We started with the storage room which now seems much bigger than before.  I’ve also completely cleaned out the office space that I no longer need and today the linen closets were done.  There are still several closets to go as well as the kitchen cupboards but we still have two months!

We also owe a huge note of gratitude to our niece, Tina, who teaches grade 5.  Richard taught grade 5 for most of his career and I taught a wide variety of elementary and junior high subjects.  Over the past 32 years, we accumulated a lot of valuable teaching resources.  We didn’t want to see them go to waste but saw no reason to keep to them.  We passed some things on to our colleagues at the end of June then invited Tina to visit in August and take away whatever she could use.  She left with almost everything that was left!  What a big help that was to us.  Thanks, Tina!

It looks like we’ll be heading off to Japan a little sooner than we thought.  We’ve been asked to arrive on about Feb. 25, two or three weeks earlier than we’d expected.   Shouldn’t be a problem as long as there aren’t any delays getting our working visas.

In order to get the visas we were required to send a number of documents including notarized copies of our university diplomas to our employer in Japan.  They have presented them to Japanese Immigration on our behalf and are waiting for Certificates of Eligibility to be issued.  This usually takes about four or five weeks.  Once the certificates are issued, they’ll be sent to us and we’ll take them, along with our passports, to the closest Japanese consulate which is located in Calgary.  The consulate will hold our passports for five working days then stamp the working visas directly into them.  We can either return to the consulate to pick them up or arrange to have them mailed back to us.

I’m not usually a fan of Canada Post but I must say that I was impressed when we sent the required documents to Japan at the end of Nov.   I mailed them on a Thurs. morning and by Sunday evening we’d received an email letting us know that they’d arrived!  We sent them priority post and paid accordingly, of course, but I was still pleasantly surprised by how quickly they got there.

Is it just vanity on my part or do passport photographers make everyone look like a terrorist?  When I applied for my last passport back in 2005, the first photo I had taken was so bad that I refused to use it.  Unfortunately, the second one wasn’t a lot better.  I remember telling the photographer that it wasn’t very flattering and being somewhat taken aback by his response.  He assured me that after twelve hours on a plane I’d look that bad.  Thanks, buddy!

Since we already have valid passports, that’s one thing we don’t have to take care of before we head off to Japan.  We do, however, require more recent passport photos in order to apply for our working visas.  We had those taken today and once again, mine looks like it belongs on a Wanted poster!