Month: March 2014

Top six

/ edebock / Leave a comment

This is Following Augustine’s 600th post written over a period of slightly more than six years! I think that the secret to the blog’s longevity is its eclectic nature.

Originally started as a way to share our year in Japan (2008-2009) with friends and family, it has become much more than a travel blog. Family often shows up but it isn’t a mommy blog and while I occasionally focus on clothing, shoes or accessories, it definitely isn’t a fashion blog. In recent months, I’ve been using the blog to share my cancer journey but, just as my life continues to be about more than just my health, so does the blog. My faith permeates every part of my life, including what I write, but this isn’t a religion blog either. For lack of a better description, I refer to it as a travel and lifestyle blog but I also like to think of it as an active retirement blog.

One of the things that I like about blogging with WordPress is the stats page where I can see how many readers view the blog, where they’re from and which posts are most popular. I’m often surprised by which ones generate the most interest. In fact, some of the most popular posts are ones that I wondered if anyone would find interesting!

Today, in honour of 600 posts in 6 years, I’m going to profile my top 6 posts of all time. Since several of them are older posts, I’ll include a link to each one in case newer readers are interested in looking back with me. Just click on the titles below to check them out.

Following Augustine’s Top Six Posts of All Time

 

#6  What influences your sense of self-worth?   Oct. 29, 2011

The idea for this post came from Charles F. Stanley’s Bible study, How to Reach Your Full Potential for God, and was the result of some serious self examination. It was one of the most difficult posts I’ve written because it involved baring my soul and owning up to an attitude that I knew needed to change.

#5   Tatami   Aug. 28, 2008

I find it quite funny that the most popular post from our entire year in Japan was about the traditional floor covering known as tatami! Tatami has many advantages and I loved it but I didn’t love the insects that crawled out of the tightly woven mat at night to bite me! Eww! Fortunately, we learned how to get rid of them and it’s obviously this information that people are looking for when they Google “insects in tatami” or other similar phrases and find their way to this post.

#4   A new journey…   Aug. 30, 2013

The newest post on my Top Six list, this is the one that shared my cancer diagnosis. I was walking this trail beside a peaceful lake in southern Alberta when the cell phone in my pocket rang and I first heard that dreaded C word.

Where will this journey take us?

Now that a second cancer has been diagnosed, we are no closer to knowing where this journey is going to take us.

#3   Alex’s yellow lizard   May 28, 2012

IMG_9629_2Richard and I are avid geocachers. Geocaching is a grown up, high-tech game of hide and seek. Participants use GPS units to hide and find containers called geocaches and then log their activity online. One of the aspects of geocaching that I like best is trackables; geocaching game pieces that are moved from cache to cache by geocachers like ourselves. Alex’s Yellow Lizard was a trackable that we picked up from a roadside cache in Manitoba on our way home from Winnipeg a couple of years ago. When it started its journey in Minnesota, its owner asked that pictures be taken and posted along the way so that his seven-year-old son could watch his little yellow lizard as it traveled around the world. We placed it in a geocache at a native ceremonial site on a high point of land about 24 km north of our home. When I posted this information on the geocaching website, I included a link to my blog.

#2   Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout   Jan. 21, 2011

pig-nose-ringI have no idea why so many people enter things like “gold ring in pig’s snout” and “pig nose ring” in search engines! I thought this was a pretty obscure thing to write about! The phrase comes from Proverbs 11:22 and refers to a beautiful woman who has no discretion.

 

And now, drumroll please!

#1   Bridges of Madison County   July 21, 2010

My most read blog post of all time is also one of my shortest. On a road trip to Kansas City for a missions conference during the summer of 2010, we purposely went out of our way to visit Winterset, Iowa, the setting of my favourite novel, The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. Like Robert Kincaid, one of Waller’s main characters, we drove the back roads of Madison County photographing the covered bridges that were made famous by the novel and the movie that followed. I crossed another dream off my unwritten bucket list when I stood on Roseman Bridge and touched the spot where farmer’s wife, Francesca (Meryl Streep), pinned a note inviting Robert (Clint Eastwood) to come for dinner “anytime the white moths fly”.

And here it is, the most viewed photo to appear on my blog thus far!

Roseman Bridge

Roseman Bridge

Cancer times two!

/ edebock / 31 Comments

Seven months to the day after being told that I have cancer, I heard that dreaded message all over again. I don’t just have cancer, I have two completely different kinds of cancer!

After waiting patiently for three weeks (okay, maybe I wasn’t all that patient), I finally received the results of my biopsy yesterday. The growth in my salivary gland is, indeed, another cancer. Though I don’t have any details yet, I’ve been told that it will be removed surgically. I don’t know when. I don’t know whether follow-up treatment will be required. In fact, the things I don’t know far outweigh the things I do.

We expected this journey to be a bumpy one and I knew that there would likely be a few unexpected curves in the road but I definitely wasn’t prepared for this one! I must admit that I’m beginning to feel a bit like Old Testament Job who endured catastrophe heaped upon catastrophe. Fortunately, I have a much better support system than he had! No one is suggesting that anything I have done or failed to do has brought these troubles upon me and no one, like Job’s wife, is suggesting that I “Curse God and die!” (Job 2:9) On the contrary, I am surrounded by friends and family upholding me in prayer and offering whatever support they can. I also need to remind myself that, in the end, God blessed Job abundantly. I’m still hanging on to the hem of his garment and praying that my story will end similarly!

In the meantime, I’m doing my best to keep on putting one foot in front of the other. There’s still laundry to do, meals to make and sunshine pouring in my window. My brain is a bit fuzzy; taking it’s time absorbing this latest blow, I guess. I found myself having to look up family phone numbers last night that I usually know as well as I know my own!

That brings me to yesterday’s good news. After being rushed to hospital in respiratory failure two weeks ago, my 90-year-old father was discharged yesterday. For the moment, things are calm on the parental front!

 

Published!

/ edebock / 17 Comments

Back in the 1980s, during my days as a stay-at-home mom, I tried my hand at freelance writing. I sold a few articles and gathered a substantial collection of rejection slips. When I went back to teaching school, there wasn’t enough time in my busy schedule for writing but I found that sharing my love for the written word with my students gave me the same sense of fulfillment.

I always knew that I would return to writing when I retired. Originally, I visualized myself once again sending out manuscripts and query letters by mail and waiting with bated breath for editors to respond. Then came blogging! Though there’s a certain thrill involved in receiving a cheque for a published article, for me, writing was never about the money. I simply love to write and I love the interactive aspect of blogging. Knowing that people around the world are reading my posts, receiving comments from some of them and even developing long distance friendships with a few readers gives me great satisfaction.

Once I became an established blogger, I didn’t foresee myself seeking publication elsewhere again. While we were in China, however, it crossed my mind that I ought to consider writing an article about our experience for news and views, the quarterly magazine of the Alberta Retired Teachers’ Association, where I had first seen the ad that led to us being there. When we returned to Canada, I emailed the editor to ask if he’d be interested. He responded the very next day saying that he’d be delighted to run my article (with photos) in the Spring 2014 issue!

“We tend to get 600 to 800 words to the page with our new format, but fewer than that with pictures. So, if you could keep the text of the article to 1200 words or so, with the photographs, it would give us about three pages.” he went on to say. That was the tricky part! Condensing almost five months in China into 1200 words was definitely a challenge but I did my best to give the readers a taste of what we experienced living and teaching there.

Today, when we arrived home from Calgary, we found several copies of the magazine and a cheque stuffed into our overcrowded mailbox! Though the publication is a small one, I am nevertheless, a published writer once more. The question now is, will this whet my appetite to try my hand at writing for publication again or will blogging continue to satisfy?

One thing is certain. Regardless of what I decide, Following Augustine isn’t going anywhere. I intend to keep it going indefinitely.

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Caught in the club sandwich squeeze!

/ edebock / 9 Comments

“Club sandwich generation” is a relatively new term used to describe the “squeezed” generation, usually between the ages of 55 and 64, who typically find themselves caring for elderly parents while at the same time providing support for adult children and helping care for grandchildren. As more and more people live into their 80s and 90s, the number of four generation families is increasing rapidly and it’s usually the second generation in these families who have the time and resources to deal with unexpected events and crises in the lives of the other three.

My sister and I presently find ourselves smack dab in the middle of this kind of family sandwich. Along with our brother, who is not yet a grandparent, we’re dealing with the escalating needs of our increasingly frail and vulnerable parents. The fact that they don’t live in the same province as the three of us adds to the difficulty.

I’m very grateful that our three children are self-sufficient and require very little help from us. The two that have children of their own don’t depend on us for childcare as we live four hours away from the closest one. When we do visit, we consider it a privilege to babysit the grandchildren so that their parents can enjoy an evening out.

The club sandwich squeeze has been much tighter than usual lately though. As I mentioned in a previous post, my 91-year-old diabetic mother, who suffers from severe dementia, was hospitalized about a month ago suffering from a gangrenous toe. As a family, we made the agonizing decision not to put her through surgery. Due to lack of circulation in her leg, it would have required amputation above the knee. There was no guarantee that she’d survive the operation and if she did, there was every likelihood that the other leg would soon be in the same condition. Instead, as hard as it was, we chose palliative care and when we came to Calgary for the birth of our newest grandson, I packed knowing that we might have to fly to Vancouver for a funeral. Fortunately, Mom is doing much better than expected and was even able to move back to her care facility at the beginning of last week. My sister, who’d been in Vancouver for most of the past month, flew home on Wednesday and we breathed a sigh of relief. That lasted about 24 hours!

The next afternoon when I phoned Dad to share the exciting news of Simon’s birth, he sounded terrible. What had been a fairly minor cold had moved into his chest. Within hours, he was rushed to hospital by ambulance. Arriving in respiratory failure, he was immediately put on a ventilator and our oldest son, who lives in Vancouver, rushed over to the hospital to be with him. In club sandwich families like ours, it’s Matt’s generation that provides the other layer of filling. We are so fortunate that Matt is willing and able to jump in in a crisis situation when none of us is close by. In this case, we didn’t know if Dad would make it through the night. Again, I wondered if we’d be flying out for a funeral.

Thankfully, Dad seems to be rallying and if all goes well, he could be home from the hospital sometime next week. This time, it will probably be my brother who flies out to be with him for a little while. I would go but I have to plan around my treatment schedule and until we get the results of the biopsy that I had last week, it’s difficult to do even that. It’s hard enough being part of the club sandwich generation but having cancer has complicated the situation and added to our present squeeze!

The pot finally boiled!

/ edebock / 12 Comments

In my last post I compared waiting for our daughter to give birth to the proverbial watched pot that never boils. Yesterday was particularly grueling. We made the half hour trip to the hospital twice. On both occasions, Melaina was given morphine and gravol and sent home to rest. By the second visit she was finally beginning to make progress but she was still a long way from delivering. They might have kept her at the hospital had the maternity ward not been swamped but instead, the doctor told us to come back at 8 o’clock this morning or sooner if need be.

It’s a good thing we didn’t wait until 8:00! It was shortly before 4:00 when I heard, “Mom, there’s no way I’m going to make it til morning” from the top of the stairs. Less than ten minutes later, she, Aaron and I were out the door leaving Grandpa and the two older children tucked snugly in their beds. As we cruised through the silent city streets, I timed her contractions… four minutes… four minutes… two minutes…

After all that waiting, when things started happening, they happened fast and at 8:23 this morning Simon Gil was born! He weighed in at 7 lb. 11 oz.

Simon

Simon’s middle name, Gil, is a Hebrew name that means joy and this wee boy definitely filled our day with joy!

Richard and I made one more trip back to the hospital this afternoon to introduce Drew and Jami-Lee to their baby brother. They were thrilled!

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Now they’re tucked into their beds but sleep evades them. Tomorrow is another exciting day. Mommy will come home from the hospital with baby Simon and a new chapter of their family story begins!

The pot that never boils

/ edebock / 5 Comments

Waiting for our daughter to have a baby is like watching the proverbial pot that never boils!

Before Andrew was born in 2008, Melaina went through what one of her doctors called the longest latent (unproductive) labour in history. It was a marathon that went on for eleven days! Over and over, her contractions would increase in intensity and regularity then slow down again. She made several frustrating trips to the hospital but each time she was told to go home and continue waiting.  Because she hadn’t reached her due date yet, they wouldn’t do anything to help her along.

Two years later, when baby #2 was on the way, the doctors assured Melaina that it was very unlikely that she’d go through the same thing again. Though not exactly the same, the weeks leading up to Jami-Lee’s birth were equally frustrating. After four episodes of false labour, she finally arrived on her due date.

Now we’re waiting for #3 and history is repeating itself. Melaina’s contractions started over three weeks ago but still no baby! Again, they increase in intensity and frequency until it appears that the time has finally come and then they subside again. After several false alarms and afraid that we’d miss the big event if we waited any longer, we packed up and came to Calgary a week ago. We thought for sure that Saturday was the day. After three hours of contractions three minutes apart, we decided that it was almost time to head for the hospital but before we did, things slowed down again.

Poor Melaina is beyond frustrated and totally exhausted. Yesterday she was given Tylenol 3 to help with the pain and allow her to get some sleep but because, once again, she hasn’t reached her official due date, the doctors are unwilling to do anything to speed things up. Her due date is Friday and she has another doctor appointment next Tuesday but we’re hoping the pot finally boils before that!

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Thank you, Ida!

/ edebock / 9 Comments

One of the unexpected perks of blogging has been the long distance friendships that I’ve developed with several other bloggers. If you’ve been reading Following Augustine for long, you probably know that I enjoy reading fashion blogs and that I absolutely love experiencing or learning about life in other parts of the world. What could be better then, than a fashion and lifestyle blog written by a Malaysian who lives in Dubai with her Italian husband? That would be Ida C, writer of Mrs Jack of All Trades!

Successful fashion bloggers sometimes receive samples from manufacturers or retailers who ask them to write reviews of their products. A few weeks ago, Ida received just such a package from a Taiwanese online shop called Born Pretty. It contained a fashion watch with a vintage looking Roman numeral face and a wrap around leather bracelet. She wrote her review here.

Ida and I often comment on one another’s blog posts and on this occasion, I wrote, “I love the watch! I could definitely see myself wearing one.” Several others left similar comments.

Not long afterward, I received a personal message from Ida telling me that she was sending me a “little something that would hopefully elevate your day.” What could it be, I wondered, as I waited in anticipation for it come all the way from Dubai.

Today, the parcel arrived!

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Have you guessed what it contained?

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Yes! The Born Pretty watch is now on my wrist further cementing a solid friendship between two women residing on opposite sides of the globe who have only met through the worldwide community of blogging! Thank you, Ida!

And now for my review… what do I like best about the watch? I love the vintage look of the watch itself combined with the edgier style of the wrap around strap. Though the genuine leather band comes in a variety of other colours, I’m glad mine is brown as it will coordinate well with my wardrobe. The only drawback is the fact that putting it on by myself was quite tricky. Now that it’s securely on my wrist, however, it’s very comfortable.

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