Book of the month – August 2026

August 31, 2026August 30, 2026 / edebock / Leave a comment

How to Read a Book

Monica Wood

The title is catchy, but this is not actually a book about how to read! It’s a heartwarming novel about forgiveness, second chances, unlikely friendships, and the life-changing power of books.

The author, Monica Wood, brings a prison, a bookstore, and a science lab to life in such a way that we can easily picture ourselves in each location, but the greatest strength of this book is character development. We are immediately drawn into the lives of the three main characters. Violet Powell is a 22-year-old from rural Maine who is released from prison after serving 22 months for a drunk-driving accident that killed an older kindergarten teacher. Frank Daigle, a retired machinist who works part time as a bookstore handyman, has yet to come to terms with the complications of his marriage to the woman who died in the crash. Widow, Harriet Larson, is a retired English teacher who runs the prison book club. A chance encounter between these three becomes life-changing for each of them.

The characters are believable and imperfect, just like the rest of us! When Violet enters into an illicit affair with her much older employer, my first thought was “How stupid!” until I thought about how vulnerable she was and remembered some of the incredibly idiotic decisions that I made at a similar age.

This was a feel-good book, but also thought provoking. Now I have Monica Wood’s memoir, When We Were the Kennedys, on my Kindle, ready to read on our upcoming trip, but more about that in future posts!

And as a totally unrelated aside, many thanks to those of you who made donations to my Hoofing It fundraiser for neuroendocrine cancer research after reading my last post. Your generosity is very much appreciated!

Another cancerversary & another health update

August 27, 2026August 26, 2026 / edebock / 3 Comments

I think 13 must be my lucky number today!

Zebra-striped number 13 standing in a grassy savanna

Today it’s been 13 years since I was told that I had stage 4 colon cancer. Thankfully, what sounded like a death sentence at that moment turned out to be stage 4 neuroendocrine cancer (NETS) that originated in my intestinal system. That’s a completely different diagnosis and one that usually has a much better prognosis. It’s incurable, but it’s treatable and so far the various treatments that I’ve had as well as the injections that hubby gives me every 28 days have been keeping it successfully under control.

The fact that I’ve survived this long and that I’m what a fellow NET patient recently referred to as a “healthy sick person” actually has very little to do with luck. Ultimately, God has my health in His hands, but He has chosen to place me in the care of a large team of amazing medical professionals. I am monitored at least every 3 to 4 months and sometimes more often depending on what’s going on.

The most recent blood tests results that I’ve seen all look okay. A few of them are flagged as abnormal, but not alarmingly so. I’ll have my next CT scan on Monday and I’m leaving on another short term missions trip the following day! Even if something nasty and unexpected shows up on the scan, I know this slow-growing cancer well enough by now to know that a couple of weeks away won’t make a difference. After all, I’d probably had it for 10 years by the time it was discovered and even then my diagnosis was delayed by 6 months when the doctors who saw it on an ultrasound and a CT scan that I had while teaching in China didn’t know what they were looking at.

I also attribute my survival and my well-being to all the research that has been done and continues to be done into the cause, treatment, and hopefully someday a cure for this particular cancer. That’s why I’m still walking or hiking at least 5 days a week as part of our annual Hoofing It fundraiser for NET cancer research. Unfortunately, it isn’t going as well as in previous years. So far, I’ve only raised $350 of my $1300 goal ($100 for each of the years that I’ve been fighting this disease) and overall, we’re less than one-third of the way to our $60 000 goal. If you would like to help, please click here to visit my fundraising page. Every dollar helps and every cent goes to research.

Writing On Stone Provincial Park

August 23, 2026August 23, 2026 / edebock / 2 Comments

Over the years that we’ve been together, hubby and I have visited 18 different countries and we’re about to add 2 more to the list, but there are still places closer to home that we haven’t explored. Until the past week, Writing On Stone Provincial Park was one of them.

Straddling the Milk River just north of the Alberta-Montana border, Writing On Stone or Áísínai’pi, which means “it is written” or “it is pictured” is geographically central to the vast area inhabited by the Niitsítapi (Blackfoot) people since time immemorial. For them, it is also a deeply sacred place, a place where they seek the guidance of spirit beings thought to dwell in the hoodoos and nearby hills. Áísínai’pi was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2018 and in order to protect the ancient art on many of the rock faces from vandalism, part of the park is an archaeological preserve closed to the public except by guided tour.

It is impossible to adequately capture the sheer magnitude of the landscape in photos, but here are a few to give you a taste of what you would see if you were to visit.

Writing On Stone has the highest concentration of Indigenous rock art on the Great Plains of North America. We did a two hour Markings of Áísínai’pi tour to view many of these pictographs and petroglyphs. Pictographs are painted on the rock with red ochre, crushed iron ore mixed with animal fat or water. Time and weathering have all but erased these remnants of days gone by.

Although the Blackfoot elders want the rock art to age naturally and no attempt has been made to preserve them, petroglyphs, etched into the stone, have lasted much better. While there is no technique that can accurately date rock art sites, researchers estimate their age based on objects depicted in the artwork as well as by analyzing changes in rock art styles. The next photo shows part of one of the oldest panels in the park.

While the exact meaning of much of the artwork is unknown, much of it was probably ceremonial, created during different rituals like vision quests.

We also hiked the 5 km out-and-back Matapiiksi (Hoodoo) Interpretive Trail and, on a different day, spent a couple of hours wandering our way through the Hoodoo Exploration Area on the hillside between the campground below and the very informative interpretive centre perched on valley’s edge above.