January 2011

Dear friends,

Here is a post-Christmas letter written in January 2011. At the age of about 14 Dave's English teacher wrote in his school report that "David will likely be very good at English once he has learned to read & write". This is a month late, and is dedicated to the fond memory of teacher David Greenlaw.

Christmas 2009 was a quiet affair, spent at our cabin west of Calgary which is now a tradition unbroken for 27 years. Neil, Jan, & Dave were together, but Mark & Heidi were on Vancouver Island no-doubt celebrating the rain in Port Hardy!

Much of the first half of 2010 centered around work on our house. Canada did not experience anything like the recession in the USA, but in 2008-9 house prices were low enough that we decided to sell the condominium & move back to a house. Condo fees cost us nearly as much as rent just to manicure the beautiful pond and garden which thawed and flowered each year after we flew back to Harmonica in some other part of the world. Our son Neil was looking for his first house and Jan found this one, showed it to him, established that Neil thought it too big, then we bought it. David flew back to Australia to anti-foul Harmonica then sail from Bundaberg to Cairns while Janet hauled, lifted, tugged, and drove van loads of our possessions into the new home.

We returned just before Christmas 2009, and soon found that the "Home Inspector" had missed a few important points. While he concentrated on soil drainage and subsidence of land that had remained motionless for 2 or 3 decades, he largely missed the leaking roof. The offending roof has a low-pitch and the trusty internet demonstrated that the existing asphalt shingles were completely unsuited and all that was needed were a few sheets of metal which Dave could fix while looking out into the Calgary sunshine with Nose Hill behind him. However, while sitting in said sunshine with a builder beside him and a 1 X 2 metre inspection hole cut in the roof, he was convinced that the roof needed rebuilding, and the wall, and the floor.... We got to know and like the builders and by June we had a lovely home again. This builder appears to have descended from an unknown population of gorillas inhabiting Saint Pierre & Michelon in the St Lawrence Estuary, and was seen early on demolishing our roof by swinging a large sledge hammer upwards from below.

It was a lovely summer: The first that we have spent in Alberta for a long time. Our younger son Neil bought a house just round the corner from where we lived when he was born and 20 or 30 minutes walk from us. Neil typically has 3 bicycles - a street bike that does not look too smart for riding to work; a mountain bike for crossing anything in its way; and a carbon-framed road bike for rides of 50 to 300km on the week end days. Jan & Dave did quite a lot of cycling but with more moderation. The Mountains around Banff and Kananaskis have got busier in recent years, but are still beautiful for walking & scrambling.

We also saw more than ever before of Mark & Heidi, and their house in Victoria on Vancouver Island. We are still not convinced about the rainy, cool winters in BC, but spring time sitting in their hot tub beside the apple blossom looking across at Mt Tolmie can be very pleasant. Although their friends seem to be moving south into Victoria, Mark & Heidi still like to spend as much time as they can in Port Hardy at the opposite end of Vancouver Island, and are dreaming about moving up there where Heidi's family comes from. They invited Neil to spend a week surfing at their favourite cove and seem to have persuaded him too.

Dave kept up piano lessons for a longer continuous period than ever before. He also returned to work enough to write a tiny bit of computer code.

Janet's niece Claire did an exchange programme in her Environmental Science course from Southampton University in UK to York University Ontario. She visited us before the snow left, introduced us to her friend Stephany from Dorset, and showed us how to watch a porcupine chewing his lunch in a tree on Nose Hill. Stephany is a talented pianist and she gave a little exercise to Dave's electronic piano. The academic aspects of Claire's course were disappointing, but that did not prevent her from having a great time here. She finished in April and moved in with Mark & Heidi where she proceeded to look for temporary work in Victoria and sit in the said hot tub.

The rest of Claire's family visited in the summer. They rented a motor home in Calgary and returned it in Vancouver before we all 10 members of both families had a quick tour round Southern Vancouver Island including whale-watching, camping on Lasqueti Island, and surfing on Long Beach.

In September, Jan & Dave flew to Malaysia via Hong Kong to rescue our abandoned sailing boat. She had housed a few flourishing insect colonies, but was otherwise well. We sailed her from Langkawi, Malaysia to Phuket, Thialand and hauled her out of the water for the most thorough paint job she has ever had. After slow-moving Indonesia, Malaysia had seemed westernized & active, but Thailand still left them both standing. Parts of SE Asia have been built up at an amazing speed over recent decades, and although it may not all be good, it is very impressive. The work which we had done on the boat was meticulous & excellent and we thank the men & women who spent so many hours doing it.

Our Calgary friends Doug & Fran arrived at Phuket airport the day before we were due to launch. After only minor hitches, we were anchored in the southern part of Phang Gna Bay. Then the mobile phone brought in a text to say that a bunch of Lake Louise Ski Patrollers was returning from a trek in Nepal and had just landed in Phuket for a week of R&R. We had the delight of the company of the Michaud's and Gover's on board for the day while we gave them a ferry ride to their local island hotel. Doug & Fran stayed with us for 3 weeks exploring magnificent rock formations & snorkeling offshore islands, then left Harmonica back in Malaysia.

Jan left at the same time for a month's holiday in Myanmar (Burma) with a friend from Calgary. They arrived in Yangon at almost the same time as Aung San Suukwi was released but they kept away from the big demonstrations and soon headed north and found some delightful people and returned with beautiful photographs.

Meanwhile Dave, somewhat sadly, headed back to Phuket to prepare Harmonica for sale and investigate sailing catamarans to buy. Harmonica now sits in Yacht Haven Marina with a "For Sale" sign on her pulpit. However, a yacht broker persuaded us to ask a higher price than we planned, and we have had no bites. We might still sail her across the Indian Ocean to S Africa in 2011. You'll have to wait to find out.

Dave has often heard that another Buddhist country - Laos - is a wonderful place to see, much quieter & more peaceful than neighboring Vietnam & Cambodia. He flew to Luangprabang for a week. The town is a UNESCO world heritage site and a lovely place, although any solitude on those banks of the Mekong River is now waning under the wave of young tourists. He really enjoyed a 3 day trek into the hills, and rented a mountain bike to explore an unmapped area to the SE the next day.

The Convention on Cluster Munitions had just met in Vientiane and reminded us that more than 30 years after the "Vietnam War" Laos still has more buried unexploded ordinance than any other place in the world. A school girl was killed by one the day before the opening address and I encourage any of you living in Canada or the USA to ask your politicians to join most other industrialized countries and sign the treaty banning them.

www.clusterconvention.org

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Cluster_Munitions

It would be so wonderful to stop making these bombs, but some of our countries are amoung the offenders that still profit from this arms trade.

Jan & Dave met again in Bangkok and had a lovely, but brief supper before catching separate flights to HongKong and thence together to Canada. A taxi driver watched our brief parting kiss, drove half way down the block and asked Dave if he wanted to go to a sex parlour on the way back!!

Back in Calgary, the house was warm and welcoming. So was the family, and we had a lovely Christmas with Mark, Heidi, and Neil with turkey cooked, as it has been for the last 27 years on the coal stove in our cabin at Waiporous Creek.

We are ageing gently, but still fit: Jan gets out running a few times each week. Dave is playing tennis, and we both ski back-country & lifts whenever we can. That excluded last week end when the Trans-Canada Highway was closed for several days by the biggest avalanche cycle we can remember.

Wishing you all a successful and peaceful 2011

Jan & Dave

3347 Breton Close NW

Calgary

AB

Canada

T2L 1X3

tel 403 282 4686

email

web www.techco.ab.ca/harmonica