Of birthdays and missing jewels…

My goodness, I had to wake up really early on Wednesday. Usually I only get up early to catch a plane! Joe insisted that if we were going to visit his daughter Liz on her 50^th birthday we had to do the trip to Oshawa and back in one day. Not impossible as it’s only a two-hour ride but it’s a lot of driving. As I was still having problems with my vision in addition to not being truly awake, Joe drove and I slept most of the way which was not at all unpleasant – for me.

 We were in Oshawa by 10.30 and of course did a raid on the Hungarian store as predicted in my last post. We were greeted by poor Katherine lying on the couch recovering from her latest knee surgery. The knee looks pretty gruesome but we were told that it looks as it should at this point. It was her first day off morphine and Percocet and her brain was just beginning to recover. I have no worries about the condition of her brain as I saw her shudder as Joe asked her how her astrology studies were going. She’s doing her Masters in astro-physics!

 Anyway there were lots of flowers for Liz and a pleasant lunch with two different desserts to raise everybody’s blood sugar to the heavens and I have to report that Joe did indulge which he didn’t oughta. He is still trying to stabilize two days later.

There was a disaster however. I looked down at one point and gasped in horror when I saw that one of the diamonds in my ring was missing. What made it even more annoying was that I had just had it reset at some cost as the jeweller told me the claws were weak. To add to that the diamonds were from my mother’s engagement ring and are a very old European cut that will be impossible to match. The family story is that Dad bought the diamonds loose from someone’s South African cook during the war. How Father met up with a South African cook I can only imagine. The story may or may not be true but I have been told by several jewellers that they are very good quality stones. I think I will go and have a chat with the jeweller who did the resetting. Bummer!!!!

 What a lively time we are having on Boxtalk these days. 232 messages yesterday and today can’t be far short. For those who have no idea what that is, it`s an online list I belong to, comprising some very interesting and eclectic characters – and how! Our youngest member is in his 30s and we range up to the 80s. We have engineers, computer experts, a poet, a writer, an artist-farmer, two exceptional photographers, a couple of non-practising lawyers and assorted others – I belong to the latter category. We all have strong opinions and are not afraid to voice them. Right now we are `baptizing`our newest member who is also our youngest and it turns out that he went to school with Angela, my daughter-in-law.

 Tomorrow we are going to the Bancroft Santa Claus Parade. I’m not really big on parades –somehow I’m not sure what they are actually for… but it seems like a good opportunity for some photographs. This Christmas thing is beginning to impinge on my thoughts and engender feelings of guilt and inadequacy. Maybe I`ll feel better when I`ve spent some money!

No photos tonight. Upload is being temperamental.