Wishing everyone a very happy holiday season. I hope you are all able to spend time with family and friends. Hugs all round.
After a busy 2022, buying and selling real estate, it was nice to settle into our new apartment in Vancouver. We enjoy living in Yaletown where we can walk or bike everywhere.
Once we got our guest room set up, we have had a steady stream of visitors (somehow Vancouver is more popular than Seattle – I’m sure it’s not us). Fabulous to see everyone, of course. In the spring we took advantage of some good weather to explore close to home.
Coco survived all the moves but was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes early in the year, so we stayed around town adjusting insulin dosages etc. I called her my science experiment. Turns out feline diabetes is a lot like human diabetes. After about 3 months on twice-daily insulin, plus a change in diet to all-tinned food (no more dry food), she went into remission. No insulin for six months now. And as a plus, I’m now an experienced vet tech assistant (shots, blood tests, monitoring of clinical signs). Nice to have her back to her old self too.
I made a couple of trips back to Ontario to visit family (and the world’s cutest dog, Gromit). Pete came with me in September and we had a great visit until a phone call late one night letting us know that we had a flood in our apartment. A fitting on the fan coil unit had failed and water was pouring from the ceiling over our closet in the master bedroom.
Fortunately someone was there (looking after Coco) and it was under control relatively quickly. It’s a ground source heating system with (clean) water piped continuously throughout the building. We were also lucky that our showers are zero-barrier so the water poured throughout our unit and out the drains. Nevertheless there was between one and two inches of water everywhere for a couple of hours. We moved Coco to a friend’s house in North Vancouver, and I spent the rest of my vacation on the phone to my insurance people, getting wet stuff removed, talking to the people trying to dry things out etc. Once we got back, we had to move everything out to assess the damage to the floors. We had a number of area rugs on a marble floor and most of them bled dye that stained the floor. The good news is that the staining was (mostly) restricted to the top finish layer, so they can be re-honed (kind of like sanding a wood floor) and refinished. It took a long time for the floors to dry (marble is somewhat porous), then there were a series of estimates required for the insurance adjustor, so that it was almost three months until the insurance signed off on the repairs. Meanwhile we have moved in with Coco and our friend (thank you Rose-Marie) and are exploring North Vancouver. I took advantage of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales to buy some replacement carpets and furniture in anticipation of being able to move back in sometime in the new year…
We ended the year with a trip to London to catch up with old Nortel friends, then a trip to Cascais (near Lisbon) to catch up with old sailing friends. Pete continues working on various interesting projects and mutters that he might retire someday (hah). I’m still involved with the Dragon Class of sailboats, representing the US (and sometimes Canada). My violin practice has suffered a bit with all the moving, but I’m hoping to get back to it in the new year.
Hoping 2024 will be a little less exciting. Anne (& Pete)
