3409 Jordan Drive, Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, S6V 6Y3, Canada

Tel: 306-764-5451. E-mail: jcrye@shaw.ca

Christmas 2003

Dear Family and Friends,

Happy Christmas from the Rye household. It has been a usual busy year and past time we put ink to paper, or electrons to screen. One of the best parts of Advent, the time leading up to Christmas, is catching up on all your news, the ordinary as well as the exciting. Thank you for staying in touch with us. So what have we all been doing this year?

MICHAEL loves the ski season best. Our local hills manufacture snow which has been a necessity these past 2 years. Last week he had us all at the hill as soon as it opened so we could get our family ski pass- a Christmas present from John’s parents. He also enjoys the sea and, after trying his feet at surfing in Australia this summer, is trying to find an area of the world to live where he can enjoy both, preferably on consecutive days! This spring he was centre stage in the new Prince Albert theatre as the butler in his school play “Into the Woods”. He also did stage managing for our Church production “The Contract”. He loves playing guitar and has been doing so in Church and for Sunday School.

This summer he turned 18 and completed his orthodontics treatment. He is in his final year at high school and hopes to start a commerce degree at the University of Saskatchewan next September. He has a job filing in John’s office and claims that in our paperless society, the paperwork has reached ridiculous proportions.

PETER loves all things sporting. He played basketball for his school at the beginning of the year and then started training for athletics. He did well in 100m 200m 400m and high jump. He is very musical and played piano in the Prince Albert music festival as preparation for his grade 6 exam in June. Guitar is something else he really enjoys but mum has drawn the line at a drum set. Driver training through the school system started in April and he is taking his road test as soon as he turns 16, this month. Summer is his favourite time of year because of athletics and golf. He doesn’t mind skiing but he dislikes the cold weather. He was talking of moving to Australia one day, with mid-winter temperatures of 3C. This fall Peter started high school and is fundraising for a trip to France at Easter. He joined the cross country training team and made it to the provincial finals, where he finished 57^th, beating his own record for the 5km distance and sprinting the last 200m.

DEBORAH at 11 has done a lot of growing this past year. She is now 5’2” tall and wearing the same size shoes as her mum. She really enjoys ballet and tap dancing and performed with her class in 2 dance festivals. This year she has added jazz to her repertoire. She took part, with John, in the Cancer Society’s Relay for Life. This was an all night affair at the local athletics track. Each team carries a baton and someone from the team keeps walking at all times. She attended the Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship pioneer camp in the summer and really enjoyed the extra water sports this gave her opportunity to try. Violin is Deborah’s instrument of choice and she took part in a workshop where she played with some fiddling greats.

JOHN continues to be busy with work related things. He now spends 2 days a week assisting surgeons in the operating room,2 ½ days in the office as a family physician, and ½ a day most weeks doing assessments for workers compensation and accident victims. He cares for quite a few folks in long term care and remains involved with the palliative care committee. On Sundays some of the docs get together for soccer, an hour of much needed exercise and fun. John has done courses this year in cardiac life support, power point presentations, general practice and therapeutics. He continues his love of all things transport and gets to railway society meetings several times during the year. Natural history and birding are another pleasure he enjoys. He turned 50 this summer and preached that day in a local Church with Christine.

CHRISTINE continues work part time on the medical/palliative ward, which moved yet again this summer. There is to be a national certification exam in palliative care this coming year which she hopes to take. (This will be the first time it is offered so we don’t know much about it yet.) Christine was a delegate to the provincial synod of the Anglican Church where 9 dioceses get together. It was interesting but stressful to meet people in positions of authority in our Church who question whether the Bible is true and relevant to today. Our Bishops desperately need our prayers as they deal with the issues that face the Church. Christine takes great pleasure in watching the antics of the birds. Sometimes they behave just like kids, particularly when they fly in and out of the sprinklers on a hot day! She runs the Sunday school with John’s help. We have about 9 six-11 year olds and the same number of younger children.

TED AND HAZEL continue to keep busy. They have a very active part in all our lives. Ted says his car has TAXI written on it and is constantly running the children around to school and activities. They took the boys out to golf at 5.30 every morning during August which all of them enjoyed. We usually stop for afternoon tea with them which gives opportunity for homework to get done unless the computer is needed. It seems that more and more things are expected to be typed.

CHRISTINE’S DAD came to visit for 3 weeks in February, our coldest month. He kept very busy the first 7 months with travel to see friends and family around the world. He has also gotten to know Anthea Bavin. They came closer to one another through the grieving process and in doing so have moved on to set a wedding date for March 6^th. They both sound very happy.

Working and helping people, we can see the consequences of policies put in place by those above us at work, church or in government. Pessimism rather than thankfulness is so easy to develop, and we have to ration what we all watch on TV when this seems too cynical. In this coming New Year may your months be half full rather than half empty.

As a student nurse “many years ago” when I was scheduled to work over Christmas, I felt that I was going to miss out on all the fun. While reading the story of the shepherds on the hillside around Bethlehem, God showed me that the shepherds had to work Christmas too, and God didn’t let them miss out. It was one of the most memorable Christmas times I have ever had and when I arrived home on the 27^th I discovered my family had waited for me and we all had Christmas together. I was twice blessed. May you know God’s special blessing this Christmas.

Holiday 2003

This summer we went to Australia and New Zealand for the month of July. For the first two weeks, we stayed with Christine’s brother and his family in Perth, and then visited friends in Melbourne, Sydney and Wellington with a short trip to Christchurch and Ashburton to see Christine’s Aunt and Uncle.

We immediately noticed the complete difference in the birds, trees, plant life and animals from both England and Canada. Nothing was the same. Pine trees there “upside down” with branches and needles that funnel precious water onto the roots.

The teenage cousins got little sleep for two weeks, making up for 15 years of not seeing one another except for a few days in England in 2000. Most mornings Christine and I woke early and headed out to see the local birdlife. There were parrots in the trees, the commonest having the strange name of “28” because that is the sound of their call. At Booragoon Lake, in the middle of the built up area is a colony of sacred ibises, large white birds with curved beaks, and black swans, the bird from the flag of Western Australia.

A day did not pass without us going to the sea. The beaches along the Perth coast are excellent with fine clean sand in most areas, and a few scattered cliffs. We found the Indian Ocean water to be cool, although the children picked up cuts from pieces of coral in the water.

Perth is a very livable city, with excellent facilities and lots of green space to breathe. John was impressed by the transit, with electric trains and bendibuses to travel into the city centres, and CATs (city centre little buses) for downtown. One major urban feature is Whiteman Park, a large area originally set aside for water catchment but now home to a variety of museums and voluntary projects. At Yanchep Park we patted a koala bear and saw lots of kangaroos up close. Perth zoo specializes in Australian animals and birds and it was really good to see them for real.

The guys went to an Aussie rules footie match, where the East Coast Eagles were playing at Subaico Oval. This is a game unique to parts of Australia, having similarity to Rugby and American football. It is played on an elliptical field with no crossbar to the goal, and you can score a consolation, if you miss. There are few stoppages, and all kinds of people are running on and off the field during play, to assist injuries. There are seven referees of various kinds. During the interval, children’s teams were able to play small games scattered across the arena field.

Out of town we went to Cape Leeuwin in the very South west corner of Australia, the point at which the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean. The Southern Ocean is cold, the home of whales and penguins (or so we are told), rather than the warm home of dolphins and coral of the Indian Ocean.

There are areas of rain forest. The children were able to climb a tree called the Gloucester Tree, 89metres tall, with steel bars every foot to climb like a ladder. We all went caving in the National Park. Someone from the local group provides a light and helmet, and says keep on the trail which is marked by reflectors.

Moving on to Melbourne, with its bright waterfront and its extensive tram system was great fun. Unlike Perth or Sydney, Melbourne is quite a ways from the open ocean. We were delighted to see a family of opossums with a baby on its mother’s back. We traveled along the coast to see the eroding cliffs of the twelve apostles. This coast road is an all time great drive. This was the only place that we saw shark nets at beaches.

Sydney is famous for its bridge and its opera house. Its ocean beaches are close at hand at Manly, just a short ferry ride away. Bondi Beach, and the world’s second oldest national park lap to the southern edge of the city. The Sydney aquarium is rightly named among the three best in the world and the monorail ride was longer and busier than Seattle’s.

New Zealand is different to Australia. It is about the size of Saskatchewan, and close to Australia, in the same way London is close to Venice and Winnipeg is close to Vancouver. The scenery is well known from the films “Lord of the Rings” and every now and then from our first to last day we would suddenly see places from the film.

Christchurch and Ashburton, on the south island, are surprisingly English in buildings and trees, although without some of the grubbiness. The Antarctic Centre was fun and everyone had to put on thick coats and galoshes to go into the cold room where they used wind chill to drop the temperature to -15C. The journey by narrow gauge train from Christchurch to Wellington and then onto Auckland is one of the great rides of the world. The train was comfortable and on the southern section there was an open coach to experience the coast. It was good not to have a hire car.

New Zealand was free of land mammals until settlement, so there were all kinds of birds, some flightless. We were able to see a wild Weka digging in an embankment. It was about the size and colour of a female mallard. In Wellington they have put a fence around a large area of trees and shrubs that prevents mammals from getting in so they can safely bring back the flightless birds. We had to have our bags searched in case mammals were hitching a ride into the enclosure!

Wellington, the national capital, like Canberra in Australia, is midway between the biggest cities, and has a modern parliament building called the beehive (because it looks like that). It is a city built on hills with tunnels, so the quickest way to somewhere may be to walk round three sides of a square. “Te Papa” the national museum was one of those places where we spent all afternoon. John was able to enjoy his only trolleybus ride of the holiday- these serve the beaches and bays of the southern part of the city with electric trains to the north.

This was our first trip to the Southern hemisphere. It was winter there which meant that the nights fell about 5pm –as the days got longer we moved south so this didn’t change much. We knew it was winter with Orion high in the sky, probably the only thing that was recognizable from our world. The Southern Cross appears on the National flag but the significance of this is not that it is bright, but that it marks south at the bottom of its tail. There are actually three crosses side by side looking up at the night sky, high in the sky with the familiar signs of the zodiac lower down.

We hope that you have enjoyed sharing our holiday for a minute or two. Sometime drop into our family website at www.geocities.com/cherith_ca and enjoy some pictures of these travels.

Have a wonderful Christmas and New Year 2004

John, Christine, Michael, Peter and Deborah Rye