“The RoseBouquet”

I hurried myself along a little earlier this morning because I had made an appointment for the car to be checked over before this weekend trip to the reunion in Alberta.

I wanted to drive the car over to this Auto Service place where I had got a free oil change with a coupon last year. I didn’t know much more about them then that, and that it appears to be the home base for a whole fleet of taxis. Some friends had been giving me the names of their favourite mechanics, but most of them were across the city. This one, Atomic Auto Service, is only about 7 or 8 blocks from my home, and from there the walking distance to my office was about the same as from home.

Sure enough, I was out of the gate in good time, but before I’d turned the first corner I remembered that I had not brought along the spare set of keys for just the car that I take along when I leave the car in the care of others. I drove around the block, dashed into the front of my house and got the keys. Second start.

The men at the service desk were friendly enough and were happy when I handed them with a slip of paper listing the things that I thought would need attention. Upon mention of the windshield they wanted to see it. One man came outside with me to go look at my windshield. One of the pock marks could be patched, he said, but the other one was spidering. Besides that, he pointed out that some of the upper area cracks looked bad and one went from one side to another (not a bigger patch than my hand, really), however in this province such a crack does not pass inspection.

Oh dear! We went back inside and the other man called for a price on a new windshield. He quoted something like $220 plus taxes. And their labour is $90/hour. Ouch!

I told them to call me before they did any other expensive changes, then I headed out walking and praying towards my office here.

My sincere apologizes to those who ran into frustrations looking for last week’s RoseBouquet on the blog, and in the RSS feed. When I went to post it, I found that things were not working as they should. It took me a couple of days to get my blog system updated. Now it is functional with some new features to discover.

Basically I’ve been maintaining my work agenda, and sneaking in time to do things in preparation for the Reunion. My goals have been to finish those 5 Uncle John binders, and to bake up a few jars full of peppernuts, and to dress them up and take them along for the auction sale.

Well, the Uncle John Binders ground to a halt on Saturday. I thought I had the photocopying all done, and just needed to finish writing up my observations and the story knitting all the memories of his siblings together. While I worked on the latter I got to thinking that I had not scanned all his photos, so I went on a serious hunt throughout the house to find them. I went through lots of boxes in the basement. Then up in my bedroom, I found them in the desk where I have always stored them. Crazy, eh?

But then, lo and behold, I see that I have a thick handful of photos that need to be scanned and printed into my story! Plus a cereal box full of file folders with more documents to photocopy.

It was noon, and I planned to leave for another meeting at 2 p.m. This was NOT going to work! I decided right then and there to make apologies and to finish those binders after the reunion.

It turns out now that Tom and I will be the only ones representing our clan. Even my Aunt Helena who never misses a reunion if she can help it, can’t come.

Now with the peppernuts, there is hope. I made a pail full of dough the other week, and have been baking about a cookie sheet full or two every other day over my supper hour. Since these are small spicy, crunchy-hard marble-sized cookies, I can get about 100 on a cookie sheet, but shaping them takes time. They are an old Mennonite tradition and the younger generation doesn’t seem to know how to make them, and the older ones are not so likely to make the effort any more, but they will appreciate the treat if they see them. They are great for dunking in coffee too!

I’m hoping to get another two sheets full done tonight, and maybe another tomorrow night. Then it will be time to see how many jars I can fill and dress up while packing on Thursday evening.

I have printed out some sketches I once did of my great-grandfather Klaus Friesen, and my great-great-grandfather Cornelius H. Friesen, but I doubt that I’ll have time to fuss with putting them into frames. If I can sneak it in yet, good. If not, I’ll take them as they are. They will be the earliest ancestors of almost everyone there, and for whom we have any photo or idea what they looked like.

Meantime, I must trudge along with my work agenda for three more days, and do my best to catch up on emails as they are likely to form a log-jam over the weekend.

Last week I wrote an article about tips for dealing with sunburn on my Aloe-Vera-and-Handy-Herbs.com site. You might find that helpful. Aloe Vera and Sunburn

I’m also offering my Herbal Tea Remedies e-book on that site, but with a slight catch. You need to sign up for my mailing list there so I can let you know of new developments as I add them. The same recipes are already on the site, but the e-book makes it handier for printing out and keeping close by in your kitchen. Especially since I crammed as many recipes as I could on each page. You can print out the pages you like best and laminate them as they will get a lot of wear until you have those recipes memorized.
Herbal Tea Remedies

I have a feeling I may have an article to write next week about my weekend adventures, but for now, I thought I’d just bring forward some links to articles I’ve written in the past about reunions. And some photos.

Here’s one How to Really Enjoy a Reunion

Here’s another one about planning a reunion, and my thoughts on how I’d do it if I were to organize one; Reunions are E-Zee.

Would you like to see the sketches I did of my ancestors on Dad’s side? The photos we had of them were too small to enlarge so I decided to sketch them larger from the photos.

My Great-grandfather, Klaus Friesen

My Great-great-grandfather, Cornelius H. Friesen

My grandparents, (Dad’s parents) Maria, (nee Spenst) and Henry W. Friesen after they sold their homestead in Saskatchewan and moved to Clearbrook, B.C. to retire.

At the last reunion, three years ago, Dad with his siblings. Left to right: Jean, Jessie, Helena, Dad, and Bill.

The whole Reunion group at the Friesen Cousins’ Reunion of 2006. Note: Dad, the oldest present at age 90, seated with the cane on the right has since passed away, as has George Harder seated on the far left, and also Dora Friesen, standing in the middle with the pink slacks. There may be some others missing this year, whose death or move to a nursing home I have not heard about. I’m hoping some other cousins will come out of the woodwork, as Dad’s generation is fast slipping away.

last couple of days. I discovered on Tuesday, when trying to post this week’s RoseBouquet parts, that I could login but nothing would save or post.

When I went to look for solutions and advice, I learned that it was high time to upgrade my WordPress software. I don’t think I’d done that since about 2005. I was using version 2.0.4 and the latest one is 2.7.1. That’s a lot of upgrades I’ve missed, but I guess I was thinking, if it ain’t broke - don’t fix it.

Now it was broke and it is fixed, but as I ran into some snags it took me two days to get it all worked out. Thanks to Support at HostGator for their excellent, prompt help last night.

Without further ado, here is this week’s RoseBouquet issue.

Yes, my garden is where it is at again. That time of the year, you know.

We had such lovely, warm sunny weather on Saturday and Sunday, but the forecast was for wet snow yesterday. I was not sure if I’d be able to work in the garden after all as I’d planned on the Victoria Day holiday. Besides, even if I toughed it out and sowed my seeds and planted my potatoes, some of them might freeze and I’d have to sow those rows all over again some weeks later.

When I went out to size up the work at 10 a.m. it was so windy and cold just to handle the rakes, with their steel handles that I went back inside and put on an old parka, my knitted toque, and hunted up my old leather driving gloves.

The old west-side of the path garden just needed smoothing out with a rake and it was ready. The east-side garden was a different story. Spying a bale of farm straw beside my fridge-planter I broke most of that up and scattered it all over the east garden. Then I dragged what was left in the big plastic bag of peat moss over and dumped it on the garden too and spread that out.

I have another bale of peat moss in the shed, and I managed to drag it out, but decided by then, that I would spread that another day.

My neighbours, Joe and Penny, are away for the weekend, but the woman who comes to feed and check on their dogs came out and we had a nice chat over the fence.

When done, I saw it was 11 a.m. and I decided to at least plant that one pail of purple potatoes I had saved in my basement from last fall. They had long stems on them already - nearly two feet long! I am ready to go buy some seed potatoes, but went at planting these for now. Because someone had said last week that you could leave those stems on, even sticking up out of the ground, I tried that. In no time I had three rows of potatoes planted on each side of the path at the end of the garden nearest my car.

Now the desire to sow some seeds too came over me stronger, and I concluded that it wouldn’t hurt the radishes, lettuce and spinach if there were a snow fall yet later in the day, so I sowed a row each of those. Then a row of sweet peas, and finally a row of onion sets for Spanish onions. I drew lines for more rows so I could plan inside what is to go where. Turns out I have room for 11 more rows on the west side garden.

When I went inside at noon, my sister Elsie called from Chilliwack, B.C., to ask if I’d be home the first weekend of June. She’s planning to come that weekend to visit me. As we got talking about gardens, she told me she would show me three-sister-planting. I’ve read a bit about companion planting, but her current job is with the Dept. of Agriculture in B.C., and she writes manuals and instruction guides for gardeners and farmers, so Elsie knows the latest and best in that area. Whoa! I’ll have the expert herself come to show me this!

Now I’m extra glad that I had Joe dig up this new garden plot. I’ll try to get that bale of peat moss worked into that soil before she comes and then I’ll have some new adventures in gardening.

Incidentally, no snow came yesterday, but there’s still threat of it today. (Shrug). I bundled up in winter clothes for my walk to the office today. Burr-r-r-r!

I do have tulip leaves shooting up in the front flowerbeds. See?

That’s only the first 10 or 12. I’m watching for 45 of them, but I think the soil has to warm up first.

I had a surprise on Friday morning related to my Aloe-Vera-and-Handy-Herbs.com web business. Back last July I had put a feedback form on the site so people could write me with suggestions and questions. I had expected these messages to come to me via email, as they do on all my other sites. But all this time nothing had come through to me. It’s an SBI site, and that’s the cat’s meow, the creme de la creme of all sites, so I was puzzled.

Maybe I had not enough interesting pages yet, or maybe not the right visitors were coming - although the STATs indicated that I was getting 71 visitors a day in April, or 2131 for the month. (These STATs climb every month)! Well, I’m still learning the how-tos so it had to be my fault, but being busy with all my other projects, and only working on this one on Friday mornings, I tended not to worry about it too much.

Well, last Friday I went to the SBI Central to see about putting up some sort of subscribe form or setting up a mailing list, and then offering my new Herbal Teas e-book as a reward for signing up. Before I got to that I spied a button marked Form database. Hmmm?
What’s that?

I clicked on it and discovered that here was a database accessible as records or a spreadsheet or a list, and it had 18 responses to my feedback form. Some of those responses were as old as July 17, and some as recent as a week ago!

Well, what d’you know! I read these messages and found some great questions, treating me like an expert, and some fine compliments on my site too.

I spent the rest of that morning answering those messages, starting each with an apology for the very belated answer. Before I was all done at 3 p.m., in the afternoon, I was already getting some good replies from some very understanding folks.

My Gr’ma Kroeker had a proverb or saying about being as wise as an old cow and still always learning. I identify with that cow right now.

Barbara, one of the regular readers, wrote last week to say she too was raised by other mother figures. I bet that’s true for at least ten more.

I’ve been corresponding with another author who agreed to read my novel and give me some feedback. on the weekend Yoka wrote that although she thinks I have great writing and storytelling skills, she felt that the events in my novel were just too unrealistic.

Unrealistic? I thought they were idealistic. Quite obviously, there are not many people who live the kind of lifestyle which I gave to Ruthe the heroine of that book, but I gave those experiences to her because that’s where my idealistic passion is. I would love to see souls saved and transformed like that. And so frequently!

There is that enemy who comes whispering soothingly, “See, you could drop your book-writing out of your life, and not have to deal with negative comments like that”

There is another whisper in my thoughts that says, “Look, now you know that you should warn people, that your book is very idealistic. It will appeal best to those who are idealistic and love to see lives transformed and changed from bad to good.”

This is constructive criticism. It allows me to know how to plan my promotion of the book better. And perhaps how to make some subtle changes when I do my abridged re-write. If-whenever!

But I sure wish I had a completely updated list of those who have really “read” my book, Ruthe’s Secret Roses, and I could do a survey of their opinions. Did you appreciate the idealism in it? Or was that offensive or objectionable to you?

If you have never had a chance to read my book, you can easily order it online from my link to it on Booklocker.com (it will be on it’s way to you within 48 hours), Ruthe’s Secret Roses - at Booklocker.com

Or you can get it for a quarter of the cost, at $5.99 US for the downloadable e-book. order page on my site You could be reading it within 5-10 minutes from now.

Today I want to hand a bouquet to my friend Rosalie from church. We’ve only known each other a couple of months but she sends me emails almost daily. At the beginning she encouraged me to come sit with her and her husband, but I kept thinking they were on the far right side by the piano, and I couldn’t find them. Finally I realized that they were on the far left. I’d been looking in the wrong direction.

On the weekends, because I’m taking time off from my business agendas during the week as much as I can, I often do not get to even looking at incoming emails, never mind answering them. However, this last Saturday I saw I had a couple from Rosalie again, so I answered it and mentioned that I had a bean stew in my crockpot for the Potluck at church the next morning. The rice for my salad was cooked, but I would finish making the salad in the morning.

Bless her, Rosalie saw my email early on Sunday morning and decided she better phone me. The Potluck is not scheduled until NEXT Sunday, the 24th. (I think preparing for the reunion weekend has me confuddled about the intervening weekends).

Oh wow! That would be something if I’d arrived with a crockpot of stew and a salad and no one else was bringing anything!

So I want to publically thank Rosalie for saving me a huge embarrassment.

I wasn’t ready to eat stew, so I quickly spooned it into plastic tubs or containers, and put five quantities away in the freezer for future meals. I completed the salad at noon and ate some Sunday, some yesterday, and have brought the rest for lunch today. See, no loss to me, but saved from severe blushing shame.

Hurrah! I actually got the photocopying of the Uncle John Binders finished last Saturday - well, except for a couple of pages that need to be done on legal length paper, and my home printer can’t seem to handle that length.

This week Saturday I hope to do and maybe complete the narrative part with the stories my Dad, and my uncle and aunts told about Uncle Johnny. I thought I had already done that, but checked on three computers and could not find that file, so I may have to do the whole thing over from scratch. Oh-well…!

Besides this, the weather is warming up nicely, and I’m gearing towards making my garden on Monday. That is Victoria Day here in Canada. It is to celebrate the Queen’s birthday, however, those who have cottages up north, head that way to open them for the season. Others like me, consider it a great day off from the regular schedule so we can make our gardens.

And guess what; my garden doubled on Thursday evening! My good neighbour Joe had borrowed a rotortiller, and came to dig up my garden for me. I had hinted before that he could do the other side of the path as well, and it would save him coming to mow my back lawn for me during the summer. It would also give me a larger potato patch and more flower beds. So he did.

Turning over the garden space I’ve had for two summers now was easy, and the soil looks rich and black because of all the compost I’ve tossed on it and turned into the soil each spring. Digging up the east side of the path was harder for Joe. He really had to wrestle with that tiller to get that hard soil loosened up. The dirt looks gray and sandy, and is not as deep yet. So I think I’ll mainly plant potatoes this year in that area, or other deep root veggies, and that will loosen up the soil more, and when I turn them into the garden in the fall, the soil will begin to be enriched.

I was going to toss in a couple of shots….of Joe tilling my garden, to contrast with the garden later when it is in full growth. Well, I got started and guess what, it turned into a photo story page. Check it out here; My 2009 garden and a NEW one!