Here I am again ... back from an exciting summer at my favourite summer job at the Historic O'Keefe Ranch. I started back to work in May and was still going to physiotherapy and walking with a cane. I have been so blessed with understanding co-workers and managers who don't mind that I have some physical limitations.
There have been a lot of changes over the summer. One change was that son #1, who had gone to Dawson Creek for school from the end of February to the end of June, came back home in July, was gone again to Oliver for 3 weeks, home for the rest of the summer, and departed to Terrace for a one-month contract in mid-September. There are many reasons why this is exciting ... first, that he has finished his Aircraft Mechanic Engineering course (before he was 19); second, that he has had 2 jobs in his field since finishing his course; third, that he is now working in the town I called home for ten years; and fourth, that he has another job in Terrace lined up when this one ends, and it is for a helicopter company, which is where he wanted to focus. Another excitement which could be titled "God works things out" was that he worked his last weekend shift for Tolko (weekend clean-up) a week before he left for Terrace. His clean-up job was meant to be for students (high school, college, or university), so once the summer was over and he wasn't going back to school, it was the end of that position for him, so the contract came at just the right time.
Son #2 was presented with a white kitten for his 19th birthday. Not by his family, by the way. Snowball is entertaining me this evening by stealing scrap wool from my knitting basket, playing with plastic bags, and apparently trying to eat a stack of phone books on which he is sitting. Oh, add to the list of dangers, he was also playing with a thumb tack and is hanging around underneath the rolling office chair where I am sitting. Needless to say, this little kitten has provided us with a lot of excitement, especially when he is under our feet. In the kitchen. I'm sure he is working on losing all of his 9 lives in his first year on earth.
I completed a lot of knitting and crocheting projects this summer ... some were done while I was minding the general store at work. It certainly fit the atmosphere of the place to have me in costume working on handcrafts that would have been done back in those days. I also finished the binding on a quilt. My little cowboy quilt sold in the ranch gift shop, as did one of the cowboy table runners that I made last winter. Does that make me a professional quilter?
I was thrilled to be back at the Ranch again, telling stories of the O'Keefe family from long ago days. I always enjoy having children on my tours, and go into "kid mode" with stories about things that the kids would do, or how they got in trouble, or just describing things in ways that kids understand. My theory about kid tours is two-fold: 1) if the kids are happy, everyone on the tour is happy; and 2) I am teaching future historians, and if they come away with a love of history, I am doing my job right.
By the end of September, I was ready to go back to my "other" life, which some might call "real life". This life includes teaching Sunday School or helping in the church library on Sundays, quilting Mondays, working for New Hope for Widow/ers on Tuesdays, church library workbees on Wednesdays, house cleaning (my own) Fridays ... and Saturdays are my days for fun.
Today was a Saturday, so I was off on an adventure with my mother and a bunch of people from our church. We embarked on the church's orange bus and motored off to Sunnybrae Bible Camp for lunch, then went to see the sockeye salmon run at the Adams River near Scotch Creek. The salmon were just beginning to fill up the river, so the river wasn't "running red" yet, but it was exciting to be watching a reddish shadow beneath the clear rushing water and have a fin break the surface and a red body suddenly wriggle about before plunging underwater again.
