Photoalbum2005

Photo Album 2005

    These photographs are intended to accompany our Christmas letter, December 2005. We believe that our lives are contained in our photograph albums, and the images represent a pictorial record of our activities over the past year. The page may take a while to load, depending on your band width, so please be patient. Also check the links to some of our other pages of interest, as follows:
            All Saints Church              Home Page          NASCAR           Photo album          Family history

Our three marvellous companions, Lacey, Cagney and Hayley:check the link on our cats web page for more information about all our friends
Conrad's brother and sister-in-law, Martin and Elizabeth visited us from Cape Town in September. We took them, among various visits, to Colasanti's Tropical Gardens	We went to dinner at Applebee's, with Simon and Philip, and Simon's friend Melissa.	We also had an "at home" to which we invited some of our friends. Here Martin is explaining the facts of life to Simon, Melissa and Elizabeth
Martin made a t-shirt for me from the Kiepersol Christnmas card bushveld silhouettes drawn by our father in the Fifties, and he is wearing a t-shirt with a photo of the two of us, taken during our last visit to South Africa in 1991	Members of the Glitterati were recently seen at the Toronto Interrnational Film Festival reflected in a mirror	We made our annual pilgrimage to the Stratford Festival, where we saw "Hello Dolly," Martha Henry and Amanda Plummer in "The Lark," "and one of William Hutt's fina performances before his retirement, in "The Tempest."
As Martin is a civil engineer (retired), we had to take him to see one of the world's engineeing marvels, the CN Tower, where we had a fantastic dinner in the 360 restaurant	Our front porch carpet was in shreds, and we decided to replace it with a granite stucco surface, which took much more work than we had anticipated, but now looks fantastic	In July Joanne was officially inducted into an exclusive organization, the Senior Citizens' Pensioners Club
All Saints Church received a visit from two Anglican ministers from our twin parish of St. John.'s near Umtata in the Eastern Cape, and we shared a meal with them.	Our guests entertained and inspired us with a beautiful hymn in the Xhosa language	Joanne continued to sing as a member of the choir at All Saints (that's her in the middle), and this year new choir gowns were introduced, to commemorate the visit of all the North American bishops to Windsor.
We cut down somewhat on our attendance at NASCAR races this year, but Conrad managed to enjoy a relaxing moment at Michigan International Speedway	We participated in the L.A.P.S. walk at MIS to raise money for the Head Injuries Association, and had an opportunity to walk round the track with some of our racing heroes, including Ernie Irvan, who signed our autograph book for Joanne	We a attended a reading by our favourite writer, Alistair MacLeod, and Joanne got him to inscribe his most recent book for us
Our mentor and spiritual adviser, Father Paul Charbonneau retired this Fall, and we socialized with him at the annual Brentwood picnic in August	Joanne took up chair caning, and successfully repaired all five of our dining room chairs. Her teacher was Bill Woods, and she is now ready to accept commissions	Last December my nephew Deneys was married to Caroline in Cape Town, and they moved to Pietermaritzburg, where they both work as physicians in a hospital. We very much regret that we were unable to attend the wedding
Multi-tasking probation officers "put up" Andrew's tent for him at the camping extravaganza held every five years	Joanne takes one of her first digital photos of the probation camping crew	We spent a lot of time in our garden, which was truly spectacular this year, glowing with honeysuckle, lilies, columbine and clematis.

We had a fortunate opportunity to attend a concert by Willie Nelson, one of our favourite singers, in Clio, Michigan.. Also, one of the best movies we saw all year was the new biopic of Johnnie Cash, "Walk the Line" which we thoroughly enjoyed.

We recently had dinner with Summer, on the right, our wandering granddaughter from Kitimat and Chelsea,who looks after our cats and our house when we are gone.

So we are now in the thick of an election campaign, and Joanne has returned to her job of managing a regional phone centre for the NDP, as she did in the previous election only 17 months ago, when this picture with Jack Layton appeared in the newspaper (that's Joe Comartin in the background)