Dear Trina – Tuesday, the 19th of December 2006.

Dear Trina,
Thank you very much for the informative explanation of your recent adventures and about the recent addition to your family. We do hope that all works out for you all. We also hope that your Christmas will be joyful and happy and that the new year will bring you all some happiness.

We are all well here. As usual lots is happening down here. Today is the 4th of December.

I was given a bike by Terry and Tania. It had a bend back wheel. The bike shop couldn’t fix it so I bought a second-hand back wheel off them, with tire and tube all in good condition. So I can now go for rides around Tokoroa. My biggest problem is learning to slow down. I seem to have that mad want to go fast whenever I am on a push-bike. But this bike that I have got is not as fast as the racing bike that I used to ride. I still enjoy riding a bike though, it is lots of fun.

I hope that all is well with the little one and the rest of your children and of course yourself. But what pets do you all have now?

What a year! Jimmy will be 7 soon. And Tracy will be 20 years old the day after. My first child to reach the twenties. And she won’t be here to celebrate it. She will (hopefully) be here for Christmas for about a week and a half.

Well Jimmy had his party. Today is the 18th of December 2006. Tracy is of course now twenty and she is coming to stay with us during the Christmas break.

We hope that you will enjoy the contents of this parcel. This is our simple gifts to you all for this Christmas period. We do hope that you are all well and enjoying life.

The weather here has just gone to rain and showers. We have had some wonderful sunny days, with not much cloud at all. Very nice weather indeed.

Recently I found a Ray Conniff record and I was surprised to find that I like his music. I am playing it as I type this letter. My children like the record as well. In fact (thankfully) my children enjoy most of my music and (thankfully) don’t like 99% of today’s modern music. We have a great range of music in our house and we avoid keeping to any one type of music. This is a great idea as it means that we enjoy music that covers many years and gives us many more options that somebody who just enjoys today’s modern music and scowls at all other types of music.

Mind you I still don’t enjoy the music of the likes of Bob Dylan, Elvis, Bowie and some others. I suppose some people just don’t get through.

Recently we had the girls (Rachel & Grace) public piano performance and it went well. I went this year with the girls and Jimmy. Last year Jimmy and I missed out so it was a new experience for us both. Rachel received a certificate for her third (in a row) pass with Honours for Piano and Organ Theory. Grace starts her theory this year. Both are doing well with their piano and organ studies. Both can read music sheets and play from them. They understand a lot of music theory and what certain notes are and how they are played. I am hoping that each of them will keep at their individual music studies for some time.

I am not sure if I told you that we bought another organ for the children. This one is bigger but still has two keyboards. It is an old one like the other one. We donated our old one to the church so that they could use it for services and to use in Sunday School. The new one also has longer keyboards. The old one had rows of keys but they were to short and the children needed a bigger keyboard to play the songs that they were given by their music teacher.

A new development for me was the problem of my lump on my back. This was an interesting indeed. All of a sudden I was in great pain on this lump that I had, had on my back. This lump had been there for many years. It became bright red like a large (more like a large golf ball under the skin) strawberry and grew and it could easily be seen as a lump on my back looking like a small mountain. The doctors injected me and then cut a 1 inch cut into the lump and for the last few weeks I have been getting it cleaned out. I have been going to the doctors every day and then this last week every two days. The infection was rather bad and I haven’t been able to sleep on that side for a while now. But recently over the last few days I have been able to sleep on it for short periods of time, then it becomes uncomfortable again.

I have seen the surgeon once. It cost $145 for the first visit. It is not surgically removed in public hospitals anymore because the government has not given the hospitals enough money to pay for such operations because it is not considered life-threatening so I am forced to go to a private surgeon who will remove the entire lump for around $800 sometime in the new year. I have my second appointment to see him this Wednesday to see what he thinks of the progress that I (and the doctors and nurses) have made so far in getting rid of the infection. The surgeon refuses to cut the lump (cyst) out unless the infection has cleared up first.

The lump is somewhat embedded into the shoulder muscle so it needs to be carefully removed. This will all happen soon I imagine so we are hoping that it will all go well. I will have to go to Hamilton for the operation which is a bit awkward due to us not having a car, but there is always the bus system. I will be heavily relying on God for all the help that I will need for this to happen. But it will all turn out well.

Jimmy and Grace homeschooling.

I hope that all is working out for you Trina and your little family. I am pleased that you got a boy. They are interesting in a different way than girls are interesting. Keep up the good work and do enjoy those children. Jimmy is growing fast and he shows great ability to work out problems and deal with real life situations. One thing that I have noticed is that children do copy easily what they see. And watching television can do a great deal of harm to a child if it is not kept in check and always monitored. This is one of the reasons that I believe that Grace, Tracy and Rachel have behaved so well over the years. We sure have had our moments of disagreements but they are good children and do listen to what it is that I want to say to them. I have found that discipline where the entertainment is concerned makes a big difference in how a child behaves and grows.

We have nearly finished watching the first 2 seasons of All Creatures Great And Small. We got them at the Warehouse on VHS video cassette. Rachel, Grace and Jimmy are very happy with the series and very much enjoy that old humour from the 70′ and 80’s era of television. Like our music tastes we do not limit ourselves with one particular era of television or movies. Now that my children have seen Peter Davison as Triston in All Creatures Great And Small, they are keen to see him act as the good doctor on Doctor Who. So we will be looking out for his Doctor Who series at the Warehouse. Hopefully we will get to see at least one tape or DVD of the series with him in it. Carol Drinkwater from All Creatures Great And Small (she acts as Harriot’s wife) is a successful writer.

It is raining tonight (Tuesday, the 19th of December 2006). Rachel got home from work not long ago. Tracy will be here in two days time.

Lots of love from our family. We hope that the new year will be good for you all and that you will gain knowledge and understanding of God and life as the year progresses.