Eric Bailey's

It was a cold, cold morning in Saskatoon, 13 years ago. My friend had a little Firefly that could start in very cold weather. It did start but for a while I did not think it would. Some friends had so generously left me some shaving supplies, I forgot to pack my own. So many details that day, we prepared for most of them but so many more came up.

All those things that came up had to be taken care of by those family and friends who surrounded us at our wedding.

Happy Anniversary Erica

I am posting from our hotel in Canmore as we make our way out to my parents' place for Christmas. We drove around Canmore unable to remember the name of the hotel we had book online. The solution was simple, Erica had a copy of the confirmation of our booking in her email in box on line. All we needed was some wifi bandwidth and my handy dandy new palm pilot. We drove around till we found a network that was not secure and that we could maintain a signal. I am currently typing from my palm. I like it. Tomorrow I will find out if my brother has a network at his house and if I can surf with my palm there as well.

Well I went and saw the Dr today about my knee. I have been waiting 3 weeks for this appointment. He promised to wrench my knee around. So today as he holds my leg he tells me to relax, don't worry. The reminds of the chiropractor just before he snaps my neck. It is hard to make yourself relax when you are anticipating pain. I got through the testing process fairly easily. There is still swelling in the knee (a little) and so the Dr says it takes about 6 weeks for that to go away. Odds are that I have dodgged a bullet, that my knee is going to be just fine after it finishes all the normal healing. The main ligaments seem to do well when he yanks on my leg. The only place that there was some pain was when he was poking the side of my knee. This is where that other cartiledge is. This is the padding between the bones in the knee. The thought is that I have likely torn a piece of this, but not enough to impede with anything that I do. So far my knee does not have any problems with locking, I have almost all of my movement, and when the rest of the swelling goes down I should have the rest of the movement back. After Christmas, if I'm careful, I should be able to try a little bit of light hockey (no contact) and other such sports. Hopefully somewhere in there we will get this Rec Centre membership and I will be able to start working out using my mornings differently than I currently am.

Right now I get up in the morning, get the lunches packed for the boys. I get Liam going, and have him eat. Sometime around the time I send Liam off to get dressed for the day, Haaken comes down and has his breakfast. I walk Liam to the bus stop and wait with him till he leaves on his bus. Greg has been walking Haaken to school, but these last couple days he has not been able to, so I have driven Haaken to school. And finally I take Erica to work. From there I can either stay in the main part of town or take the 10-15 drive back to our house and hang out for the day. Haaken walks home from school on his own. I meet Liam's bus at his stop, and I then drive to pick up Erica at the end of the day. Sometime in there I do cleaning, I read, play on the computer, and cook. The fun part is the currently I am teaching Greg my cooking tricks (which are all that tricky). I'm sure that Neil is dying to ask about that one.

Not much is happening now. We have actually spent three weekends (two Sundays) in Kenora. We have checked out two churches so far, but it looks like we will not continue looking until we have finished the experience we have started with the little baptist church we found. Little, it is probably 80-100 or maybe even more. We went there this Sunday and the Sunday school for the kids was in the middle of working on their Christmas pagent. So our kids are now in the pagent so we are staying at least long enough to really see what the Sunday School will be like for the kids. This coming weekend, on Sunday they will practice again with the pagent being in the evening. The next weekend we will be in Thunder Bay and then we will be out in Victoria for the Sunday after that so we won't be around much more this year for church in Kenora.

The pastor at this church is new to town and lives in our area (which is quite a ways from the church as far as this town is concerned). I have barely talked to him, and yet I feel like dropping by his office to visit and to try to encourage him, maybe even hang out a little. Maybe it is more for me as I am looking for people to make friends with and am unable to play hockey yet.

As far as the knee is concerned, next week before we go the Tbay I find out how my knee is healing and perhaps then we will have a more definite idea of what the problem actually is and how long it will take to heal. I am hoping to get a gym membership here so I can do a bit of workout type stuff, but there is still lots I can't do (no weights the doctor said). Until then, Greg and I continue to watch a lot of DVDs while we clean the house and unpack.