Into my new organizational mood and deciding on priorities, looks like outside needs some work today and perhaps vacuum the basement which I did accomplish.
Ed is writing his story and we are working on that together. Perhaps we can complete the set of pictures that he wants to use today. My husband has an interesting life story. He was born on his grandmother's farm which his father managed. Unfortunately when Ed was two his father had a farming accident and died which meant that the farm was sold and he moved into a small village with his mother where she raised him. She worked as a clerk at the local grocery/mercantile store and he was looked after by his grandmother who had a house nearby. Then off to school at a country schoolhouse with just four classrooms. He went to the high school in a nearby town and discovered how much he enjoyed chemistry. He studied Chemistry as an undergraduate and then went on to do his PhD. We married when he completed his undergraduate degree (I was one year behind him also in chemistry). He did a two year PostDoc in Chemical Engineering but this was the time of the draft dodgers coming to Canada and the universities snapped them up and there were no jobs for the young PhD graduates in Chemistry (and other fields). So he did a masters degree in Library Science and got a job at the Canadian Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) at the National Research Council. He worked there for about thirty years and then retired. Personally I still think there was such a waste of all that young Canadian scientific talent in the early 70s when he and his fellow students were graduating. My husband's research is still quoted in papers as it was some of the initial work done on Cobalt. Although I am a great believer in diversity I do think that our universities should hire Canadian graduates and then when really interesting candidates from around the world come along then hire a few of them!
The house that my husband grew up in did not have running water when he was young so his story is really a story of endurance, working hard and doing the right thing. His involvement in volunteerism has been stunning and he did receive the Queen Elizabeth Medal which has quite pleased me. He and his mother attended the local United Church and when he was just twelve they wanted him to teach Sunday School but if you knew my husband you would know that at 12 teaching Sunday School was not something that he could have readily done. Instead he just stayed home from Church for a while but gradually as he moved through High School his confidence increased and by the time he finished University he did take on teaching for a while but with a young family he needed a steadier occupation and so the Masters in Library Science which lead to a thirty year career. I am also proud of his ten years as Treasurer at his local United Church and fifteen years singing on the Choir at Church. He has so many other volunteer commitments that it would take me ages to write it all down!
I need to prioritize my newsletters to see what I might be able to look at today and make a plan for getting caught up once again. I believe I will do them in the order, Blake, Pincombe and H11.
Somehow the dog days of summer always turn my mind towards the fall and all the work that I can accomplish once the snow starts to fall.
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