Loss

I woke up this morning to an email letting me know that a family friend had died.

Death is a strange thing, and something that is leaving its impression upon my life more and more as life goes on. A year doesn't go by when I am not touched by the affects of someone's death.

Last night Kate, mother of Brett and Phil, and husband of Dan died of breast cancer. She'd been fighting it for the past 51 months, and succumbed to it last night a the age of 54.

Brett and Phil were brothers that I grew up swimming with. I swam competitively from grade 4 through 10, and met Brett and Phil through it. They also went to the same school as us, where their mom was a occasional substitute teacher.

Dan worked for the City, as did my dad, but Dan was one of the city engineers, while my dad ran the bailing facility at the dump. They were friends outside of work, and we'd go over to their house for dinner and out to their cabin for weekend boating/fishing trips.

To me, they were rich. They lived in a huge house, owned a Super Nintendo with lots of games, and had a cabin with a boat. They were no better than us, they just had more money. Dan and Kate were just normal folks that made more money than my parents, but it never seemed like that made any difference. We all got along great.

Sometime in junior high they moved away to Florida or somewhere and we lost touch. I think I saw them one other time in Yellowknife during high school when they were in town for a visit, but other than that, I haven't seen them since junior high.

Facebook reintroduced us, but other than cursory messages, there hasn't been much conversation.

It really sucks that Kate died. She was an awesome lady, far too young to die. It's a shitty deal.

My thoughts and prayers are with Dan and the boys while they go through this horrible time.

Garden Update

So last Friday we got a bit of a cold snap (and of course we decided to make that weekend our first camping trip of the year). It went down to just below zero and wreaked havoc on our beautiful garden.

In April or May, we decided we should get started on planting inside so that come planting time in our garden we'd have a nice crop of seedlings ready to go out. So we planted cauliflower, broccoli, watermelon, pumpkin, corn, peppers and tomatoes. Almost everything germinated on schedule, but they sort of stalled out. They grew on long spindly stalks and seemed to stretch for the sun coming in the windows. Most of the plants got some sort of secondary "real" leaves but they never reached the point of the seedlings you buy in the store.

Last week we decided that it was safe to put the seedlings into the ground, along with a row of geraniums and marigolds. We figured since June was underway and we were seeing average nighttime temps above 10 degrees that it would be safe to plant our delicate seedlings. I guess not.

We planted on Wednesday evening before small group, and they were looking nice in their new homes. I watered them and we left them to flourish. Well Friday comes around and so does the dreaded freezing temps.

We stopped by to check on our plot Sunday morning after returning from camping to find rows of death. Our plot is in the middle of the community garden, so we had to walk by a number of plots before reaching ours; all full of dead plants. Even those whose tomatoes were covered suffered. Some people had some pretty established plants and they were all withered and dying. I'm curious to go out tonight and see if some people's stuff has recovered, but I'm not holding out hope for our tiny, fragile plants.

So tonight we are going out to plant our tomatoes and peppers. We'll also turn in all the dead plants and see about using up the remaining seeds for the other crops we've already planted. It will mean a whole bunch of extras of some stuff, but that's alright. I'd rather have a nice full garden, and it also means less weeding.

It's just sad is all.