Volume II, Number VII: 2006
A Quotable Quotes Edition
“Looking forward to this year’s TaylorGram…”
So went the notes that came in with this winter’s Christmas cards. Truth be told, so were we. Looking forward to writing it, scribbling personal notes on it and mailing it. We have resigned ourselves to the fact that this little letter, now in its eighteenth year, is destined to be a new year’s greeting because we perennially miss the Christmas season. A friend in Arizona noted the schedule slippage over the years this way, “When it arrives, I know Easter is just around the corner.” Sigh. Don’t set your calendar by it, but here is the next installment with our best wishes for a happy new year.
“Dodsland looks like the set of an old time Hollywood Move”
That exclamation pierced an unseasonably cold, wet and snowy September weekend in Dodsland, Saskatchewan. The quote came from Susan Starr of Manchester, England, sister to Rosemary Jeffers of Aberdeen, Scotland who (as noted in last year’s TaylorGram) used the Internet to search for and find the Canadian Bacons with whom the family had lost contact two generations before.
A year to the day of her first contact with Elaine on September 17, 2005, Susan, Rosemary and her husband Anthony reunited with 50 relatives from western Canada in Dodsland. It was a remarkable weekend of exploring the town’s past and reconnecting the family in multiple ways.
“There’s no excuse for dirty windows anymore”
Said with fatherly firmness and a grin, that was Elaine’s dad’s reaction to the new deck. Jim had made a habit of incorporating a little window washing with each of his visits, using long poles to reach the higher windows on the lake side of the house. The deck, of course, brings the windows down to eye level. On his most recent visit last fall, Jim and Elaine discovered that visiting vineyards is a more than adequate substitute for window washing where father-daughter bonding is concerned.
“She runs with Scissors”
Coworkers on Elaine as the education project team lead for the hospital’s Clinical Information System Replacement effort or CIS-R (read: scissor) for short. The new year promises to be intense because a small staff has to train thousands of doctors, nurses and technicians on a new system in a narrow window between its initial completion and its hospital-wide roll out.
“You’ll be between Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton”
So said the editor of a desk calendar in his request to use a quote from one of Paul’s columns in the 2007 edition, which is now featured on June 18 in the Freedom Forum calendar (see image above). Add two peer-reviewed book chapters to Paul’s publication list and the year had both substance and sizzle.
“I was expecting, you know, scrolls…”
Overheard while leaving the exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Seattle with Paul’s parents during their Christmas visit. The scroll fragments are awe inspiring but they sure are not that big – restoration experts apparently used the same technology to reconstruct the cave full of artifacts as investigators did to reassemble shredded files from Enron.
The Scrolls were the capstone of a great visit chalked full of good stuff – three Christmas dinners and a Swing era-themed Christmas musical. And mercifully, in a break from tradition, they did not fly via Denver and missed spending the holidays with 5,000 storm-stayed strangers.
“For a couple of Canadians, you throw a pretty good Fourth of July party”
A back handed compliment from one of the largest parties we have ever attempted. Hosted on Canada Day (Saturday, July 1), we had water slides for the kids, about 24 feet of potluck and BBQ, and a floating fireworks show at dusk. At one point, we counted 80 people on the yard in one spot or another. And, may our Canadian friends and relatives forgive us, we had red, white and blue bunting all around the new deck. [More on the deck in a moment.]
Where would we have found 80 friends, you ask? Most of them are part of a church plant in which we became involved just over a year ago. It has been a challenging, rewarding and sometimes humbling experience but it has resulted in a solid and thriving congregation that meets in a hotel conference room just off the I-5. Elaine has led the women’s group while Paul worked some of the logistics of doing church-out-of-a-box and successfully petitioned the IRS for tax-exempt status as a public charity.
The deck – a beauty that wraps around two sides of the house and points at Mount Rainier – was built with the help of dozen guys from the church who volunteered their time to finish what a pair of them (Mike and Jacob) had started two days earlier. On your next visit here, you will also notice a terraced set of retaining walls in the back bank leading to the lake. A fellow named Michael is about half way through three dozen pallets of bricks in reshaping the back yard.
There are longer versions of all these stories but they are best told over cold beverages while sitting on the deck. Consider this a standing invitation.
Peace and Grace,
Paul and Elaine
So went the notes that came in with this winter’s Christmas cards. Truth be told, so were we. Looking forward to writing it, scribbling personal notes on it and mailing it. We have resigned ourselves to the fact that this little letter, now in its eighteenth year, is destined to be a new year’s greeting because we perennially miss the Christmas season. A friend in Arizona noted the schedule slippage over the years this way, “When it arrives, I know Easter is just around the corner.” Sigh. Don’t set your calendar by it, but here is the next installment with our best wishes for a happy new year.
“Dodsland looks like the set of an old time Hollywood Move”
That exclamation pierced an unseasonably cold, wet and snowy September weekend in Dodsland, Saskatchewan. The quote came from Susan Starr of Manchester, England, sister to Rosemary Jeffers of Aberdeen, Scotland who (as noted in last year’s TaylorGram) used the Internet to search for and find the Canadian Bacons with whom the family had lost contact two generations before.
A year to the day of her first contact with Elaine on September 17, 2005, Susan, Rosemary and her husband Anthony reunited with 50 relatives from western Canada in Dodsland. It was a remarkable weekend of exploring the town’s past and reconnecting the family in multiple ways.
“There’s no excuse for dirty windows anymore”
Said with fatherly firmness and a grin, that was Elaine’s dad’s reaction to the new deck. Jim had made a habit of incorporating a little window washing with each of his visits, using long poles to reach the higher windows on the lake side of the house. The deck, of course, brings the windows down to eye level. On his most recent visit last fall, Jim and Elaine discovered that visiting vineyards is a more than adequate substitute for window washing where father-daughter bonding is concerned.
“She runs with Scissors”
Coworkers on Elaine as the education project team lead for the hospital’s Clinical Information System Replacement effort or CIS-R (read: scissor) for short. The new year promises to be intense because a small staff has to train thousands of doctors, nurses and technicians on a new system in a narrow window between its initial completion and its hospital-wide roll out.
“You’ll be between Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton”
So said the editor of a desk calendar in his request to use a quote from one of Paul’s columns in the 2007 edition, which is now featured on June 18 in the Freedom Forum calendar (see image above). Add two peer-reviewed book chapters to Paul’s publication list and the year had both substance and sizzle.
“I was expecting, you know, scrolls…”
Overheard while leaving the exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Seattle with Paul’s parents during their Christmas visit. The scroll fragments are awe inspiring but they sure are not that big – restoration experts apparently used the same technology to reconstruct the cave full of artifacts as investigators did to reassemble shredded files from Enron.
The Scrolls were the capstone of a great visit chalked full of good stuff – three Christmas dinners and a Swing era-themed Christmas musical. And mercifully, in a break from tradition, they did not fly via Denver and missed spending the holidays with 5,000 storm-stayed strangers.
“For a couple of Canadians, you throw a pretty good Fourth of July party”
A back handed compliment from one of the largest parties we have ever attempted. Hosted on Canada Day (Saturday, July 1), we had water slides for the kids, about 24 feet of potluck and BBQ, and a floating fireworks show at dusk. At one point, we counted 80 people on the yard in one spot or another. And, may our Canadian friends and relatives forgive us, we had red, white and blue bunting all around the new deck. [More on the deck in a moment.]
Where would we have found 80 friends, you ask? Most of them are part of a church plant in which we became involved just over a year ago. It has been a challenging, rewarding and sometimes humbling experience but it has resulted in a solid and thriving congregation that meets in a hotel conference room just off the I-5. Elaine has led the women’s group while Paul worked some of the logistics of doing church-out-of-a-box and successfully petitioned the IRS for tax-exempt status as a public charity.
The deck – a beauty that wraps around two sides of the house and points at Mount Rainier – was built with the help of dozen guys from the church who volunteered their time to finish what a pair of them (Mike and Jacob) had started two days earlier. On your next visit here, you will also notice a terraced set of retaining walls in the back bank leading to the lake. A fellow named Michael is about half way through three dozen pallets of bricks in reshaping the back yard.
There are longer versions of all these stories but they are best told over cold beverages while sitting on the deck. Consider this a standing invitation.
Peace and Grace,
Paul and Elaine