Dalhousie days: a chapter comes to an end

After 21 enjoyable years, the old family homestead in Dalhousie home is up for sale. My parents, sister and I moved back to Calgary once we left Vancouver (Richmond) BC in 1989. After some wilderness years of instability, it was nice to have a real home to settle down in. Lots of good times and memories here.

Though I moved out in 1998, I was always coming back to visit, even for the years away in Taiwan. When it was time for us to move back to Canada in 2007, Mum and Dad were kind enough to let us rent the place from them once they moved to their condo. This summer we'll be moving into our own house, which we bought back in 2005.
The garden has lots of pretty trees in it. May is the best time to see all the blooms coming out.
Fiona enjoyed playing in the tent here last summer. Lots of good BBQs and garden parties had on the lawn
Summer 2006: Baby Fiona with grandma on the deck
Vivian did a super job repainting the dark kitchen in bright white, plus adding a new blacksplash

Mayday tree in bloom
Fiona's playground. Gareth rebuilt the white fence surrounding the property back in 1998
This ancient picnic table may have come from when we lived in Cochrane back in the early 1980s. Recently Vivian's family helped us repaint it
Nanjing cherry tree in the back yard. It grows real cherries!
More blooms

Mum spent hundreds of hours developing the garden into what it is today. Dozens of perennials like these ones now come up every spring

What's in a name? Mengkai (孟楷), Chiachien (嘉倩) and Mengtian (孟田)

In case you were wondering about some of the characters on the banner of our blog: 孟楷 = Mengkai, Gareth's Chinese name. 嘉倩 (Chiachien) is Vivian's Chinese name. 孟田 (Mengtian) is Fiona's Chinese name. I have also taken to using Mengkai in my email address, my Twitter handle and elsewhere online.

The Meng (孟) comes from Mengzi (孟子) aka Mencius, the famous Chinese philosopher to follow Confucius (孔子). Meng is phonetically similar to Morgan, both starting with the M sound. Since I took a philosophy minor in university this is suitable. I can be a thinker at times, so it is an appropriate name on many levels.

The kai (楷) character denotes the "modern" style of Chinese calligraphy (楷書) developed around 200 AD. Kai is a fitting name for a writer and editor like myself. The other meaning of kai (楷) is model or pattern (楷模), which in other contexts can be used to describe clarity, detail and orderliness. There is a personality connection here for me too.

Vivian's Chinese name is Chiachien (嘉倩). Chia 嘉 is an auspicious character, and can be loosely translated as excellence or honor. Chien 倩 means lovely or beautiful, a popular character for female names.

Fiona's Chinese name is Mengtian (孟田). The tian 田 character means rice paddy or field. 田 is one of those forgiving pictogram characters that actually looks somewhat like the thing it represents. Mengtian as a spoken name evokes the poetic metonymy that makes Chinese enjoyable to hear and contemplate. Without seeing the characters one could think that Mengtian = a different Mengtian: 夢田 or 夢天, "dream field" or "dream heaven" respectively.

New video: July - November 2009

Poor neglected blog. Though I spend more time on Facebook and Twitter these days, I would like to do more blogging and video editing. I also have a large backlog of digital photos to review and print out. Who has time for all this stuff?

Nonetheless, I recently found time to compile a video of highlights from the latter half of 2009. Some are from home in Calgary, but some are from our summer trip out to the BC coast: Boating in English Bay, walking through rainforests to a natural hospring near Tofino, and chasing pigeons at Granville Island. Enjoy.