Challenges

The weather has been bad lately (not one plus temperature in January) and there's worse to come. Yesterday afternoon though, it was warm enough to sit in the sun in the shelter of the clubhouse and watch Chris take to the air for the first time in weeks. He was happy to be up there while I struggled over my sewing machine, repairing the tears in one of our wing covers. I was not keen to be his passenger because a northwest wind was blowing, and he admits I wouldn't have appreciated the turbulence and fierce gusts of crosswind combined with his touchdown on the icy runway. For tomorrow, twelve hours of freezing rain are forecast, followed by a day of rain on Wednesday and sleet on Thursday.

Talking of Crosswinds, I finished putting the January edition of the club's newsletter together in January, and am thinking of other things now. Mostly to do with one of my least favourite topics, financial planning. I'm feverishly budgeting. Nortel having filed for bankruptcy protection means that a large percentage of its employees will be laid off this month, perhaps this week. We know there will be no warning of the announcement, and haven't any clear idea of what's going to happen to his pay and pension if Chris is one of them, as he probably will be. When the time comes, so the rumour goes, Chris and other unfortunates, some of whom have worked thirty years for this company, will be escorted by security guards to their desks to pick up their possessions and hence escorted like criminals off the premises. In case this happens, Chris has been bringing home armfuls of books and other office paraphernalia night after night, since he couldn't possibly carry off all his stuff in one go. It's a disconcerting situation, but he doesn't seem too dismayed by it yet. He's in another room as I write this, with a group of fellow groundschool instructors, laying the groundwork for a new enterprise of his own devising: Farmhall Aviation Training. Many hours have already, and will be, spent on this, I'm glad to say, for I don't want him bored and frustrated during these challenging times.

Yesterday evening we went to a fundraiser for a new piano at the MacKay Street United Church where five members of the NACO played us quartets, the first being Mozart's Oboe Quartet, K 370, with Charles Hamann playing the lovely oboe part—click here!—Sally Benson on the viola and Leah Wyber on the cello, and the second being Dvorak's 11th String Quartet, Op. 61. Dvorak wrote 14 quartets in all and the first violinist, Leah Roseman, said that this one was full of his love of life. Mark Friedman (her husband) took the second violin part, the two violins indulging in gentle repartee in the slow movement and playing in thirds for much of the last movement. Pretty music, but it didn't seem to have as much substance as the Mozart.