We all have things that we aspire to do when we have time. Something that I’ve always wanted to do is to get involved with Hospice in some way – ideally as a volunteer. Going through this crappy cancer journey has reminded me of this goal, since one of the goals of Hospice is to help people who are dealing with a life threatening illness live their lives to the fullest. I’m doing that right now, although I don’t needs the services of Hospice – hallelujah x 1 million.
The Organization
If you don’t know about what Hospice is, you’re not alone. A lot of people have no idea that this incredible organization exists, or if they do, they don’t really understand its purpose.
Generally speaking, when someone is dealing with a life threatening or terminal illness they need support. The family needs support. Hospice provides it. As people reach the end of their lives and are in palliative care, Hospice is invaluable.
Currently Hospice Peterborough is building a new facility on London street. It’s a huge endeavour. Here’s a quote from their website:
“The new London Street building will provide a welcoming, accessible space for Hospice Peterborough’s home support program, day program, caregiver support, grief programs, family support, wellness programming and administrative offices. The scope of Hospice is also expanding to include 10 private bedrooms, offering another choice for end of life care in the community and the first hospice care beds to exist in the City and County of Peterborough. This will complete Hospice’s transition to become a central hub for the delivery of hospice palliative care and grief support in our community.”
looking straight at the entrance
Building is underway!
The Pitch
So I’d like to ask a favour. Will you walk with me on May 6th to raise money for Hospice? It’s the day before my 53rd birthday. It would be the best birthday present ever! I will be in recovery from the chemo (although still having other regular non-chemo treatments) and I should be good to walk the suggested route (or most of it).
The Options
No walking – but can donate! Perfect. You likely live too far away, have small children or are too lazy. Haha!
You can donate by pledging to me that you will give me cash. Just let me know how much you can donate in a comment on this page, on Facie, by text or email, phone me, Insta, come over … OMG. Just let me know how much … then I’ll come after you!
OR….
You can donate by going to my team page on the Hike for Hospice website and clicking on “Donate”. There you’ll find a little ditty that I wrote. After you read it, you can donate something by clicking on the blue button. Easy peasy. (Or you could go to the Hike for Hospice website and search for my team, but that’s unnecessary.)
OR…. Walk with me! Outta site!!! Now that would be so much fun …
Just go to my team page and rather than “donate”, click on “join team”. From there you choose the type of participant you want to be. You can just walk, add a donation, or you can set your own fundraising goal and then harass persuade some of your friends to give YOU money for Hospice. This way you can compete with me to see who can raise more money. (I am very competitive, just sayin’.) If you want to do that, just set a goal for fundraising, and make your own donation (I didn’t do this the first time and it took AGES to figure out how to donate, not just set a fundraising goal…)
The Final Comment
I don’t generally like to hit people up for money, but come on. I have cancer, it’s (going to be) my birthday, and Hospice is awesome. Please walk with me and / or make a small donation to a great organization!!
xoxoxo J
My bald head thanks you. And all of the other parts of my body do too, but my bald head is the most thankful for sure.
Even though day 1 of spring is officially tomorrow, we had a prelude to a spring a couple of weeks ago and as a consequence we have already made 101 litres of maple syrup. I know. That’s a lot of pancakes. But apparently we need more, so I’m heading out shortly to check the lines and collect sap. Before I do that though, I’ll give you a bit of an overview of the operation – purely hobby, by the way, so some of my methods / tools may be a bit questionable to a pro. (And if you work for the CFIA, stop reading this now, because I only sell syrup to friends and family. Thanks very much. Goodbye.)
We (ok, my brother) tapped in mid February this year. It’s a bit of a risky move, because your tapped holes can dry up if there is a long freeze in between runs. We He went for it. He’d collect and boil in the day, I’d come home from work and finish the boil. We’d try to do finishes together, but it didn’t always work out. (Of course, in the March break, when I had LOTS of time to boil and finish, it didn’t run.)
Let me take you through the process with the help of some photos I’ve taken over the years.
When we’re ready to tap the lines they are already hanging from the trees since we leave them up year round. There is usually some damage to the lines – the deer sometimes like a nibble – so fixing the lines is often necessary.
We generally fix and tap at the same time, working our way up the line. Hot water, extra tubing and taps are necessary, as is the handy and very sharp knife.
Tapping takes a day or two – we tap about 300 trees … and several trees have more than one tap. Most taps are connected to tubing (various colours). We do have 20 or so buckets that we use around the house where I don’t want to hang tubing. I can also ask visitors to collect sap from the buckets. It keeps them happy.
You need to drill on a slight upward angle. Tony’s a pro.Vintage photo of Liam putting the tap into the freshly drilled hole. Afterwards it is hammered in. The spile has a wee trough, a hook and a hole for the lid pin to go through. Clever.After you hang the bucket on the spile you have to attach the lid with a long metal pin. It’s a bit tricky.Once the tree has been tapped and the spile hammered in, the sap runs immediately.
The tubing runs downhill and into jerry cans that collect the sap. These were a brilliant choice by my dad as the tubing fits perfectly into the vent hole.
We stretch the lines starting at the bottom of the line, tapping as we go, and raising the line up the trees so that the sap can run easily down the line and into the container.
We collect the sap by exchanging the full cans with empty ones. They conveniently fit in the back of the gator. Clever, eh?
Cousin Tim jets around to collect. There’s a job for everyone!If the temperature stays warm the sap will run at night. So we collect at night. The coyotes can freak you out a bit…
The sap is then transferred into big stainless steel containers. We have about 400 gallons of storage space.
The sap is poured through the first of many filters.
Once we have enough sap to boil, we light up the fire in the sugar shack and feed the sap down through handy pipes.
You can see the pipes go into the shack right under the obligatory OMSPA sign.
The procedure in the sugar shack is pretty basic. Boil the hell out of the sap until all that’s left is syrup, then filter it and bottle it. The machinery is pretty spectacular though!
These lovely pans make incredible syrup. They’re made in Quebec by the pros.
The slow work is feeding the fire, skimming the foam, checking the levels and collecting more sap. As it boils down we pull small batches into the finishing pan which sits beside the evaporator pans. Once we have enough to finish (around 26 litres), we light up the propane under finishing pan and prepare to do a “finish”.
As the sap boils in the upper evaporator pan, we skim off any foam that builds up.Keeping the boil high is important. We have varying theories on the best way to achieve this. I am right of course.Once the syrup sap reaches a certain temperature in the lower evaporator pans we pull it off, filtering it as we do so into the finishing pan. This is the second filtering. It’s critical. See the sediment?
This final part is the art of it all. The syrup is boiled in the finishing pan until a certain temperature is reached. This stage of the work involves beautiful caramel bubbles, measuring the Brix (sugar content) with the hydrotherm and taking it off at just the right time. The syrup is poured through its final set of filters as it goes into the bottling pan.
If you boil the syrup too long and the sugar content is just too high, the syrup will crystallize. Even though it’s pretty and can be used to teach Grade 4 kids in their rocks & minerals unit, it’s a waste of syrup and very disheartening. I’ve become better at finishing now, so I haven’t had crystals in a few years.
These are my sample bottles that sit in the window. One sample for each finish. The crystals formed within a month.
Making maple syrup is a LONG process. Fun fact: it takes 40 litres of sap to make 1 litre of maple syrup. That’s why it’s a labour of love, and why I’ll smack you if I ever see you leaving maple syrup on your plate.
Today was a beautiful day to be alive! It was sunny and crisp – perfect for raking a shitload of leaves. It was also the “fall back” day for daylight savings time, which gives you this idea that you can tackle 50% more things than normal because you have one more hour in the day. Ya well, I was on fire!!!
Yesterday I picked up these beautiful plums at the market…
Today I made them into this!
My nephew Ben served it up at our “traditional family dinner” … and it was AWESOME! You can find the recipe on smitten kitchen (which I LOVE). They call it a Plum Torte, but really, if you want to get technical, it’s more like a buckle. Look it up.
After making the plum thing, I polished off my LAST SET of progress reports, raked for a while, then got going on some blueberry muffins – recipe also from smitten kitchen, coincidentally. (Did I mention that I love that website? Hell ya.)
This is currently my fav blueberry muffin recipe. It’s cakey going into the muffin pan, but moist and has a perfectly crunchy top with that fat sugar on top. Love the fat sugar.
There’s nothing like incorporating fruit in some kind of dessert. Makes you feel like a hundred bucks, eating fruit in a naughty way … don’t you think?
Last week my body freaked out on me. Even though the week felt to me like most other weeks, my body didn’t think so. It must have felt as though it was under attack because it produced a shitload of histamines and covered me with hives. Generally I think my body is pretty smart and does a great job looking after me, so obviously it was trying to tell me to chill the fuck out!!! The hives started out small then joined together into plaques (according to google, my dear friend). Soon enough hives were in my ears and through my hair, all over my torso and legs, and when I thought it was done, I woke up with swollen and beet red hands. They were ON FIRE.
Yes there was a lot going on – my Superintendent came to talk to me about my goals for the year (it’s an evaluation year), I had a busy schedule in the evenings with doctors appointments for the girls and shuttling to extra curriculars, there were lots of calls to various agencies about Bree, a situation with a student who ran away from a school trip and police had to be involved … and a 1/2 day Professional Development day to plan. It was a lot. Oh and a pot luck. Oh and a whole school trip to help coordinate. Not too much.
The fact that our entire school population can fit on two (crowded) buses … sweet.
But then I worked with staff on the PA day in an ice cold room. As I worked with them, my stress melted away. I think I gained so much peace and goodwill from them on Friday that my hives went away. I love my staff. We talked about First Nations peoples and the importance of recognizing the First Nations land that our school is on, our beliefs about our awesome little school, we marvelled over our students’ math thinking. It was all pretty great.
By the weekend I was hive free and thinking about how to prevent that from happening again. I think I need to get outside and breath in the air. I should be able to fit that in.
soon these trees will all be red and orange …
And so I had a fairly peaceful weekend – after getting Bree some new shoes and running the girls to various events, I managed to have a tea date with my good friend Alison, have dinner with Paul, do some baking and join a “traditional family dinner” at my mom’s. Paul got a ton of wood brought in (I helped a tiny bit…). Quite stress free!!
Favourite breakfast – date & ginger scone from the market and a chai tea latte.Spies are for pies!! “There’s something slimy in my glove!” Paul had dropped his glove for a moment and a wee frog took advantage.
Now I’m well into another work week and despite the fact that today I was short 2/3 of my teaching staff, the Grade 7/8 kids had immunization shots, it was a Blue Jays theme day and the Director of our Board visited the school … no hives. So far so good!
The week gone by was, well, life changing. Not just for me, but for my whole family, and for Bree, the wonderful girl who has joined it. All sorts of meetings and stress are behind us, and while there are likely many challenges ahead, we’re feeling pretty peaceful for now. We’re at the cabin, happy to show her around and share with her some of our traditions. She has already noted that we are a very “singy” family … so when we did our Disney princess challenge on the way in (in which one person sings a Disney song and the others try to name the movie faster than the others), she wasn’t overly surprised.
The other day she asked what exactly we DO up here. I think she’s figuring it out, and is starting to find her own groove. She’s been swimming, enjoying big breakfasts and plenty of baking, relaxing, exploring the woods. She likes to fish but is terrified of boats. We’ll have to work on that.
Today has been a day to make a few of the comfort foods that we love to eat when at the cabin. Buttermilk biscuits for breakfast…
Annie ate 7. Omg.Cinnamon buns for an afternoon snack …
I only ate 3. Pasta salad, chicken parmesan and Gingerbread cake to take with us to Andrea & Mike’s for dinner…
Once around the fridge pasta salad. Paul flattens and breads chicken, then fries it. Mmmm. Gingerbread cake is cooling. Almost ready to make the icing.A good day so far!!
