Family

No wilderness adventure this past weekend , the caches of the world have been left undesturbed and the only mosquitos that managed to bite me were in my own back yard 

Family from Argentina came to visit , my cousins daughter Mariana whom I had not seen in about fifteen years and her boyfriend  Juan Pablo were in country for a wedding and we managed to get together with them for a very short but very nice family reunion with just my nephew missing ( but that's another story )  .

The lovely ladies  

Food and drink, good canadian beer !  

 Food !!!

Had to sharpen up the Spanish ( castellano is what us Argentinians call it ) , I love that language and wish I could speak it more often . 

 A good part of my youth was spent in South America, I refer to that time as the best years of my life , but as the years go by I am not sure if that is totally true as I have been fortunate to have had an interesting life so far,  influenced by many interesting places and fantastic people , but those forming years of my youth I would not trade for anything, so if not the best they certainly were unforgettable .

My mother was Argentinian and when I was around 9 years old and the hippie movement was in full swing , my parents decide to move south thinking that it would be a better environment in which to raise  their children, they were very right and very wrong at the same time, the wrong part is that we went into a military dictatorship that devolved into a bad attempt at democracy only to be followed by a more brutal dictatorship with an end result of more then 30,000 people being killed, hippies even with all their toking and LSD couldn't light a candle to that !

The right part of the equation was that we had family for the first time and lots of them and it wasn't  so much the individuals, although I love each end every one of them immensely, but it was the social fabric of what family is ,that warm all engulfing entity that took us in loved us and treated us as their own, it was a life changing event for me.

So it always gives me great pleasure when some part of the family manages to make the long journey up to this northern part of the continent for a visit . 

We eat and drank , Lisa and Max joined us  then Pat and Tammy and we had ourselves a wonderful evening .

 Saturday after a typical Canadian bacon and egg breakfast we said our good byes and Pat took our visitors for the rest of their short stay with us , we were heading to church .

 Just one slice of bacon left, pups will score it ! 

One last shot before they left 

Yes a very unnatural event for me who uses words like atheist , agnostic , polytheism and tibetan buddhism to describe my faith or lack of it, my wonderful mother she herself of a catholic upbringing decided that she would not baptize us, instead she told us when we were old enough to understand, that she was leaving it to us to chose our own path and I admire her for that ! 

Our church visit was because our grandson Max is being raised a catholic much to my objections, wisely his mother ignores my many opinions on child rearing .  

Saturday he received his first communion a big event for those of his faith so we were off to church to help him celebrate the occasion. I must say I do find churches interesting places, this ceremony was full of hope and joy and there was a sense of togetherness in the congregation especially since many of his classmates were doing there first communion also .

Lightning didn't strike me so all was good : ) 

Handsome man waiting with grandma 

Attempting to take the dog off the child, impossible ! 

We are off to church 

 The man of the hour 

Well I took the picture, read what you wish of it, to me it's artistic but perhaps a message exists in it also , who am I to know ?  

A very interesting church I thought  

Max with his classmates  

Mom and son

Sunday evening we went bowling with Max and Lisa , a celebratory dinner-outing for his communion and once again a wonderful time was had and when we finally got home that night I was popped again even though no hiking was done  !!! 

 The bowling ball is almost bigger then he is !

We played two games, I won the first,

 and Max won the second  

 Selfie 

Popped again !!!