Home Thoughts From Abroad

We bought a car. Not exactly our first purchase in Malaysia; it has been four years and then some since we arrived, and there have been other priorities. The Lord comes first in our lives, and Pam’s ministry has been an expensive undertaking. Our children come next, and although they are grown and we are no longer paying for their post-secondary education, they have other expenses: new cars to buy, first mortgages to negotiate. All of these things come before our own needs. In fact we probably would have been happy to do without a car altogether if Pam hadn’t been injured.

It was the kind of injury that comes with age; too many groceries in too large a backpack for someone of her frame. Put that together with broken sidewalks, flood-high curbs, maniacal traffic with no respect for pedestrians and taxi drivers that were recently referred to in the local paper as “thuggish” and we reluctantly came to the conclusion that we would have to put our environmental and financial considerations aside and get some form of transportation.

We needed something with an automatic transmission so Pam could drive, something that had no rust or obvious maintenance issues that would reflect poorly on the Lord, and something that would enable us to maintain proper stewardship of the resources the Lord has committed to our care. You see the result pictured above. It is a 1996 Proton Satria. It has had four previous owners, the last being an expatriate Irishman, the boyfriend of one of the staff at the College where I teach. He seems like a reliable chap, and he has maintained the vehicle in an acceptable manner. It has a Mitsubishi 1.5 litre engine, three doors and probably a shelf life of another five years.

We are not planning any road trips any time soon. This car will get us to church and pick up a few groceries. It might also get us dancing or going for dinner again, as we have had to give that up coming here due to the uncertainty of being able to get a cab once you have gone out for the evening. We have thought about this very carefully for the last couple of years, but this does seem to be what the Lord would have us do, and we hope that it proves to be a blessing. Perhaps it might keep my darling wife a little safer on these dangerous streets than hauling groceries down treacherous sidewalks.

This is the first of two gigs as Ring Bearer and Flower Girl for Ben and Abi this summer. Not only did they look great but they led the processional and did their job very well. Ben was a little annoyed that he didn’t get to actually carry the rings but was happy to be a part of their friend Acasia’s wedding party.

Happy Birthday, Jon. The older you get the more your birthday’s seem to get lost in all the excitment of life.

A 60th Wedding Anniversary is an amazing event at any time.

It was a real joy and privilege to be able to join with family to celebrate this milestone with Uncle Stewart and Aunt Lil, my mom’s younger sister. Together they raised their four children, had the privilege of being involved in the lives of their sixteen grand children and now nine great grandchildren.

I know that their marriage did not survive because it was an easy road but rather because they made a committment to each other which they held dear and were prepared to work hard to preserve. How wonderful it is to see them at this point in their lives still enjoying each others company and having fun with their family.

This is their grand daughter Sara, modelling the dress that Lil wore, purchased  in 1951 at Garber’s for the exorbitant price of $34.00.

Pam has extensive family in Canada: six brothers, five with children; lots of cousins, all with children; and more aunts, uncles and in-laws than I can keep track of. My family is mostly in England, and I don’t get to see them that often. But Pam and I have made an effort this trip to see as many of my British relatives as possible.

We started with Mom, of course, and got in a number of visits while we were in Lincoln. Then we scooted up to Newcastle to see my niece Claire and her family. Claire and Phil have two children. Phil works for a pharmaceutical company on the leading edge of developing molecular structures that can be made into medication to treat cancer. Claire has set aside work – she has Ph.D. in biochemistry as well as her husband – to bear and raise their two children, although now that Joe is about to enter nursery school she is considering a return to the working world, at least on a part-time basis.

Megan is five and Joe is three, and they are quite delightful. For Pam it was the first time she had seen Claire’s family, and she was quite taken with them. The family took us for a hike up to see a portion of Hadrian’s Wall, a defence fortification built in the second century A.D. to keep the barbaric Celts of Scotland out of Roman England. Parts of the wall remain; along with the watchtowers, barracks and baths that the Romans built for their soldiers. Megan and Joe marched up the hills and over the fortifications like little troopers, Joe only needing a carry down a particularly slippery stretch on the way down. We stopped for lunch at a nice little hotel overlooking the river where the children patiently listened to their (great!)-uncle try to teach them the intricacies of outdoor chess. Just for the record and future bragging rights, Megan won with a king and castle checkmate.

Next on the grand tour was my sister and my nephew Colin, who with his wife Verity and their two children, Jack and Willow, all live in the wilds of North Lincolnshire. Colin is a farmer like his father Roger, and has what is for England a fairly large farm on which he grows wheat and oil-seed rape (canola). He is a clever and well-educated young man with an extensive knowledge not only of the crops and animals he manages, but of all the government regulations and subsidies that need to be managed in order to be successful in today’s stress-filled agricultural sector. He took us on a tour of the farmstead, showing us the new storage facility that he is having built and the crops, including an experimental section of elephant grass (miscanthus) that is being grown in England as a biomass fuel.

His wife Verity is a lovely warm-spirited woman with a Master’s degree in animal husbandry and an enviable reputation for her knowledge of horses which she uses in horse rescue operations for a charitable organization. Her most recent project was the rescue of twenty Shetland ponies from animal abuse on a Lincolnshire farm. Their two children are friendly and adventurous; Jack was pretty shy at first but by the time he took us on a tour of the farm, he was happily strutting his stuff. Willow is just a happy and beautiful little doll. Their grandmother, my sister, quite dotes on the two of them, and her house is filled with a riot of motorbikes, front-end loaders and train sets. We are so happy to see these two new families doing so well in very different environments and areas of pursuit. They are a real tribute to Rosey and Roger’s commitment to parenting and I am sure it makes them both very proud.

After two days in Colchester, staying at a lovely B&B down near the coast, we headed out past the dreaded M25 and into the south to see my cousin Rosalind, who lives and works in Kent as assistant head of English at a girl’s boarding school. It had been forty years since I last saw my cousin and I had quite lost touch until she found me through Facebook. She lives in just a charming little town in the English countryside, surrounded by stately homes, lovely gardens and quaint little British pubs. Her school, pictured here is like something out of a Jane Austin novel, a handsome structure set in an idyllic landscape. Yesterday we took a drive past her school on our way to Sissinghurst, a medieval castle that is the site of one of England’s most iconic gardens. Towering plants grew in glorious profusion beside ancient brick walls surrounded by neat little rows of hedges trimmed to geometric precision.

Ros was wonderful to stay with, very relaxed and welcoming with her two little kitties and bookcases full to overflowing with literature that I was dying to read. But there was far too much to do: little pubs to visit and a friendly little high street to explore. This morning we went with Ros to church and were warmly greeted and encouraged in our faith. It has been such a treat to share our Christian belief with a cousin who understands the call of Christ upon her life. We missed visiting with her son Tom, who is in Oxford, but that simply gives us a reason to come back at another time to this lovely part of the world.

It has truly a privilege to have the opportunity to visit with my family in England. It has been brief and packed; not an easy visit to plan and co-ordinate with the limited time we had. But the Lord has been in all of the details, my family have been most accommodating and understanding,and it has been a blessing from beginning to end.

There were four children born to Muriel and Wyndham Wise following World War Two; three of us survived, but the youngest, Henrietta, died the day after she was born, on May 31, 1951. She was buried in our parish church, St. Michael’s, not far from the hospital where she was born in Colchester, a rural town not far from London, England. Today I visited her gravesite, placed some flowers in her memory, and prayed for her dear little soul.

I am certain with all my heart that she is with her Saviour in heaven. David said of the child that he fathered through Bathsheba, and that died shortly thereafter, “I will go to him, but he will not return to me” (2 Sam. 12:21). Henrietta is not coming back in this life, but she is waiting for me in the next, and one day I will join her, and my dear father, who committed his way to Christ before he died. Such assurances are a blessed treasure for those who know Christ as their Saviour.

Finding little Henrietta’s gravesite was the reason for coming to Colchester where I was born. Colchester is England’s oldest town, and its original capital. King Cole of the nursery rhyme is reputed to have ruled here, and Boadicea, Queen of the Brits, rode out of Colchester to defeat the Romans on her war chariots when they first arrived, circa 50 B.C. Charles Haddon Spurgeon was born nearby, and saved at the Methodist Chapel on New Park Street in Colchester, from which he derived the name of his famous church in London.

There is plenty of history to see, in other words. But it was personal history I was interested in. After placing some flowers on Henrietta’s grave and making arrangements to have her little broken headstone replaced, I went to Turner Road, where I was born and raised, and took a walk on the public footpath to the woodland behind our house, which looked pretty much as I remembered it. These memories are understandably vague and faint now, but nevertheless it was sadly sweet to visit these places again and touch the past, if only briefly. I thank the parents who gave me such a pleasant start to my life, and nurtured my love for nature thorough the woods and the lanes that surround the place of my birth.

The Yorkshire Dales are justly famous for their pleasant country drives and their gorgeous scenic views. We left the Newcastle area, where we had visited my niece and her lovely family and drove south, intent on hitting the Dales by noon. But we have always held that the journey is what makes the destination worth going to, and we were ready to discover whatever we could find on the way. We didn’t have to wait long, as very early in our journey we came across an antique car show in the little village we were driving through. We followed the MGs and Austin Healeys to a nearby park where things were just getting underway.

We saw very few ‘foreign’ cars: a Model T, circa 1905 and a few corvettes, looking Disneyesque and ridiculously over-styled beside their sleeker and leaner British cousins. A full range of MGs were there, a car that Pam and I are partial to, since an MGB was the first car we jointly owned back in the days when we were still courting. There was the odd Rolls Royce and a few Jaguars, lots of Minis and an old Vauxhall looking fabulous despite its age and the fact that it had never been reconditioned. There was even a steam powered tractor that chugged into the parking lot and briefly stole the show.

But the Dales were calling us, and we pushed on past ancient mills on streams that cut a path through the glens and fields, past curious cattle and sheep that dotted the hillside between the stone walls, down circuitous little lanes through villages like Swinithwaite and Aysgarth. We stopped for tea in Richmond, only to discover a charming little market square where a skirl of bagpipes serenaded the Sunday shoppers while others explored the nearby castle. We settled for a taster’s sip of local ginger wine, and thought it quite the nicest dessert liquor we had ever tasted.

Finally after a few close calls with oncoming traffic in roads really only wide enough for one vehicle, and a few wrong turns that led to sheep pens and not much else, we arrived at our destination: the little village of Kettlewell. Pam, in her usual thorough investigation of accommodation while we are travelling, found Pennycroft, a little B&B which we have entirely to ourselves, including a view of the main intersection of this tiny village, and a delightful English country garden out back. To bring an end to a wonderful day, we enjoyed the Sunday roast beef dinner, with roast and boiled potatoes, cauliflower, broccoli, garden peas, squash and gravy, and most appropriately Yorkshire pudding, as light and fluffy as the lovely croissants we had for breakfast.

We hope you had a lovely day where you are, and sorry that you can’t be here. But if you ever get the chance to come to England, you simply must get to the Yorkshire Dales. We could recommend a nice B&B, and have a pub in mind that serves the nicest Sunday meals. But be forewarned, places like this can make you think about settling down in the middle of England when you retire!

Some tips for those of you who are intrigued by what I have written over the last couple of days and want to try an eating regime yourself:
 Don’t eat anything processed. Learn how to make your own soups; it is not as difficult as Campbell’s would have you believe. Homemade soups are dense in nutrients and stingy in calories.
 Find the lowest calorie salad dressing in your favourite supermarket and stick to it. Some dressings are eight to ten times more calorie rich than others. You will lose all the benefit of a nutritious low calorie salad on the wrong dressing choice. Read the labels.
 Get yourself a decent kitchen scale that allows you to measure quantities less than 500 grams with some accuracy.
 Start compiling a list of foods you normally eat and their caloric value. There are plenty of websites on the internet that do this for free, so you won’t have to ‘sign up’ to get the information. Some sites are more reliable than others so do a comparison of values and use your own common sense. Then post these on the fridge.
 It is best to use a standard method of comparison. Weight lifters use calories per gram, and they spend a lot of time calculating these things, so it is a pretty good way to go. There are 5 grams in a teaspoon, 14 grams in an ounce and 227 grams in a cup of water.
 A cup of water is not the same weight in grams as a cup of sugar or a cup of watermelon because the density of these things is different. Again, use calories per gram as your standard and you won’t be misled.
 Find some low calorie treats to comfort yourself along the way. I found some sugar free mints I liked for the day, and now much prefer hot lemon tea with sweetener to my usual hot milky tea with sugar. Since I do about five of these in a day, I also save about 125 calories (or one supper portion of roast beef!)
 Discount the bunk. There is a lot of nonsense out there about food and caloric intake. This route is “dangerous,” that path is “inadvisable.” Trust your instincts and listen to your gut. You body will tell you what feels right.
 Make peace with your spice rack. Ginger aids digestion and speeds metabolism. Turmeric has been shown to be more effective at reducing Alzheimer’s than cholinesterase. Garlic strengthens your immune system. All of these things add taste and interest to your food; and if your food isn’t tasty, you aren’t going to continue eating it for long.
 Make friends with Chinese vegetables. You don’t see many overweight Chinese, do you? The secret is their incredible vegetables. Bok choy is an example. At 0.1 cal/gram (the same as lettuce) you can nuke it, steam it, stir fry it (not a wise choice) and chop it raw in a salad. A cup of this stuff has 10 calories, yet contains 50 % of your daily requirement of vitamin C and 40 % of your vitamin A, as well as being rich in other nutrients. And it is tasty!
 Avoid sauces like the plague. You DO see a lot of overweight Indians, and they eat a lot of veggies too. The difference is their sauces. The Chinese cook in soya sauce, about 0.7 cal/gram, depending on the brand (read the label). Indians cook in oil, about 8.2 cal/gram. Malays like peanut sauce, about 6.2 cal/gram. Choose your poison, for you will have to wear it on your waist for years.
 Give up snacks for the duration of your regime. There are very few healthy snacks. If you are feeling peaked have a fluid instead. Caffeine is not the enemy it is made out to be and I think all the nonsense about aspartame is overblown as well. Pepsi Max is my friend, but a large slice of watermelon has only 50 calories.
 Give up alcohol for the duration as well. Wine has 70 calories in a glass, beer 150 calories in a can. A shot of Bailey’s is 100 calories. That is a lot of roast beef. If you can’t give up alcohol for a month, then you have more problems than can be dealt with in a post about nutrition.
 Get 30 grams of carbs in a day. There really aren’t a lot of dangers with a low cal diet, but low carbs is one. Fortunately carbs are easy to come by as they are in bread, pasta, grains and leafy green vegetables. I start my day with 35 grams of oatmeal, so I don’t have to worry about them. Carbs are more dense in calories than raw sugar (3.8 compared to 3.2) so for the duration you will want to keep these to a minimum.
 Do not cook in oil. Fat has 9 calories per gram; oil has 8.2, so it is just about all fat. Nuke, steam, bake or poach your food, or eat it raw. Use spices for flavour and you will never miss the oil. Nuke your veggies lightly and use a teaspoon of soya sauce.
 Take a fish oil supplement for the duration of your regime to make sure that you are getting enough essential oil in your diet. I also recommend a vitamin supplement if you don’t like veggies and take acidophilus to aid digestion. You body has gotten used to the crap you normally dump in it. The added bacterial supplement will help your body adjust.
 Learn to eat with chopsticks. This will slow down your rate of consumption so your body can naturally trigger when you are full and will also teach you to savour each morsel of food for its own distinctive texture and flavour.
 Limit the duration of your regime in advance. Tell yourself that you are going to give it one month or two (at the most!) and then stick to that. Of course when you return to your ‘regular’ diet you will be much better informed and less likely to dump all that crap into your body that you used to.
 Reward yourself with a nice meal when are finished your regime, and then get back to the basics. You don’t have to be so hard on yourself once you have made your target, but you don’t want to forget what you have sacrificed to learn either.
 Read positive books. A lot of our bad diet comes from a poor image of ourselves, and it gets to be a vicious circle. When you decide to break that circle in the physical realm, you need to reinforce that in the mental and emotional realms as well. I am a spiritual man, so I read spiritual books that help me deal with the negative self-image that poor body image reflects. I need to not just reorient my body; I need to reorient my mind as well.
 Pray or meditate. You are making a major life change; you are going to need some help. For me this is where is all begins and ends. If I am doing this to please myself, I won’t bother. But if I have some higher purpose, I can do just about anything. If God led me to this place, then I figure that He will lead me through it as well. Sure I listen to my body; but I listen for His still small voice as well. That is why I know it is time to bring this regime to an end, and resume a regular routine, informed by what I have learned. It has been an interesting two months.

Oh yes, the results. Well, for what it is worth I now have a waist of under 32 inches, a waist to hip ratio of 0.9, and a waist to height ratio of under 0.5. All of these fall within the ‘fit’ range for a man of my vintage. In other words, I hit all of my targets. Good luck with yours, and let me know if I can help in any way.

In many ways, it was a difficult Father’s Day. Steve and I are both missing our own Dads, our family is spread out across the globe and to add insult to injury, Steve had to work. Nontheless, we have much to be thankful for. Not the least of which is that we both had decent fathers to begin with. Steve’s Dad was a prince of a man; kind and caring, stalwart and faithful, patient and enduring. Though suffering for years with both lung and bone cancer, he never complained of the pain or his treatment and remained until his dying breath focused on the welfare of his wife and children. After his death, his mother showed Steve a shoe box jammed full of letters from grateful clients and friends that his Dad received at his retirement, and each one gave testimony to a man who had lived his life in the service of others, and had displayed an attitude that had earned their gratitude and admiration.

Pam’s Dad was also a man who was greatly admired for his kindness and his fortitude; a man who was given to spending long hours at the bedside of his ailing wife, not just for months, but for years, earning the respect and appreciation of dozens of health care workers for his friendliness, helpfulness and perseverence through his wife’s long illness. For years he had worked two jobs to support his family, and yet on his rare days off would always use his time in the service of others, giving of his substance, both financial and physical to help those who were worse off than he, raising with his good wife six sons and one daughter. It is the legacy of these men that have have inspired both of us to serve our family and to serve the Lord our God with all our strength and resources. Their lives still speak to us of faithfulness and devotion; of lives well lived in the service of others.

Now a gracious Lord has blessed us in seeing our oldest establish his own family with his devoted wife Nicole; a family that also has put its priorities in the right place by devoting their children to God, just as we devoted ours to the Lord many years ago. We rejoice with Jon and Nicole in the birth of their third child, Elisa Grace, a name that speaks volumes of their commitment to God and their determination to let the Lord have the final say in how their children will be raised. In the Bible we read that “children are a blessing of the Lord.” We have seen that to be true in our lives, and this also is the witness of our son and his wife as they commit their childraising to God’s good guidance. It is therefore most appropriate that our latest granddaughter should be dedicated to God on Father’s Day; a fitting tribute to the father our son wishes to be, and to our Heavenly Father, who we are sure looked on with delight.

One of the things that we, the Carter family have enjoyed for a number of years is getting together for a Saturday morning breakfast at the Four Seasons restaurant. It is nothing special as a restaurant but is fairly centrally located, nobody has to prepare anything and the food is not bad. It is usually enough just to put out the word and whoever is around will show up.

The last time that I was able to join in Dad was still there with us and he always loved being together with family and a good breakfast a bonus for him. It was a year ago this weekend that we made the difficult decision to stop treatment and move Dad to palliative care. Dad was definitely an outdoor person and it still seems impossible at times to think that he is not around to enjoy the seasons. He loved the leaves of the fall, new growth of spring and the flowers and birds of summer. He even enjoyed being out there shoveling the snow.

I love the memories of seeing him standing, leaning on a rake or hoe or shovel, usually creating a picture in his mind always with the thought of painting it at some later point. It was good to be together as a family this Father’s Day weekend and to share our memories and sorrow at his loss.

Using my friend’s information that a reduction of 750 calories a day would result in a one pound and a half loss of body weight in a week, and a rough calculation of my daily caloric need at 1400 calories, I set a daily target of 650 calories, not knowing if that was possible, or even advisable. What about nutrition? I could not afford to degrade my health. I didn’t want to eat dry toast and grapefruit, either, thank you very much. Besides as I mentioned, I didn’t have any clear idea of the caloric value of anything I ate. Would my allergy restricted diet be able to cope with a further restriction? So many questions, so many doubts; I needed some facts.

I started looking for caloric values on the internet. I started with Malaysian foods, since that is what I eat these days. I was blown away. Masala dosai, my regular supper, was 500 calories according to one source! One of those was nearly my entire my daily target. Add a syrupy sweet ice lemon tea at 180 calories and that would be my caloric load for the day. Next on my favourite list was nuts. At 6 to 7 calories per gram, my regular snack of a bag of peanuts in front of the telly racked up another 600 calories. Throw in a Sprite at 150 calories and there was no mystery to why I was losing the battle for my belly. Ouch! These were hard realities. Clearly something would have to change.

I started compiling a list of foods I could eat and their caloric values. Roast beef looked good at only 1.2 calories per gram. Boiled potatoes at 0.8 were going to be okay, as were baked spuds at 1.1. Butter at 7.4 was clearly out, and even margarine at 6.8 would have to go, but gravy was surprisingly ‘cheap’ in calories and soya sauce was clearly the best bet. Veggies came in around 0.3 cal/gram on average, so salads were going to be my mainstay. Most salad dressings are extraordinarily ‘expensive’ in calories, most around 2 calories per gram. I found one at less than ½ calorie per gram. I like it, and it is allergy friendly, which is a huge bonus. A real bummer was finding out that even a tablespoon of peanut butter was 180 calories. A slice of rye bread was 120. Therefore toast and peanut butter, long a favourite, wasn’t going to make the cut either.

My determination to lose some weight was helped by some changes I had already made. I have eaten oatmeal for breakfast for years, and it turns out to be a pretty good choice. Three tablespoons of oatmeal (35 grams), with a teaspoon of brown sugar is only 150 calories and pretty filling. Throw in a black coffee with sweetener, not sugar, and I was on my way to work on only 150 calories and feeling fine. Lunch was a ½ can of tuna (65 cal) on a salad (30 cal) with Italian dressing (15 cal). A few cups of black coffee and a can of soda water with lime I was headed home on less than 300 calories. This looked like it was possible.

I made myself another soda water with lime, very refreshing and practically zero calories while I made supper. I had 100 grams of roast beef, plenty for me, one boiled potato (50g) , about 100 grams of veggies nuked in plenty of ginger, turmeric and garlic salt with a teaspoon of soya sauce. This made supper around 200 calories. I had a couple of cups of sweet milky tea in the evening as a treat and I finished the day at less than 600 calories. I couldn’t believe it! I had eaten better than I had in weeks, felt full all day, and hit under my low target estimate on the first day out! This was not only doable, it was going to be enjoyable!

Since then I have had roast chicken, salmon, roast beef, meatballs and baked potatoes, you name it; I have been eating well. I made all my targets for the month, and did so well that I continued the same regime for a second month. I have not been sick a single day in the last two months and I have averaged around 600 to 650 calories a day. Better nutrition has meant that I am sleeping better and I am mentally sharper when I am awake. I have more energy and am better able to cope with stress at work. And I haven’t had to waste my time in the gym to get fit.

I have learned some things about the process too that I would like to share, and I would be happy to hear what you have learned about this important issue as well. I will add one further post on this topic in a couple of days with tips about such things as bok choy and fish oil that you might find interesting. Anyway, that has been my little adventure in food. I have learned lots and have enjoyed eating the fruits of my labour, so to speak. The next time you see me I will be so svelte you won’t recognize me. Now if there were only such an easy fix for my personality!