Fisher & Paykel are known as innovators in the appliance industry and for good reason. Their inventions include the extremely popular Dish Drawer dishwasher and the Smart Drive system used in their washers and dryers. Fisher & Paykel were also the original manufacturers of a single top/bottom mount fridge with water dispenser and the first to produce a top load washer with a 4-star water rating. Alongside these innovative products they also manufacture a large range of quality fridges and dryers. Fisher & Paykel's technological advancements and their unique characteristics have made them a household name in Australia and abroad. In fact, the Smart Drive™ clothes washer - which for the first time used a Brushless Direct Current Motor - was the flagship product that paved the way to brand recognition in Australia.

I've no recollection why it was four years ago that we went shopping for a new washer and dryer not where we would generally tend to select our kitchen appliances, but to another place altogether. It was one that we knew had been in business for an awfully long time, and perhaps they had been advertising special sales on appliances. We were faced with the necessity of replacing our old set because they were on the verge of breaking down entirely and had been repaired too often. And we thought we should be looking at more energy-efficient machines.

Which was what brought our attention to a Fisher & Paykel set of clothes-washer and dryer; expensive and entirely electronic, so we did wonder what we might be getting into. However, both were energy efficient and although the washer was a top-loader it was a high-efficiency appliance nonetheless. We made the purchase and awaited delivery. I did do some preliminary research on the Internet and thought that complaints about intrusive and frequent sound alerts when the washing machine was out of kilter, didn't sound too serious as a deterrent.

So we had them delivered, and first thing we noticed was that the dryer shell had been slightly dented and chipped, so we alerted the seller, and they assured us they'd send on a replacement. One putative replacement after another arrived hugely dented; the first one when it was unpacked by the deliverer, so badly out of whack the door wouldn't shut securely, and the second was no better, so we decided to keep what we had.

I soon came to understand the complaint about the sound as I became acquainted with the chirps the washer regularly emitted when a load went out of whack which it did one time out of three loads, necessitating response and readjustment of the wash. We had taken out an extended warranty above the usual one-year warranty on purchase, and several years later called on it when the washer began leaking into its interior. The store had gone 'out of business', declared bankruptcy. But it opened under a new name, same store; different name. They agreed to honour the extended warranty and sent out a serviceman.

A month ago the washer began leaking again, but we were out of luck with service since the company decided it could no longer 'afford' to extend service, despite we had paid for it. So my husband installed two little turn-off valves for the water on the pipes going into the washer, so it no longer leaks. A week ago the dryer stopped its heat function, though otherwise it responded in whirling the wash about; simply no heat however.

We called one of the few appliance service businesses in the city that can look after this brand of appliance. And yesterday the serviceman arrived. A frail, elderly looking man, very affable, and remarking that the company certainly didn't make it easy for repair personnel to reach its interior mechanisms. It was mid-afternoon so we invited him to take a cup of tea with us and relax preparatory to work, since it was obvious he'd been working elsewhere up to then, and he obliged, and we chatted.

When he put the dryer through the electronic phase that self-diagnoses it cheerily responded that nothing at all was awry, puzzlingly. Our doughty serviceman made a few calls, and then proceeded to take the metal skin off the front of the dryer, revealing its interior and its controls matted with dryer lint. Despite that I assiduously empty the very generous and never-full lint bucket, it soon became evident that dryer lint is not completely caught where it should be for user disposal, but filters down through the machine and settles on the air intake and controls. Causing, in this instance, the machine to rectify the situation by closing down heat rather than burn out the functional part and possibly cause a house fire.

Some advanced technology that is. Resulting in a charge of almost two hundred dollars to clear lint from the interior of the clothes dryer. Now that everything has been cleared, the dryer is operating at full capacity. I cannot recall the last time a load dried so efficiently; swiftly and completely dry. I no longer must scatter half-dried items about various places in the house to ensure they're sufficiently dry to be put away.

Would I ever commit to another appliance produced by this company? Hugely unlikely.

Two weeks ago this day we were in New Hampshire, visiting the Waterville Valley site that we have returned to for decades, first with our teen-age children, and now on our own for the last twenty years. The area never ceases to give us immense pleasure even though we are now no longer able to climb the summits we once 'conquered', in our love of the landscape of the alpine regions and the vast, interminable scene of mountain tops marching on the lofty arras as far as our eyes could see....

The day dawned overcast, not too cool, 61-degrees Fahrenheit the high. We drove to one of our old haunts that used to serve for us when we and our children were young, as a foretaste of the more physical struggle it would take to clamber atop challenges like Lafayette, Eisenhower, Clinton and Little Haystack. Now, the Rattlesnakes represent the far more modest hiking aspirations that we can hope to achieve. We do the climb, along with many others, enjoying the Autumn atmosphere, the fragrance of fall, the splendour of the foliage at their height of perfection, and the sheer pleasure of being within the embrace of nature.

On the way there, the highway foliage of the forests were nothing short of spectacular. We discovered though at that point it was two days beyond the advent of a long national holiday week-end, that there were abundant numbers of other hikers, and among them plenty of old geezers, like us. At our age the intent to climb is mildly fraught with physical difficulty, but it is not a particularly arduous climb.

My husband's newly-bought hiking boots performed excellently. We took our time ascending, taking photographs as we proceeded and appreciating little Riley's determination to maintain our progress.

The sight lines from the lookout just prior to reaching the summit seem somehow more appealing than those of the summit itself, perhaps partially due to the fact that not everyone knows of its existence, and we were able to enjoy that set-aside area to ourselves. As usual, when we're ascending/descending such natural attractions we strike up friendly conversations with others doing likewise, and somehow in a matter of a relatively brief period of time, come away with other peoples' life stories; brevity of time can still convey a great deal, people appear anxious to explain themselves to others, strangers seem to have that especial appeal.

On the descent, Riley almost danced down the mountain slope, happy and excited to be there. It's true that he becomes bored anticipating the same old circuits he has been familiar with for all of his life, when we embark on our daily ravine walks.

She is so dedicated to her dream of attending the best university that Canada has to offer, to follow her ambition to become a lawyer, a criminal lawyer no less, that she is distraught at the very real possibility that she will be unable to find herself at one of the universities of her choice. She is overly annoyed at the fact that the school guidance counsellor assigned to her high school grade level has been of little assistance to her. She speaks of her aspiration to attend Osgoode Law School, and he speaks of the wonderful curricula available at Nipissing University.

She already lives in the backwoods of Ontario. She has no interest in spending her life in any rural area. The city calls out to her. She has done her due diligence, checked every resource available to her, from Macleans magazine's yearly university ranking edition, to everything available on the Internet on Canadian universities and their law programs, to the literature produced by the universities themselves.

She is very well aware of stiff competition for desirable university spots. She knows she must have exceedingly good marks, present a high grade-point average to be able to successfully apply. Her marks in most of her subjects are in the mid-to-high 80s and in the low 90s. With the exception of math, which infuriates and mystifies her. Last year she received some tutoring and her math teacher aided her to enable her to get a mark of 74 in math. This year, her university-course is in math statistics and although she hoped it would help to bring her through, it has proven to be as confoundingly difficult for her as previous math courses. No tutor this year, but a sympathetic math teacher willing to help her at the lunch period, but it seems to be that she is destined to squeak through, which will certainly bring down her grade-point average.

And she despairs.

She is passionate about attending university. She wants to receive the very best exposure to a good, sound education in Canadian law and specifically criminal law that is possible. Attending a prestigious university guarantees she will have guidance from the very best teaching staff, she has convinced herself. And that would have the ultimate effect of not only providing her with the opportunity to become a really good, effective lawyer, but it could open opportunities for good employment.

She queries her distanced two uncles half-heartedly; their experiences throughout their university years in obtaining doctorates lead them to express opinions to her that don't quite mesh with her expectations, despite that she is so big on "reality". Life can seem fraught with blockages to attaining one's heart desire when you're only 17, looking toward adult maturity and fulfillment in a profession that has appealed since childhood.

My mother was the youngest of three sisters. All three were sponsored by an uncle who had previously moved himself and his immediate family pre-World War II from the Pale of Settlement in Russia to the United States, where he and his family became American citizens. Their success in removing themselves from a society which was famous for its oppression of Jews, encouraged others in their more extended family to follow his example. But whereas he had the wherewithal to emigrate, they did not. So he paid their way.

We two girls, offspring of two sisters, resemble our mothers. The two younger of three sisters.

The three sisters, little more than emerging adults at the time in their late teens, voyaged to Canada to make their future lives there, with hope and aspirations to find a better place for themselves. They spoke Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish. Then they learned English. (When I was a child I was embarrassed by the immigrant-quality of my mother's English. My father's was never accented by any of the European languages he had acquired a proficiency with. Eventually that 'accented' English disappeared into a fluid use of the language.)

It took the sisters decades of careful saving to finally pay off their debt to that uncle who lived in Georgia, U.S.A., but each of them made good on their debt.

The two younger girls eventually settled in Toronto, while the oldest married and made her home in Hamilton, Ontario. That family would eventually decide to move to the United States, leaving only the two younger sisters in Canada. I would see my cousins from time to time, but not all that often; three boys born of the oldest sister, and a boy and a girl born to the second oldest sister. While I was my parents' first-born, I was years younger than all of them, but one.

I adored my aunt's children, the boy and the girl. The girl was four years older than me, the boy two. And since both their parents worked at tailoring at Tip Top Tailors, those two children had the run of the streets. I was both appalled and intrigued when I began to understand that although I had certain freedoms as a young child to be on my own in the neighbourhood where we lived, something that would most certainly frighten current parents, my two cousins, to use a phrase that might have applied to some degree "ran wild".

They did things I would never have thought of doing; free spirits, free to wander wherever they wanted, to experience life quite prematurely related to their age. I envied them and I feared for them. I thought they were the most audacious, beautiful, romantic young people I would ever know. I still recall my then-fifteen-year-old cousin on a rare occasion when she was sleeping over with me, whispering to me in the bed we shared that she aspired to become a mother as soon as she possibly could. No mention of marriage, just motherhood and I was scandalized.

She eventually had six children, one after the other, starting with the first one born when she was sixteen. Their father was a gadabout, sometimes living with my cousin, more often not, in a flat in a large three-story house that my aunt and uncle eventually bought in the High Park area. They never married, and doubtless he never supported his growing brood. Eventually my cousin found a man with whom she could share her life, a tall young immigrant from Holland. They had a child together, making for seven children in that family. He died about five years ago, after they had shared a half-decade together.

I haven't seen my cousin in at least 45 years; our paths just never seemed to cross. We did exchange letters and telephone calls, which she initiated, before his death, bringing me up to date on how she and her children were faring. Very well, indeed on that score. Out of those seven children she has innumerable grandchildren.

Yesterday evening, just as we were finishing up with dinner, the telephone rang, and there was an old familiar voice on the other end. She is now 80 years of age, her oldest child is 64. She has travelled extensively; to Holland repeatedly with her husband, to Italy several times, to Australia as well, where her oldest daughter lives, and many other places that intrigued her. She is the kind of person who is enthralled with life, a perpetual optimist, bright-eyed and enquiring. She would now, she confided, like to take a long river trip in a ship quite unlike the great ocean liners that now ply the oceans like small cities. She would like to visit Russia, to go to where our mothers had once lived.

Despite her age, she well might do just that. Did I mention how talented she is? She paints delightful scenes in bright palettes of glowing pastels. She still owns a modest little getaway in Florida, and she's planning to launch herself into another three-month stay there before winter sets in. She's just moved into a new condominium, having finally sold her country property with its wonderful gardens, and she finds it like living in a small village; she has acquired friends everywhere.

Yesterday was a positively filthy day, in the most negative of terms, as far as weather is concerned. It was cold, windy, and heavily overcast, incessantly rainy and utterly miserable. Since the forest canopy is no longer in residence in the ravine there was not even the optimistic tendency for us to gear up for rain and venture out into the ravine, notwithstanding the weather. It was raining too heavily, blowing everywhere, to allow us the comfort of a ravine walk. And so we missed out on one, yesterday.

We should have known, actually. Invariably, on the very day that those who arrange such things, feature the annual Autumn antique show now held at the Fieldhouse of Carleton University, this is the typical weather that prevails. If I search my memory of all those times we've ventured out to attend that antique show it is in such weather. So off we went, marvelling during the drive downtown, at the ferocity of the rain and the grimly threatening darkness of the clouds overhead, seemingly layered with malevolence toward all living creatures below.

Traffic was busy, and the drive to the site is always a little complex-seeming, but we did arrive, much earlier than we usually do, since the matter of our ravine walk was settled in such a negative manner. It was interesting to note that unlike the spring antique show there appeared to be more dealers. More dealers, unfortunately, of items like 'vintage' clothing, jewellery both fine and collectible representing days gone by in showy costume jewellery. And the usual pottery, glassware, silver and paperweights, odd bits and pieces that people discard and others collect because they appeal to our collecting instinct, somehow.

We greeted some long-familiar faces, among them dealers from the Montreal area whose wares are expensive, and elite in the manner of what they represent; fine objets d'art of an appreciable quality and far beyond our pocketbook, but certainly deserving of our admiration. We saw icons and bronzes, paintings and porcelains, ivory figures and jewellery of fine distinction and outrageous pricetags, that always leave us wondering who in this city buys these desirable things; certainly not us.

The show wobbles between the unique and the rude in its offerings. And then there's the in-between, objects of beauty and fine workmanship harking back to an earlier day that also elicit our admiration, their pricetags more representative of what we are able to afford. On this occasion several sellers of Canadian paintings of 19th Century vintage that we're familiar with, were present with a selection of such paintings. We were glad to see them, because they are all who are now left of the many such dealers who were accustomed to coming out to this city for the semi-annual antique fairs. They no longer come, because though the city is awash with those who can afford such desirable objects, they choose to put their investment in acquisitions of rare distinction elsewhere.

Furthermore, moaned one of our acquaintances -- who had scant hope of selling much but dragged himself and his paintings up to the show from Toronto in the remote expectation that a miracle might occur and a few of them might be sold -- the younger generation is not interested in paintings and antiques. Leaving hope in the fact that the older generation who formed the backbone of his business might still be interested in acquiring them. But the older generation has already acquired all that their homes and incomes might accommodate, besides which they're more discriminating, and a painting has to appeal mightily almost viscerally, to loosen their determination to merely browse and admire, not acquire.

On Tuesday the fifth day of our trip to the Waterville Valley in the White Mountains Presidential Range of New Hampshire, we continued to enjoy mid-October weather that was surprisingly benign, allowing us to enjoy our various trips into State and federally-administered parks. Because of the situation in the United States with government shutting down all its services as the Democrats and Republicans had a hissy fit of almost unprecedented proportions, leaving the nation in a state of perturbing dysfunction, the forestry office that we would visit on such occasions for a permit to park environments was closed and we had to make do without one.

We woke again to a heavily overcast day, though I had been up through the night of a restless sleep, a pattern that I hoped would not continue forever in our stay there. At one juncture I drew the bedroom window curtain aside to look up at a dark, dark sky. Close above dangled large scintillating stars. When I heard my husband wake some time later and make his way to the bathroom, I suggested on his way back to bed that he too look out the window and share with me the wonder of a truly dark sky, one unblemished by the light pollution city dwellers like ourselves are accustomed to.

Reminding us of different types of conditions in wilderness areas we'd experienced over our adventuring years, sleeping in a tent on the side of a mountain, camping beside a lake in a great forested preserve, where we'd had the pleasure of seeing the sky without human interference, a huge treat we enjoyed together years ago.

We returned after breakfast for a hike at Smarts Brook trail, this time the landscape ours alone since the day before traffic was heavy with people returning to Boston and other cities from their brief holiday sojourn in the White Mountains over the Columbus Day long week-end. We dawdled to our hearts' content, taking photographs, talking nostalgically between us of the many years we had been returning to this wonderful natural landscape.

And then we set off for a long drive to the southern part of the State, past Concord, then Manchester and finally arriving at the small town of Milford to once again visit the Antique Co-op market that we had been delighted to discover on our June trip. It is a place to ogle period furniture, bronzes, paintings, porcelains, clocks and everything in between. The quality of the objects is marvellous, their condition pristine and the prices are in the affordable range for people who are comfortably well off.

Within the upper story there is a gallery full of maritime paintings that are exquisitely beautiful. The paintings range from the 18th Century on to the 20th Century in their execution.  Seascapes and landscapes of masterful artistry in original frames, all in superb condition. And most, sadly, beyond our pocketbook, but wonderful to look at. Many of the artists' names were familiar to my husband who felt it a privilege to be able to see them close up, not just in books and art magazines.

After the rush of the week-end, when there were so many people on the road, travelling hither and yon, celebrating their long-week end for Columbus Day in New Hampshire, we figured it would be as good a time as any on Monday to go along to one of the most picturesque spots in the area, just to pay our respects and to be newly amazed at the wonders of Nature.

We shouldn't have been disappointed to discover that the extended week-end brought people from hear and far to goggle and google at Sabbaday Falls. Despite the crowded parking lot and the extended parking on the roadway leading to the parking area, fortune was kind to us and serendipitously, we found a place in the parking lot newly vacated by a departing sight-seer.

It's a relatively easy, slightly uphill stroll of about three-quarters of a mile, perhaps a little more, to reach the falls. On the way there are glimpses of the mountain stream and the trees surrounding. The oaks still held on to some of their nicely bronzed foliage, and the birches, their yellow leafs. An occasional burst of crimson revealed the presence of maples. Great hemlocks of elderly vintage and large old beeches proliferate there, as well.

The day was heavily overcast, intensifying the hues and beauty of the colourful scenery; on our drive over to the falls the background mountain slopes were ablaze with gold, orange, bronze, green and red. Once on the broad trail leading to the falls, little Riley, trotting along beside us never fails to draw the attention of his innumerable admirers; they are legion and they are everywhere.

The basin at the foot of the falls swirls with an intense, pale green colour, the solid layered rocks above one of Nature's countless architectural wonders. The rushing impact of the falls thundering down into the basin below spumes the air with sound and moisture. We've taken so many photographs of this spectacular spectacle over the years, yet never tire of it; for how could we?