Loretta and Daniel

Daniel grew up in Burnaby and Loretta’s childhood home was in Ashton Creek, BC.  We met at UBC in Vancouver during our undergraduate days.  Since then we have lived in many different places. First, for graduate degrees, we moved to Claremont, CA and then Winnipeg, MB.  Next we moved to Ahousaht on Flores Island, which is 14 miles (22 km) by sea from Tofino, and then to Quadra Island, which is a short ferry ride from Campbell River. Now we are happy to be moving to live on Vancouver Island itself.  During our time away from island life, we spent time in Edmonton, Ottawa, Squamish, Toronto and Surrey. 

Daniel has spent most of his working life as clergy for the United Church of Canada.  He has a PhD in Educational Foundations and has taught courses at the University of Ottawa and the University of Alberta / St. Stephen’s College.  He has research interests in Thomas Merton, Ivan Illich and Alfred North Whitehead, to name a few.  He enjoys cooking, is a master bread maker, having won overall champion bread maker at the Carp Fair in about 1990, and he loves to go for long walks with our black and tan cocker spaniel, Zeke.

Loretta started out with training in nutrition, then changed to computing science, and finally added on geographic information systems.  Her favourite job was working as a computer programmer at Nortel in Ottawa.  She worked on messaging code for a large Nortel telephone switch that had up to 11 processors.  Currently she works for Fraser Health Authority mapping and analyzing COVID-19 cases.  You can also see her mapping work in the road polygons on the City of Surrey online COSMOS mapping tool.  She likes to do arts and crafts and solve puzzles of all kinds, including genealogy.

Our 2 children were both born on Vancouver Island, while we lived on the islands off either side of it. Wade is now an actor in Toronto who also spent 9 years at the Shaw Festival Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake.  Adina lives in Germany and is an engineer who works as a project manager and document manager for a large multinational wind energy company. 

We have been researching co-housing for 10 to 15 years now and fell in love with Sooke when we visited a couple of years ago.  We look forward to this new chapter in our lives of building community with new friends and neighbours.