Rambling into the void

I took far too long writing a whole navel gaze about why I've been gone and what led me back, and how I found myself reading through my blog today.* You know the drill. I don't know how long I'll keep this up, and I have no expectations that anyone is reading this (but that is a bit of the appeal? It feels a little more like shouting into the void than Twitter does, these days). But I've missed writing. Let's see where this goes.

So: hi, guys! Since we left off, I turned 35, and bought a house for my birthday. (It just worked out that way.) We bought a 1950s bungalow that's walking distance from Chris's work, and now my life is so different from where we were at when I turned 30, that I barely recognise myself. (I think? I was leading into "I sometimes go for days without leaving the house and I bake a lot of bread," but that's exactly what my life was like at 30. It's just now, instead of having angst about failing at academia, I worry that I'm losing my identity into the domestic sphere, and mutter stuff about Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique.) (Okay, I guess the main difference is that Chris's commute is now a 5-minute walk instead of a 40-minute drive, and I have to get out of bed before he leaves for work now, because the early hours of the morning are Wild Party Time in preschooler land.) (Okay, and my life involves 500% more Small Person's Bodily Functions, but I'm trying to steer clear of that discussion here.)

Homeownership is exactly as scary as I thought it would be, during all our basement suite years: in the five months since we bought this place, we've spent roughly a kabillion dollars on it, especially on a furnace, a new stove, and an air conditioner (but the last one was technically optional), and when the snow melted and warm weather arrived, it turned out that our house was full of bees. (They had a way of getting in through the walls, and really, really love our house. Nine indoor bees in two days. Chris spray foamed every gap in the house, and now they stay outside and I stay inside.) And we got water in our basement, because it turns out that our sprinklers don't so much run as pour water against our foundation. And I hurt my arm attempting to be a gardener!

So, I think that catches you up. Rascally child, wacky house, and brain that's slowly de-fogging and starting to comprehend the surrounding world again. We'll see where this goes.

* A bloggy friend met up with my IRL friend, on my old university campus today! And then I got reminiscing about my bloggy friends, and then I got updating my blog roll, and then I realised I was blogging in my head while cleaning the kitchen...

Dun dun DUNNNN!

I needed to take out a few books and a movie from the library, and so I convinced Chris to come with me this evening. As we approached, I stopped to re-check the closing time, because the whole building was dark. It turned out that the power had been out for an hour already, but the library was still up and running (as long as you didn't need to look anything up on the computer).

I really didn't want to have to come back, and between the emergency lights and the big windows, you could make your way around well enough, and so I decided to go and find my books.

The first books I had to get were just on the second floor, where there are big windows and where plenty of students were still studying, huddled under the emergency lights. The only thing that seemed strange was the complete silence.

But then I needed a book from the third floor mezzanine level. The third floor's mezzanine is creepy on a good day: with its thin railings and its sudden staircases cut through the floor, I always feel like I'm going to fall off. (And it's the level that has all the history books.) Without the power, with very few windows and with no one on the third floor or its mezzanine? Super creepy. Especially when I came back down to the regular level and discovered that Chris had disappeared. I couldn't find him in the entire half of the building where I'd last seen him, even when I called out his name.

Seriously: I'm twitchy enough at night, and I should never watch any remotely scary movies because they all run through my head at once when I'm alone in the dark. And when I'm alone in a dark, empty and remote part of the library?

Of course, as soon as I lost my nerve and decided to go and wait out in the brightly-lit stairway, a librarian with a flashlight came up to the third floor. And I was just joking with her that I'd lost my husband to the creepy darkness when Chris appeared, having been looking for me up on the mezzanine level. (He'd also been toying around with the idea of jumping out and scaring me up there, but decided that the library wouldn't take too kindly to someone screaming as if murdered.)

Extra Mom from Hong Kong

Are Chris and I just the types who pick up Extra Parents everywhere we go? Seriously, everywhere we go, we have Extra Moms and Extra Dads and Extra Grandmas who want to keep us and take care of us, and maybe have us take them shopping for dresses (as we're doing with one of our Extra Grandmas from church, tomorrow morning).

Our landlady Joyce has clearly appointed herself as one of our extra moms. She's forever making sure that I'm getting outside enough, or am eating properly. When our neighbourhood had a garage sale last year, and I was out of town, she monitored Chris to make sure that he sold more than he bought.

Today, Joyce came downstairs to tell me about this year's Block Watch garage sale, and I told her about Chris's job prospect.

QoWP: Joyce! I have some good potential news for you!
Joyce looks extremely excited already.
QoWP: Chris may get a teaching job for next year! Out in Langford!
Joyce's face falls.
J: Then will you want to move out to Langford to be close to the job?
QoWP: Of course not! It makes more sense for us to live close to the University. It's no problem for Chris to drive out there.
J: Oh good! I was so worried that you'd go away from us! We want you to think of this as your home and stay as long as you want! [Gets a sly look on her face] So, Chris might get a job, and you're not moving to Langford. That's two pieces of good news. Do you have good news number three?
QoWP is confused: No, just that.
Joyce reaches over and pats QoWP's stomach: I was hoping you'd have other good news... about family?
QoWP: But I'm still going to school for the next few years!
J: You don't want to wait too long! You must start making plans!

That's right. Our landlady's pressuring us to have kids. (Thankfully, our real parents behave themselves beautifully.)

(Note to self: Don't begin conversations with "I have good news!" anymore. Somehow, I've hit the age where people assume that "good news" means "pregnant.")

The scene in my living room

The flood repair company didn't send out their usual crew, this time. Apparently, I'm now stuck in the Indie Comedy Movie version of my flood repairs.

They somehow didn't get the "Go around back and knock on the door to the basement suite" instructions, and so they've been ringing my landlord's doorbell all morning. I heard them when they came back and lunchtime, and actually had to do the Run After a Van While Waving My Arms.

It's a team of two that's nailing on the baseboards and hooking the baseboard heaters back up today. In their cast we have:

No-Nonsense Grandpa: I'm pretty sure that they would have cast Richard Farnsworth in this role, if he was still alive. (Can we please have a moment of silence in the memory of Richard Farnsworth. I'm still sad. Everything about his movie career made me sad, and then he died in a sad way. But I digress.) I can't quite place which actor has replaced him, but he's clearly a Canadian actor, with a background in both Shakespeare and TV roles that require a gruff grandpa. Maybe Gordon Pinsent.

No-nonsense Grandpa isn't exactly talkative, but he's asked me a bunch more questions than the other guys ever asked. He also asks permission to move things around.

And then we have his rapscallion apprentice, Aspiring Musician: As played by Jon Heder (but not in Napoleon Dynamite costume). AM would like you all to know that he only has this job for now, and that he hates work, and that he's going to quit as soon as his CD's released. He'd also like you to know that he's really sleepy, because he just got cable last night and he was watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force. He got one year of University (back on the East Coast), but he spent that year partying (and then got kicked out of school), and so now he's back to playing his guitar for eight hours a day, and working at this stupid job, where they make him manually take nails out of baseboards. He whistles and hums constantly, while he's working.

I played my role, Quirky Hermit Scholar. Messy hair, ancient cardigan, a t-shirt that references an internet cartoon. I made my lunch of perogies and then patiently explained to AM about what I study, and how no, even though I study Germany in the 1930s, I'm not really that interested in Aryans. We also talked about books (as he pulled out nails and I ate perogies) and attempted to speak each other's language at all. The fact that this is my ninth year in University blew his mind. The fact that I don't party at all, and that I have no idea what the University's music scene is like also astounded him. The fact that he and I are the same age entirely confounded me.

And then, as befits my role as Curiously Young Quirky Hermit Scholar, I excused myself to go work in my office, gave No-Nonsense Grandpa free reign to move around all the furniture he wishes, and went to post about this on my blog.

I'll tell you if any Wacky Hi-Jinks break out.

Story Time from Saskatchewan

I'm at my aunt and uncle's house in Saskatoon right now, but I had to share a story from yesterday.

Background detail 1: There's some cliqueyness going on among the grad students in my department lately. You might say that some of the first years have formed themselves a "cool group." And, if you know me at all, you'll know that there's nothing that bugs me more than a cool group. (It may have something to do with flashbacks to high school. And may have provoked those recent flashbacks.)

On Saturday, our departmental grad students' society tried to have a beginning of semester potluck. Only five grad students were there, plus Chris. Of fifty in our department. It turned out that one of the first years had e-mailed a bunch of the others, saying he was tired of potlucks and didn't want to talk with people he didn't know, and invited them to a pub instead. But only invited those that are liked by the cool group.

Okay. So, I'd heard about the whole counter-event thing from several different people. (My friend Justin refers to those of us who work in the office all the time as the "Sewing Circle," because news travels so quickly through the office.) So had the president of our society, although we kept it from the girl who organised the potluck, because her feelings would be hurt. I decided to have a bit of a chat with the one who invited people away, because I know him and work with him. Our talk was really positive and helpful. We made plans for stuff that the whole group would enjoy doing. We talked about how everyone will be at the conference next weekend, and how it'll be good to have a chance for people to get to know each other. I casually mentioned, in context of "only five people came to the potluck" that I knew about all of them going to the pub. But not in an "I know what you did" way, but more in a casual-mention-like-it-was-general-knowledge way. We both said that it was a good talk.

Background detail 2: I spend all my time working in the PhD office. Our department has a common room, and then there's each an MA office and a PhD office off to the side of the common room. The doors are very thin, and we spend all of our time wandering back and forth through the three rooms. It's understood that, if you're wanting to work there, that you're going to be working with a bunch of others. Oh, and the common room is actually quite a small room, as are our offices.

Flash-forward to yesterday afternoon. I'd been working back and forth between the common room and the PhD office all day. Some MA student friends of mine had shown up and started working in the MA office, and so I moved to my office, but with the door open. A girl (I didn't recognise her voice) came in to the common room and was talking on her cell phone, and so I closed my door. But I could still hear her quite clearly, because the doors are like paper.

Suddenly I heard my name.

"Well, I don't know who told Maryanne, but she was talking with Erik yesterday, and he said that she knows that we went to the pub on Saturday! Who would have told her? Did you tell Maryanne? I didn't tell Maryanne. How would Maryanne have even heard about it?"

Now. What would you do in that situation?

I was kind of frozen. I didn't want to know why it was such a big deal that I knew. (Seriously, more than half the department got that e-mail. And I wasn't one of the organisers of the potluck.) I didn't want to hear any more of this. And I was going to have to leave the office soon, since I had to teach a class. It sounded like this phone conversation wasn't going to end anytime soon.

I don't know what I should have done, but I'll tell you what I did. My inner Kevin McDonald from "The Tax Man" episode of Corner Gas. Kicked in. In fact, what I said was a direct quote. (Which is why I'm pretty sure I only did this for my own amusement.)

I opened the door, and called out (she was seriously five feet away from me), "I'm right here! I can hear you!"

And that's when she took off running.* (It was some girl that I'd only met once before. I was surprised she even knew my name!)

What would you have done, in that situation? Would you have stayed hidden? Casually walked through the room and said "Hi?" Am I entirely twisted that, for the rest of the day, I kept remembering that exchange and bursting out laughing? Especially when remembering how everybody knows that the common room is the worst place to have a private conversation, and the offices are always full of people silently working?




* (She later came back, and did a bunch of back-tracking, and we actually got to know each other a bit. We second years have decided that our response to all of this will be just to be friendly with them, get to know them individually and not treat them like a whole group, and ignore their drama. Set the example by being grown-ups. But I'm adding my own twist by not allowing any kind of talking-behind-backs.)

Story 7: Little Things

We would sometimes tease Grandma about the following:

1. Grandma treasured most some of her least valuable possessions. Valuable antiques would be sitting in the basement, hiding in a back corner, or holding tools and paint cans. A little ceramic cat which she found at some garage sale, on the other hand, got a place of honour on top of the piano and was very specifically willed to me. She told me solemnly that the ceramic cat would someday be mine, because I was the only one in the family who would not sell the cat for a quarter at a garage sale. She wrote my name on the bottom of the cat, and ended up giving it to me when she moved to Regina. You know, just to make sure I really got the cat. I also got all of her 1975 Eatons catalogues (the last year that Eatons put out a catalogue) as well, because I was a historian and therefore would not discard these items as junk.

2. As I mentioned in a previous story, dishes in Grandma's house were only used for their assigned purposes. Do not even think about setting a pie fork out for a regular meal. (I still can't use a pie fork for anything but dessert.) She had a lot of dishes.

3. Grandma, while babysitting us kids one time, once made us dress up to go visit the family of May-B, Ky and LynnieC. They were in t-shirts and jeans (because we were over all the time! We were extras in their household! I had chores at their home!), and we were in dresses and dress pants. Because we were "going visiting."

4. When my grandparents had a garage sale before they sold the house, one customer made the unfortunate mistake of presuming that he could take two 25-cents-each items and inform her, "I'll pay a quarter for both of these." The presumption! Grandma, full of righteous indignation, responded, "You most certainly will not!" In my aunt's version of the story, the customer then drops the items, runs to his truck, and speeds away.

5. My Grandma's immediate response to the discovery that my (very young) brother had somehow locked himself into the bathroom was to shriek, "Call the fire department!" The door had one of those handles that you could unlock with a nail. (Which is what my mom's cousin, who was boarding with us at the time, did immediately after that.)

These stories were especially funny to us because, in situations where I would expect her to be somehow shocked, she could be very stable and accepting. (I loved how she shut down other old women who were scandalised about a young man showing up at church with his hair in a spiked mohawk by saying how glad she was to see him at church.)

Story 6: "Prayer Warrior"

When I was small, I would frequently spend hours reading a book in this little armchair that was tucked away in a corner of my Grandma's kitchen. It was the best place in the house, right between her washing machine and china cabinet. My favourite part about the kitchen was all of its comforting noises: the whirring of the clock on the wall, the hum of the dryer, and the sound of Grandma praying. When Grandma was alone (or practically alone) in her kitchen, she would talk out loud to God.

I'm always reminded of Grandma when I read the Biblical instruction to "pray without ceasing." It really seemed like Grandma was in a constant state of prayer. When we slept in the spare room in her basement, I'd wake up in the middle of night to the sound of someone walking around upstairs. If I was in anyone else's house, I would have been alarmed by the sound of someone walking around in the small hours of the morning. At Grandma's house, that sound was comforting, because I knew that Grandma was pacing around praying. She would regularly wake up in the middle of the night and think of someone who needed prayer. When that has happened to me, I've mumbled a prayer and fallen back asleep. Not my Grandma; she'd get out of bed and pace around so that she wouldn't fall asleep until after she'd really prayed.

A lot of people referred to my Grandma as a "prayer warrior." She took prayer seriously and prayed frequently. She loved dwelling in God's presence.

You know, it was always a comforting feeling to me, whenever I was sick or somehow distressed, to know that there were very good odds that my Grandma was praying for me. That made me feel so safe.

Story 5: Priorities

When I was young, my aunt told me about a trick that she would sometimes use when she was a child: if she knew that Grandma was going to want her to wash the dishes, she would start practising the piano. Grandma would never stop anyone from playing the piano and make them do housework. (I may have tried that trick a few times myself.)

Grandma took housework very seriously (never mind the tiny handprints on the mirror and the Depression-era mentality that dictated that she hoard such things as jars and jars full of buttons). She cooked huge meals and asserted that pie forks should only be used for pies (or pie-related desserts). She ran a pretty tight ship.

However, Grandma also believed that certain things were just more important than housework. Such as music.

Story 4: Grandma Saw the King and Queen

Even from a young age, I could tell that my Grandma was a bit of a sentimental royal-watcher. She tended to have books about the royal family kicking about. She particularly seemed to take pride in her resemblance to the Queen. The best compliment that each my grandfather and I (at a young age, because of a fur hat she was wearing) ever paid her was to tell her that she looked like the Queen. She lived off of those compliments for ages.

(In fact, my Grandma stopped dyeing her hair dark brown when the Queen let hers go grey. If white hair was good enough for the Queen...)

A few years ago, I discovered what I suspect were some of the roots of this particular feeling of closeness. We were all in a waiting room at my grandfather's nursing home, about a week before he died. We were all waiting to be able to see him, and to pass the time and to distract ourselves from our worry, I told my Grandma about the course I was taking on Canada in the Depression and the Second World War. She was really excited that I would take such a course, and started related to me many of her reminiscenses of living on the prairies during the Dirty Thirties (where Saskatchewan was hit not only with stock market collapse and unemployment, but severe drought and plagues of grasshoppers). I got telling Grandma about the paper I was writing for the course, about the 1939 Royal Visit when George VI and Elizabeth (whom I knew as the Queen Mother) travelled by train across Canada to huge crowds along the way. Their reception in the prairies was particularly enthusiastic, with thousands even showing up at train stations along the line where there were not planned stops. I had been sorting through newspaper reports about the visit at that time, and had been astounded by all the purple press, and especially by the number of times the Queen had been called "radiant."

Grandma got really excited when I started telling her about my project. She informed me that she had travelled to the town of Unity for that day, because it had a station along the line. There had not been a stop planned there, but a huge crowd gathered (a newspaper report I later read claimed that there were 5000 people at that stop). Grandma's memories of that day were even clearer and more detailed than most of her stories, even though I'd never heard her tell of this before. She got to the station early and managed to get pretty close. She wore something pretty. And, fortunately, the King and Queen ended up stopping there, unlike many towns where bands were playing "God Save the King" as the train sped through. In fact, they ended up spending nearly half an hour, which was quite a long stop for that trip. The royal couple were very kind and Grandma got a good look at them.

"The King looked tired, but of course he was not well. But the Queen!" Grandma's eyes lit up. "The Queen was radiant."

Story 3: Less of a Story, More of a List

And it's also my 800th post! (And Monday's my second blogaversary.)

We had a hugely attentive Grandma. After we would leave her house, she would avoid cleaning the bottom part of the living room mirror because she didn't want to wipe away our little handprints. She only had four grandchildren (and the fourth one -- our only cousin on that side of the family -- didn't come around until we were teenagers) and she liked it that way. She got a lot of time to play with each us. In fact, one of my last conversations with my grandma was about how she couldn't imagine having forty grandchildren, as Chris's grandma had. How would you ever find the time to spend with them all?

My Favourite Ways that Grandma Would Entertain Us Kids:

• Taking walks to the big rock that was in the yard of the nearby high school. That thing was huge when I was a kid, and we would climb all over it.
• Playing Junior Scrabble
• Playing the fishing game that she rigged up; she attached a magnet to a piece of string and we would use it to fish for paper fishes that had paper clips on their mouths. (She invented this game as an incentive for us to leave The Rock. If we went home, we could play a fishing game she invented!)
• Bowling in the basement with the plastic bowling pins she bought, using the secret baseball that she kept hidden in a toy babycarriage. (My grandfather was a very cautious man, and would not have liked the idea of us kids having such a hard baseball around.)
• Playing with the flannelgraph board that she would borrow from her friends every Christmas.
• Having slide shows (always the same ones: Dad and Auntie Darlene as kids; their trip to the United States to visit Grandpa's side of the family) and then making shadow puppets afterward.
• Treating me as a grown-up and letting me drink peppermint tea with honey in it when her sisters would come over for a visit.
• When we didn't eat our crusts, singing us a song about a child who hid his crusts under his plate and then the crusts grew all big and scolded him after he went to bed. We liked the song so much that my brother would purposely leave a bit of crust on his plate so that she'd sing the song. (She would alternately tell us how children in Korea would love to eat those crusts. In fact, they would pick them out of the garbage and eat them with relish! Somehow, that didn't help my appetite.)

Hm. This list seems like it could also be entitled "How Nerdy I Was, Even As A Tiny Child."

Story 2: Chocolates and Red

When I was young, my grandmother was on a quest against refined sugar. She feared developing diabetes in her old age, and so she used honey instead of sugar and raisins instead of chocolate chips.

She kept this up until somewhere around the time that Grandpa's Alzheimers got worse and he went into a home. Somehow, she decided that life was too short and she embraced her love of Oh Henry bars and all things chocolate. By the time she moved in with my parents, we had learned one simple rule about buying presents for Grandma: she didn't want any more possessions (especially while she was giving so many of her things away), but she would always welcome a box of chocolates. This Christmas, my brother and his girlfriend bought my Grandma a big box of chocolates. She kept forgetting who gave them to her, and so my Mom attached a big note on the lid that said, in big black letters, "Michael and Nicole." She wheeled that box around on her walker, offering people chocolate and telling them that her grandson gave her them: "Such a big box! So generous!"

As she aged, my grandmother started admitting many of her hidden loves beyond just chocolate. She also started letting everyone know that her favourite colour was red. I first learned the extent of it when I was in North Battleford for a girls' weekend (back when Ky lived there) and had dyed my hair bright red. I'd never done anything like that before and was nervous about what my grandma would say when she saw it at church.

I was surprised by her reaction: "I love it! I always wanted the courage to dye my hair red! I even bought red hair dye once but never went through with it." After that, it seemed like she was always talking about her love of the colour red, and her previous reservations about it. She'd always wanted to buy a red coat but hadn't had the courage. She loved Janice's car best because it was red.

I think that was my favourite part of my grandmother's aging process.

Story 1: Grandma didn't go to India

Grandma told me this story while we washed dishes together, at my parents' house during some holiday. I think it started off with us playing the "What were you doing in this year" game. She realised that I didn't know the whole story of how she ended up a teacher and then in Bible College, and then getting married. Here was her story (some of the details may be fuzzy, because this is as filtered through two storytellers who love effect more than precision):

When Grandma was a young woman, she went to Bible College. After she had attended for a while, she panicked. Everything in her life seemed to be aimed toward being some missionary in India, never getting married, and probably dying of some exotic illness. What she wanted out of life was a "normal" life: a husband, a house, some kids, and stability. And she wasn't going to find it where she was. (Don't ask me how she decided this, as the joke about "Bridal College" was going around as much then as it is now.) And so she decided for herself that she was going to go and find herself a husband and stability. The best way she knew how to do that was to become a teacher and be posted in some small Saskatchewan town.

And so my Grandma went off to Teacher's College. She had a student loan arranged, which had the provision that it would go into effect after she'd been in college for three months. After it went into effect, she was bound to stay in for the full two years. Shortly after she started, some people from the school board came and talked to her class. As the war was going on, there was a teacher shortage, and they needed volunteers who were willing to start teaching right away and to get a temporary teaching certificate.

And that's how my Grandma ended up not going to Teacher's College, but teaching right away. She was thrilled that she got to skip that whole process and get started immediately on her quest for stability.

She taught for a few years. It was both good and bad. She collected a lifetime worth of stories about teaching in a one-room school, and in that time she also made an impact on one young student who would grow up to be a significant scholar and writer, who would write over and over about his teacher. There were also bad times along with that, and she frequently felt troubled.

But, one day, as she was walking home from school, God spoke audibly to her. His message was simple: "Frances, weren't you happier when you were following me?" And her reply was simple: "Yes, Lord, I was." And so she quit her job and went back to the last point where she knew she was following God: she went back to Bible school.

At this point of the story, she told me, "That was the point where I gave up all my own plans for my life. I gave up hope of living a normal life. I gave up my plan of getting married, of having children. But none of that mattered, if it wasn't what God wanted for my life."

She finished Bible College and became a deaconess with the Pentecostal Church. One day, a friend of hers wrote to her from India; she had been teaching there, and they had an opening for another teacher. Would she like to teach in India? Everything seemed to be falling into place just as she had always sensed it would. Grandma accepted, and was instructed to go up to North Battleford, where there was a camp going on where they would raise funds for her to go.

After Grandma left for that camp, another letter arrived at her home: her friend had lost her job, and the people in India told her not to send her friend there, either. The letter missed Grandma at home, but the people at the camp in North Battleford did get the news. When Grandma got to NB, she found that no one mentioned any fundraising. She went home and found out why.

And so Grandma made a decision. Obviously God wanted her to go to India. And the only people she knew who could send her were those people at that camp in North Battleford. "And so I decided that I would go back to that camp, and I would wait there until they could help but send me to India." And so Grandma returned to North Battleford.

And that's where she met a man named Daniel. He was nice and he was balding, which Grandma took as a sign that he was actually older than her. (She was in her mid-thirties by that time.) She decided that he was the sort that she would like to marry. She only found out later that he was actually a year younger than her, but was just balding. (It wasn't until later that she also found out that the first time he saw her, she was scolding people in the kitchen and he remarked to someone, "I wouldn't want a wife like that!" He apparently changed his mind later.)

She and Daniel got married in North Battleford, bought a house and had two children, and lived there for the next half century. Interestingly, she also always had close contacts with people in India, and blessed many through her letters.

"It turned out that God had the same plan for my life that I had," Grandma told me. "But he wanted me to to give my plans to Him, so that He could give them back to me in His time."

Remembering Grandma

Kissing Grandma C
Originally uploaded by Maryanne, Queen of Procrastination.

Today, I'm easing up and taking care of myself. I've drunk a lot of tea. I've done that "hold your head over a bowl of steaming water, covering your head with a towel" trick for my sinuses. I'm using my SAD lamp, which is doing wonders for me. I've e-mailed my supervisor and told him not to expect any productive work out of me for the next few days.

And now I've been remembering Grandma. I went through my wedding photos and found the really cute one of Chris and me kissing her. I think that, for the next few days, I'm going to start collecting stories about her here. Both silly and serious. Because she would want it that way. Grandma told me as many stories as possible, both because she was Irish and loved telling a good story (and would sometimes confess that it was really difficult to keep to the exact facts), and because she was so proud that her granddaughter is a historian.

We even used to make a game of her good memory and her love of story-telling. We kids would take turns picking either a year or an age. Then she would tell us everything that happened that year. The year she got a red coat. The year she saw the King and Queen. The year she started teaching. The year she started Bible College. The year she had a nervous breakdown. The year she thought she was going to move to India, but met Grandpa instead.

And I'll try to relate a few of those stories.

New Traditions

Today was absolutely lovely. I strategised the entire day so that it wouldn't feel like we were doing last-minute Christmas shopping. It helped that the weather cooperated, and we had a lovely sunny day. We lazied around all morning (thanks to the Wal-Mart adventures) and then set out walking to the mall at noon. The only stops we made at the mall were the bank and our favourite book store. We bought a Christmas present, got fries at New York Fries, and then walked home.

After that, we drove to the smaller shops that we were planning on visiting. All of them required a bit of outside walking (especially downtown), and all of them were to small and friendly stores. We spent quite a while wandering around 10,000 Villages, listening to the soft African music, and feeling good about buying fair trade Christmas presents. We also bought a wedding present at my new favourite store, a little Vietnamese shop in the Market Square downtown. The woman who runs the store sells items that her family makes, and they're absolutely gorgeous. She was so excited to see me again (as I've said, it's my new favourite store) and spent quite a while helping us pick out a present, telling us all about her family's lacquering techniques.

When we had walked into the Market Square (an open-air mall downtown, full of some of the sweetest shops you'd find), we heard brass music floating all around. It turned out that a brass quartet was playing Christmas carols in the courtyard. And so we stopped and watched for a while. It was beautiful.

After a quick stop for groceries, we then stopped by my friend Kat's house, where we met her parents and her brother and his fiancée. We sat down and visited with them for an hour, drinking tea and joking. We all enjoyed each other immensely. (Right now, I have my gift from Kat beside me. This book is amazing. And I think Chris and I are going to try out some of these recipes soon.)

And then we came home. Now, I'm in the process of making Norweigan rice porridge and a cheese ball. My Mom makes those for us on Little Christmas Eve (which is tonight) every year. I've never made rice porridge before, and I couldn't find my family cookbook, and so I'm operating entirely on memory and Mom's verbal instructions. Considering the fact that I've also never made a cheese ball before, and that this will be our entire (late) supper, I'm nervous.

I've lit candles, because that's what Mom does on Little Christmas Eve and Christmas Eve every year. And that's what feels Christmassy and traditional to me. Making our own Christmas is strange and exciting. We each find ourselves trying to preserve those favourite parts of Christmas from our own families, but we're also finding ways to make our own Christmas.

Call me a crazed sentimentalist, but every Christmas when I sit my my parents' Christmas tree and watch the lights twinkle, tears well up in my eyes as my heart just feels full. This year we have no Christmas tree of our own. But the funny thing is that today, as we walked through Market Square, with the brass music, the ocean, and the friendly Vietnamese woman, my heart felt full.

Bad idea of the day

Taking up Wal-Mart on their "we're open all night for the week leading up to Christmas" promise. Ugh. Oh. Boy. Dude. These are the only thoughts that can fully form in my brain, after a night like last night.

We thought we were being endlessly clever, seeing as last night and today are our only chances for Christmas shopping. We thought we were so clever until we pulled up to Wal-Mart at midnight to see that the store was packed with people. And when I realised how over-whelmingly tired I was, even though I rested all day and used my SAD lamp at strategic times to make me not as sleepy at night. And so the whole experience was like a bizarre waking dream of flourescent lights and messy piles of boxes (because they re-stock overnight) and hoards of Victoria's strangest people shuffling around slowly, inanely chatting and clutching to merchandise. No one was moving quickly. Everyone had the same mentality as us: if we stay a bit longer, maybe the store will die down and then we'll stand in line. Every employee we saw had this blank expression as if they were the walking dead. You could see in their eyes that their main thoughts were "Only a few more hours. Only a few more hours." The individual customers were far stranger than the ones that you normally see, such as the woman behind us in line who was way too energetic and pretty much changed all of her clothes in line, to wear the new clothes she was buying. And then she was collecting all the tags so that they could ring her through.

And now it's taking me forever to wake up. Even after I've sat under my lamp and have gotten a reasonable amount of sleep last night. Remind me not to do that again. Today will be different. Other than the quick run to the mall just for the bank and the book store, we're only going to small independent shops today.

This city is funny

Victorians are used to life without weather. Okay, so it rains in the wintertime. And doesn't rain -- at all -- in the summer. That's pretty much it. No wind. Hardly any fog. No such thing as lightning. Many people here live outdoors, and many own ancient and rickety buildings with no level of weather-proofing, because there's no such thing as weather here.

Or, to be more precise, there was no such thing as weather here, until a few years ago. Climate change is really apparent here, as we are going through our second year of unprecedented windstorms, which I think many thought were impossible in Canada's Most Sheltered City. Last week, heavy winds tore apart trees, ripped off roofs, and knocked out the power for a big chunk of this city (but not including us, thankfully). When we went outside, we noticed tree branches on our front lawn, and then realised that we couldn't see any tree that matched those branches on our block. When we got to church, the lawn was littered with roofing tiles that didn't come from the church's roof.

But then the wind died down and people got back to their usual routines. We noticed that, this week, a bunch of people have hung big Christmas tree ornaments from the branches of their leafless deciduous trees. Chris said, as I was driving him to work this afternoon, "They'd better hope that the wind doesn't come back."

And wouldn't you know it, it's back. The gusts were rattling the pictures on my wall, and Evironment Canada's forecasting "damaging winds" tonight.

We'll see what things look like tomorrow morning.

Edited to add: oh, and the power's flickering again. What are the odds that we get another power outage tonight? (The problem is that we have all above-ground power lines, with really low hanging and swingy lines, and this has apparently never been a problem before, and so the wind just keeps taking down power lines.)

It's a good day after all

I'm really silly when it comes to meetings with my supervisor. For some reason, I become a nervous wreck about them. Take today, for instance. I had to have an essay written and two books read for today. I had finished reading the books, but had to finish writing the essay. But then I psyched myself out with the essay and convinced myself that I didn't have anything intelligent to say. And so I left the essay at home, with one more page to write, and went to the meeting with my prof (telling him that I'd hand in the essay tomorrow -- he was fine with that).

The meeting went well. Really well. My supervisor was excited about everything I had to say. Even though my head was all congested and I was slightly looped out on Advil Cold and Sinus. We planned out my next essay, and then he gave me back my first two essays. I got an 85% and an 86%.

Hm. I guess I'm not so dumb after all.

Then, when I got home, I checked my Ebay auction (where I was bidding on a Boney M Christmas Album), to discover that someone had outbid me. And had set a really high maximum bid, apparently, and so I dropped out of the race. But then I went back and checked to see if there was another album for sale, and I found another one! But this one is in mint condition (whereas the original one was only "Very Good," with some superficial marks), was only $3, and had a "Buy it now" button! And it's still in Canada, and so I still get the same cheap shipping. And now, instead of waiting until the end of an auction, I've already bought my Boney M album and it'll be in the mail tomorrow. Meaning that it'll be here before Christmas!

Today is a very good day after all.

(Some of you may think that I'm crazy with the Boney M Christmas. But the thing is that my brother and I have always listened to that record before Christmas, especially while we were decorating the tree. It's just not Christmas without "Mary's Boy Child" and "Zion's Daughter." I think it was far more urgent this year -- as opposed to last year, when CDs were readily availabe for sale -- because I'm not going to be home until after Christmas. As a result, I'm clinging to every bit of tradition that I can find. I'm even going to make rice porridge for Little Christmas Eve.)

I threatened him that I'd tell the blog people

Chris = Reader's Digest Sweepstakes addict. He's a sucker for the words "You might already be a winner!"

He's currently combing over their latest mailing, making sure that they're not going to force him to get a subscription. ("But if I win this $33,000, won't you be sorry you made fun of me!")