I'll admit I've been keeping my cards close to my chest lately

Well, I didn't intend to disappear for such a long time! At first, right after I wrote that last post, I got very sick (as part of a series of stress-related illnesses), and stayed sick until the New Year. (Also, I got to try all kinds of powerful antibiotics, and may have experienced some rheumatic fever! Fun times at Christmas.) (As another aside, I am your perfect sick party guest: hobbling around, whining about "my rheumatiz." You guys missed a magical time.)

After I got home from that second trip home, my life was divided between the Bloggable But Stressful (Get the crazy chapter under control and come up with a workable plan for finishing soon!) and the Very Unbloggable Thanks To IRL People Reading This Blog (Let's apply for work closer to home! What if we start a family now?). Some days, it felt like every decision we were facing were some of the biggest decisions we'd ever made in our lives. And somehow they seemed so much scarier than the Big Decisions we made before (or maybe we were younger and more flippant than we are now.) Get married? Sounds like a wonderful plan! Move across the country for grad school? Hey, why not? Sounds fun. (Oh, to be 24 years old again.)

But now, we've made some decisions, finalized plans, and have even announced them on Facebook (you know, after I told people in person first, because I'm not a monster). We're moving home, and I'm pregnant!

Dear goodness, those words are simultaneously exciting and terrifying.

I seriously can't believe this is all happening. And I know that "I'm pregnant and we're moving home to the prairies" sounds like the beginning of a novel about giving up on your dreams, but both of these really feel like the fulfillment of life-long dreams for us. We got Chris a good job in our hometown, in the same city as our entire families. And, barring something major happening, we're staying there. I'm insanely determined to get this dissertation finished, and then I'll figure out what I'm doing. It's been years since I realised that I wasn't cut out for the tenure-track life, but I'll carve my own path. I love working with students, and I'd love to do something university- or research-adjacent. There will be something for me (and it's not urgent for me to find it: the top priority is finishing the dissertation and having this baby; Chris will be making enough to support us until I find something).

There's this part of me that fears some people will think I'm crazy for having a baby right now (well, at the end of December), or that I'm somehow wasting all this education by not aggressively pursuing a tenure-track position. Or that I'm crazy for having a baby at a point when I don't qualify for EI maternity pay. (But do you know how long it would be until I would qualify? And seriously: we'll be financially fine.)

Okay. Enough (heading-towards-an-outie) navel-gazing. I'll save the crazy medical details (How I've Spent The Past Month In Doctor's Waiting Rooms, and Why I Keep Baffling Medical Professionals*) for another post.

In honour of the move back to the homeland, let's finish off with an old school Question Time!

Time? 1:39pm

Surroundings? I'm in my office, surrounded by dirty dishes, kleenex boxes, and scraps of printed off translation material. (By the way, I have a cold, and the inability to take cold medicine: pure torture.)

Tea? Murchies Library Tea. (Why no, I haven't completely cut out caffeine. Why yes, I do know about the risks, but I also have read a terrifying number of medical journal articles and stay well under the safe limit.)

Wearing? Pyjamas, rubber-soled slippers, TARDIS bathrobe, hair that is standing straight on end. (It might be time to bathe soon.) (Uh, you guys, I just found out how much my sister spent on my new bathrobe...)

Stuck in my head? "A Hundred and One Pounds of Fun" from South Pacific. Because I forced Chris to watched the movie with me this weekend, and this is what I get in return. Mitzi Gaynor's voice in my head for the rest of my life.

What am I most thankful for? My Christopher. He's been phenomenal lately, doing all the cooking and cleaning (in addition to dealing with the madness of the end of the school year), since I've been so sick, sore and tired for the past couple of months. He's a good'un.


* Working title.

Home. Couch. Bed.

Traveling Minuses:

• The air conditioning just barely works, and the temperatures were high. I was delirious from the heat when we got to Swift Current (only about two hours away from Regina), so much so that I ended up hugging a bag of ice in Safeway.
• Driving through road construction in the mountains at night is stressful. 
• Why do we always travel on the long weekends? Why is the majority of the final day spent in the vicinity of Vancouver?
• Half-way through our day today, we blew a fuse on our stereo (while playing the Glee Cast's version of "4 Minutes") and then for the rest of the day had to be a little more creative about entertaining ourselves.
• Too little healthy food eaten and too much money spent.

Traveling Pluses:

• We got through all 467 songs on my Driving Playlist before the stereo went out, and it was truly Epic.  
• Because I was in a car with Ky and Chris, it was not hard to entertain ourselves without the car stereo.  Seeing as we were already at the punchy stage of the long trip, we ended up pretending to have a brass band while stopped in a traffic jam. 
• We also sang old-timey songs in rounds.
• Bad air conditioning = good excuses to buy Slurpees.  
• Traffic was better than I've ever seen it on the August Long Weekend.  We made the ferry three hours before Chris had predicted we would.  We were home before it was dark.  
• We didn't have to drive straight through this year: in the middle, we got to attend the wedding of a good friend.  I got to spend time with my oldest friends, and meet another one of this past year's babies, and it was good.
• I did my annual Check For Spiders, Since We've Been Away For A Month, and I haven't found any spiders yet.  It worked well to cover all of our drains before we left.  

Neither good nor bad, but interesting:

• It is disorienting to arrive home after a long trip.  Everything looks a little different at first, as you notice things that you usually don't. 

Last day

Our suitcases are all packed.  I just finished a list of everything we need to do tomorrow morning.  I can't believe that our last full day in Saskatchewan is over now, and it'll probably be another year until we get out here again.

It's a strange place to be, at this point of every summer, when I've had too little sleep, have done too little work, and have not always been the best version of myself because I'm not getting a lot of time to myself.  I'm longing for my bed and my own routine, and at the same time it's hard to face the fact that it'll likely be more than eleven months until I'm in this house again. 

This was a funny summer, because I really only saw immediate family and a few really close friends, and didn't really venture further than that.  There are a few friends whom I didn't even get a chance to contact this time.  That's a first for me.  This week, I spent a lot of time finding ways to stay home and be with my family.  I originally planned to invite people over for a barbecue tonight, but instead Chris and my mom went for a bike ride, while my dad and I watched a football game while I packed.  We were all happier that way. 

And now I'll stop rambling and go to bed.  I'll see you all either in Alberta or BC, folks. 

Couldn't wait any longer

We were going to wait to decorate the GINORMOUS TREE until tomorrow, but after Chris finished trimming bottom off the tree this afternoon, it was pretty clear that the branches were done settling and it wouldn't make any difference if we just went ahead and decorated tonight. I can't believe how nice it is to have my living room filled with Christmas tree. All those glowing lights make me so happy.

After the decorating was done, I played around with the camera, trying to get some good shots of the tree in spite of the low light in here, and ended up taking this one, in the (poorly-done imitation of the) style of my birthday buddy Marc Vandersluys (happy birthday in forty-five minutes, Marc!):

(Wow. My hand kind of looks like a scary claw in that one.)

You know, I like myself in that picture. (And I usually don't like pictures of myself.) That was a nice way to spend my last evening as a 28 year old.

Dreaming of the prairie sky already

This week has been nuts, as we've been trying to get the house ready for us to leave it for 5 1/2 weeks. But now we're almost ready: in a few more hours we begin the first leg of our trip home to Saskatchewan! All that's left is a little more packing and errands, and for Chris to finish up his last day of end-of-the-year staff meetings.

And then I'm heading back to Saskatchewan, after being gone for nearly a year.

I'll try to twitter our Road Trip of Legend, as I travel 1/3 of the way across Canada with Chris, Ky and her wee dog Vicki, in a car just a bit bigger than a clown car. I'll try to remember to update, and so you can follow along here. The highlight of last year's Twittering the Road Trip was getting stuck in a traffic jam (yay, truck fires!) for four hours, while trying to get out of Vancouver.

Taken on my cellphone just as we crossed into SK last year. It was the wallpaper on my cellphone for most of the year.

Little Christmas Eve Again

The "I'm not home for Christmas" homesickness hit today. I had friends over for rice porridge, for Norwegian "Little Christmas Eve." (We don't actually decorate on the 23rd; we make rice porridge and light candles.) I spent the day cooking and trying to make everything familiar, and somewhere in the middle of making the rice porridge and the cheese ball I sat down and cried for a while. It was all so familiar -- the twinkly lights, the smell of the porridge, the music in the background -- but I was alone (Christopher being away on errands) and so far away from my family.

I guess that's why I had such high expectations for today: I tried to make everything that we usually have at home. Some of it didn't work out (I ended up having to throw away my attempt at lefse), and I got entirely exhausted, but this day was important to me. I found myself worrying that my friends wouldn't be able to come over, or that I was stressing everyone out by making everyone celebrate yet another day around Christmas, but it all worked out beautifully. My rice porridge and my cheese ball (the two necessary elements of any Christmas, in my immediate family) both turned out perfectly. The chicken (the extra food, to counteract the overload of carbs and dairy, and in case anyone wasn't into porridge) was my best yet, the snow held off long enough that everyone could come and stay for a while, and everyone got along well. The candles glowed (and, uh, singed Derek's hair) and everything was familiar and comforting.

And I am happy and comforted. The rest of Christmas can happen now, and I won't be stressed out by it.


(I apparently spend every December 23rd feeling reflective, with a full heart, seeking the familiar. Here's my post from 2006, and here is 2005.)

Looking ahead

So, it's been decided that we're not going home for Christmas this year. By "it's been decided" I mean that Chris and I have been discussing this for nearly a month, and came to the conclusion that there's no way we can afford to fly home this year (the tickets would cost $1300 and money's going to be the tightest already for the next few months, without dealing with that extra burden).

The funny thing is that I'm weirdly okay with this. When Chris first suggested this, I was not okay. Well, I was more avoidant about it, and then I would sometimes mention that I needed to go home for Christmas. And it's not ideal: a year away is a long time when you have elderly grandparents and when your friends back home have small children who count the days until you come back next. And of course it'll be difficult being away from our families.

And yet...you know, it'll be nice to be here. It'll be nice to have a quiet Christmas with Chris. We can decorate and have a wee little Christmas tree, and we'll spend the day with our ladies from church and Ariann and Derek (they also can't go home this Christmas). We'll do Little Christmas Eve at our house, and I'll make rice porridge and lefsa. We might go to Mount Washington (which, weirdly, is on Vancouver Island) and go snowshoeing, to make sure that we see snow. I want to walk around Market Square and see the brass bands playing Christmas carols. We can have some down time during the break, and won't have the usual "I don't know how I'm going to have time for everyone and I'm disappointing everyone" breakdown. I'll be less likely to get horribly sick.

It'll be strange, we'll have to work to make it feel like Christmas (especially without snow and family) and I don't want to make a regular habit out of missing Christmas back home, but I think we'll be okay.

(These thoughts have been stirring in my head for a while, but we wanted to talk with our families first, so that they weren't first hearing this news from my blog!)

We now return to our regularly-scheduled broadcasting

The sun was shining when we landed in Victoria early yesterday morning. After three weeks of the bright whites and dingy greys in wintery Saskatchewan, all the colours in Victoria were shocking. As we drove into the city, I told Chris that I felt like Dorothy landing in Oz, where suddenly the whole world was in colour.

(Of course, a couple of hours later the clouds descended again and the colours weren't nearly so bright.)

Now I'm working my way through heaps of laundry and settling in to starting some heavy reading, but now that we're finally back in our own apartment, I have one more holiday-related scheme up my sleeve: the maiden voyage of the mixer.

Isn't it pretty? Tonight I'm going to make the Cheese Soufflé Cockaigne from The Joy of Cooking. I really want to see what that whisk attachment does with egg whites.

And now we're ready

It's funny looking back at what we expected for our life here in Victoria, when we were moving here. We expected that Chris would have a teaching job right away. We expected that I would be involved in the campus Christian groups in the same way that I was involved in IVCF back home. We expected, essentially, our lives back home, but translated into Victoria.

But that's not what happened when we moved here. Chris didn't get a teaching job. I was so overwhelmed by everything that had happened so quickly (getting married, moving, Mike dying, starting a new program, etc.) that I couldn't really handle meeting too many new people. I met our little church group, and I slowly started to meet people in my program, but that was it. We spent a lot of time at home.

But it was really good for us. Chris and I learned how to become each other's best friends. We also learned how to become really close to people outside of our age group, like the wonderful seniors at our church. We also spent a lot of time growing closer to our family.

The odd thing is that now, out of the blue, things that I expected two years ago are now falling into place. First Chris got that teaching job. I've finally gotten in contact with a friend from home, who has lived here in the city for this whole time and yet I've never gotten things together enough to touch base with her. And then, all of a sudden, I found myself gathering up the courage to walk up to the Navigator's table and introduce myself. And I found myself invited to their grad and alumni monthly potluck dinner, which happened this evening.

Bizarrely, in the past few weeks I've had this same conversation so many times: "No, we aren't new to Victoria. Actually, I'm starting my third year at the University. It's just that [Chris didn't find a teaching job until now/I was too busy to get involved in anything else until now]." We being treated like newcomers in a city where we've lived for more than two years.

And yet there are ways that we are new here. For the first time we're making ourselves at home in this city. We've hung up the hammock chair. We've gotten Chris a job. We're finally in the place to deliberately seek out friends. My head's finally in the place where I'm ready to have a normal life here, and let my heart establish some connections.

And that's indescribably fantastic.

Bliss

I am posting this while sitting in my wedding present from Chris: a hammock chair. (Mine looks kind of like that one, but without the hangy things on the front.) Chris gave it to me two years ago, but we never had a place to hang it, and we kept feeling nervous about asking our landlords if we could put a giant hook in the ceiling. But, since the flood and since they started stressing that they want us to treat this place like out home, I've been wondering if we could perhaps convince them that this was a good idea. Today, I worked up the courage and went upstairs, bearing freezer jam and the dish that held yesterday's beef curry. And they thought it was a good idea, after I explained what I was doing.

And so we bought a nice wall sensor, and found all the joists in the office ceiling. Happily, there was one exactly where I wanted to hang my hammock (in the little nook beside my desk). Two hooks and a lot of work later, here I am.

And it feels really strange to be here. It makes me homesick for that old apartment with Meg, with her hammock chair hanging in the corner of the living room. It makes me miss the Wee Girlie, who used to cuddle with me in Meg's hammock chair, her tiny fingers feeling the strings, and her little voice whispering "Whee! Whee!" every time we rocked back and forth. It feels right that I'm working on the old Lappy. (Dear new computer: please arrive. We could be such good friends.) I'm also really glad that Meg and Karl are moving closer to me soon.

The funny thing is that it really makes me feel like reading. Even though I strongly suspect that I will fall asleep immediately, upon trying to read in the hammock chair. That's always what happened in Meg's chair.

My own chair

And my own computer

And my own shower

And my own bed

And my own cup, covered in pictures of kittens

Filled with my own apple juice

And my own tea cupboard

Filled with my own pretentious teas

And my own schedule

And, in a few hours, my own Christopher

(whom I haven't seen in weeks)

After living for weeks out of a suitcase, this is relief