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.

Doing my best imitation of a Victorian invalid

So, I think that the WWII course took everything out of me.  After that whole "I was so tired after giving the final that I was pretty much sleepwalking outside, and ended up with a scraped nose and a concussion" episode, I finished all the marking, packed, drove to Saskatchewan, attended a church camp, and promptly caught the Cold That Ate Vancouver Island.  Two and a half weeks later, I'm finally getting better.  Well, I had been getting better, and then had an allergic reaction to a cat, and spent a few days where I hardly could get out of bed.  So, that was an adventure.  There wasn't much to blog, since my thoughts were mostly occupied with such thoughts as "Naps after taking Benadryl are particularly strange naps," and "It is convenient that my in-laws possess a fainting couch, because I really am doing my best imitation of a Victorian invalid this week.  Sometimes I'm worried that this cold is just in my head and is an excuse to sit around on a chaise lounge and read Sherlock Holmes mysteries,* but then I try to move around and start coughing like I have consumption."

But today I'm starting to feel better.  I even felt well enough to tease the in-laws' cat (without actually touching her, since that would cause an allergic reaction), which is how Chris knew I was feeling better.  Maybe tomorrow I'll even leave the house, and start visiting people in town.  You know, since I'm IN SASKATCHEWAN and all. 

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In other news, I'm trying out Google+ now, and am still figuring out what I think about that.  If you're trying it out too, you can find me using the gmail address on the sidebar. 


* You know, it is a surreal experience reading the entirety of the Sherlock Holmes stories in the course of a few weeks.  You start noticing funny things, like how apparently everyone's response to traumatic experiences is to suffer from "brain-fever"?  What is a brain-fever?  Dramatic things happen in Prague, secret societies happen in the United States, murder is apparently okay if a lady's honour was at stake, mysterious wives come from South America, and Empire and racism are everywhere (unsurprisingly).  Also, I have trouble not picturing Holmes and Watson as Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, but I picture Mycroft Holmes as Stephen Fry, even though the new Sherlock Holmes movie isn't even out yet.  But I digress.

One more sleep

I have a stack of papers beside me, with all the information for our accommodations and reservations for tomorrow and August 1st. I've been making a lot of calls, booking motels and campsites and ferries.  The iPod and all our cell phones are charging.  I spent a bit of time and put together an Epic Driving Playlist, with more than a day's worth of music.  Every item of clothing in the whole house is now clean. Chris has emptied out the fridge. We have fifteen pounds of dry ice for the cooler.  I've made so many lists and have talked to my landlady four times today.  I've spent as much time as possible resting (with the exception of Chris's high school's grad) to get over this cold, and it's almost gone now.

All that's left is packing and a little more cleaning, and then we're ready to leave for Saskatchewan tomorrow morning. 

I'm excited, because we'll be driving through Jasper for the first time in both our lives. People keep describing that road as "one of the most beautiful in Canada." [Note to self: charge all the camera batteries.]  We've been making a lot of plans around making this trip enjoyable: we were going to take the first ferry of the morning, but then found out that the 8am ferry was the really nice new one, and so we made a reservation for that one instead.  Tomorrow night, we're camping near Mt. Robson.  And then, after another day of driving, we'll be together with almost all my extended family and oldest friends at Camp. 

I'm more than a little excited.  Home.

Madness

Here's a picture from my hometown newspaper that shows one of Regina's streets this week:

That's the street our church is on! And have I mentioned the fact that Regina is the only city in Canada that wasn't built on a major body of water?  (The "lake" in Regina is a man-made one from the Depression era.)

And we're driving out there next week.  We're officially crazy.  (Well, granted, we're heading further north than that next week, and won't be going down to Regina until a week after that.  So Regina: you have two weeks to get your act together!)

In other news: I have laryngitis! Laryngitis is so strange.  And just as I didn't realise how frequently I unconsciously touched my eyes until I was covered in VapoRub, I had no idea how compulsively I talked until it hurt too much to talk.  (Everyone who has met me in person knows how compulsively I talk.) Poor Christopher: he's finally on holidays and I'm completely useless.  On the other hand, because I feel guilty if he does too much work, I encouraged him to play computer games for half the day. 

On the up side, I'm allowed to watch as many movies as I want, and I am getting better at Spider Solitaire.  I tried to read German and my brain and my head weren't up to it.  Relaxing without guilt is nice.

Looking more like a local

Until today, we had Saskatchewan plates on our car. When we moved out here, I read through all the requirements for students living out of province, and I did everything that Saskatchewan's auto insurance company required.  We kept renewing our plates and buying insurance, and then some friends of ours were in an accident and found out that the province had stopped covering married students (but their brokers didn't stop selling insurance to married out-of-province students).

And so today we went and got BC license plates.  It wasn't too much work to import our car: Chris always makes sure that our car gets properly maintained, and so the only thing that didn't pass inspection was a small burnt-out light bulb that illuminates the plates.  Which cost $2 to replace.  Getting the insurance took some work, but we found a good company, and we aren't paying too much money because we both have been driving for more than ten years, with good driving records.

But it's all so strange. Our Saskatchewan plates made us stand out around here.  It was so easy to find our car, and it was an easy way to show people that, while we may live here, we aren't from here.  We're permanent residents of another province, and we think that this province is insane.  We still get to keep our Saskatchewan permanent residency as long as I'm a student, but not very many people look at my health card or my tax forms.  It feels like we've given up a part of the prairies.

Chris is especially sad because we can't have our Saskatchewan Roughrider front plate anymore.  BC requires two license plates, and so our Rider plate is now in the back window.  He'd been hoping to get the real Roughrider license plates this summer, and then he found out that we had to give up Saskatchewan plates altogether.  It was a sad, sad day in Christopher land.

I'm just glad that I know that we'll be fine if we're in a car accident now.  But with a Toyota with BC license plates?  Our car just became much, much harder to find in a Victoria parking lot.

Two more weeks...

...and then we'll be in Saskatchewan!  And we'll be leaving in less than a week. (Which reminds me: we have nowhere to stay in Edmonton so far.  I'd better deal with that.)

I can hardly believe it.  Chris finished teaching last week, and this week it's all exams.  I have so much to do before we leave.  So much to do.  I need to write as much as possible before we leave, because it's going to be hard to get work done in July. 

and yet I'm not frozen by anxiety, which is good.  I'm taking each task one at a time, and am trying to get real work done without burning myself out.  It helps that it's June and it's gorgeous outside. And much of my busyness right now is happy busyness: I'm baking a pink birthday cake for a certain silly person, we're preparing for some more house guests, and I'm going with Chris to his high school's grad sometime soon.  And the chapter isn't unhappy busyness: it's an enjoyable chapter and I have so many ideas. 

It's just so strange when I realise that June's more than half-way done, and I'm going to see my family soon.  (That weather in Saskatchewan had better clear up soon: I'm dreaming of sunny skies, and the news tells me that I get to look forward to flooding and mosquitoes.)

There was no joy in Mudville

Bronwyn wrote about this better than I can, but tonight Saskatchewan Roughrider fans have broken hearts. You know, while I only spoke positively about today's Grey Cup championship, I wasn't quite sure. I guess it's because we've only won the Grey Cup three times in ninety-seven years. I was hopeful but felt cautious.

And then it suddenly looked like we had it. My team was amazing today. Everyone seemed to have it together, and we were dominating over the seemingly-unbeatable team. By the fourth quarter, I turned to my friends and said with amazement, "I think we might win the Grey Cup!?" A few minutes later I started thinking gloatingly about how CBC Sports would have to eat their words about their prediction that the Alouettes would beat us by 16 points.

And then we lost in the last second, in the most heatbreaking way imaginable. An extra man on the field allowed them to re-kick a missed field goal. It took me half an hour before I could really fathom that we'd lost by that single point. It was harder because we'd briefly thought we had won. We sat in silence for what seemed to be an eternity.

When did I become someone who cares this much about any sport? This is a relatively new thing, the result of marriage to a man who loves his hometown team deeply, whose mother speaks about individual players as if she knew them. It's also the result of being a Saskatchewanian on the West Coast: the familiar and home-like are so important to me out here. The Riders are so deeply intertwined with our prairie identity, with our identification of ourselves as the perpetually hopeful underdogs, the Charlie Browns of Canada.

And somehow I've become a person who feels weepy about how sad the head coach is. Who thinks words like "I would like to hug those football players." Who feels strongly that the team should keep quiet about whose fault that loss was. (Sometimes the "more than a game" attitude is a bad thing in my province.)

I'll be picking up a dejected Christopher from the airport tomorrow morning. I've baked cookies (which I will take along), and will keep the Rider flag on our car.

Edited to Add: So, it turns out that Ky (who always gets my references) has never heard of/doesn't remember "Casey at the Bat," even though she has apparently seen the same Disney sports specials that I did as a kid. And so here's a link to the YouTube video.

Crafty News

As Ky has already announced (and I have been talking about on Twitter), Chris has taken up knitting. Ky's now taught him how to cast on and do the basic knitting stitch, and he's starting off by making a Möbius strip scarf. Discover Magazine is to blame for his new knitting mania; he's convinced that he'll be able to make the dissected frog project in no time. (Well, he knew how to crochet when he was a kid, and he's decided that these sorts of handicrafts are exactly right for him these days: just mindless enough, but doing something useful, and combining his spacial awareness and manual dexterity with his love of knots.)

But seriously: isn't he precious?

I was starting to claim that I don't have a crafty bone in my body, but then I went to a Girls' Night with church, and we made Christmas decorations for our doors out of evergreen branches that had fallen during last Tuesday's wind storm. It was the perfect project: instant gratification, lots of floral wire (I love using floral wire), and both free and environmentally sustainable. Everything we used had been scavenged by Barb from our church (fallen branches, pine cones, and also cloth ribbons from off of presents and past decorations).

And look how Christmas-y my front door is now; can you believe I actually made this thing?

And then when Christmas is over, anything that's not compostable can be collected and used again next year! Completely brilliant.

Also also: they make super-fierce hats. Ky will demonstrate this fact:

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In other news, Christopher will be off to the Grey Cup this weekend! This will mark the first time that he gets to see the Roughriders play in the Grey Cup, and he is more than a little excited right now. And he'll get to see his parents and his brother! He's pretty well so excited, he could run all the way to Calgary right now.

Quick Saskatchewan (Somewhat) Randomness

• Hi guys.
  
• Yes, I've been home for nearly a week now, and yes I've been neglecting ye olde blog.
• I have one excuse: we left my laptop's power cord in Calgary. Laptop and cord will be happily reunited today.
• I've spent my week navigating the whole "Is this home? Or is the other place?" question.
• It particularly got interesting when we joined the sea of green jerseys at the Roughrider game last night. (I'm still getting my voice back.) And we were playing against BC. Boy, is here ever home.
• And yet I kind of felt like this prairie girl poseur, walking around with my SK plates and my Rider shirt, being all "Yes sir! I'm a permanent resident here! I don't live in Victoria!"
• Do you know what Chris and I've found strange? We've been noticing that Regina's becoming more multicultural than allegedly-cosmopolitan Victoria. Way less of a melting pot. Which is funny, considering the stereotypes.
  
• I went shopping for shorts. I've decided that, until styles for women's shorts change, I'm sticking to capris and skirts. (The long shorts taper in at the knees, which has the effect of "Hey guys! LOOK AT MY HIPS! LOOOOOK!" And we're not going to talk about Short-Shorts and the Pale-Skinned Woman.)
• I think I'm finally finished with Mall Stores Targeted at Girls Ten Years Younger Than Me. I went to a bunch of those before returning to my beloved Rickis. Would you believe that at Rickis I'm a size 6 and I'm a size 11 at Bluenotes? (And they only had one item of clothing in "size 11", and everything else was smaller?) Understatement of the year: the salesgirl at the latter store said, with a straight face, "Our clothes fit a little small."
• Can we please be rid of arbitrary numbering for women's clothing sizes?
  
• I helped make another wedding cake! It was pretty.
  
• And now I'd better get myself packed and on the road for North Battleford.
  

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.

Garage Sale Finds

We spent an entire Saturday garage sale-ing, and nearly all of our favourite finds came from one house, where we only actually spent $8. (We also bought a laptop bag for when Chris takes my old notebook computer to school, and a bunch of beautiful old maps.)

The sorts of things that we found at that One Magical Garage Sale were like the garage sales you find back home. (Seriously: no one else in this region knows how to put on a garage sale; they're all "we annually take a couple of unwanted items out of our basement, throw them on the lawn, overcharge you for them, and only keep the sale open for an hour and a half on a Saturday morning.") But here? At a sale on top of the magical-sounding Triangle Mountain? We found things like this:

Now we have a kitchen window that looks like my mother-in-law's

And this:

(I've always wanted to have a couple of old milk bottles of my own, because one Grandpa was a dairy farmer and the other was a milk man. Also, they make terrific vases.)

Plus piles and piles of board games, all for $1!

From 1956! And the game's name is in quotation marks!

I guess this is only one pile of board games. Note: we bought a second Clue board because the awesome 1956 one was missing the lead pipe and a couple of other things. And because it's pretty much my favourite game, right after Trivial Pursuit. I now have five different versions of Trivial Pursuit.

I've already played Clue twice, using the old-timey board, and won both times. Best day ever.

Adding to my list of cultural experiences

I finally went to a Roughriders game with my in-laws yesterday. I even got two Rider shirts so that I can represent back in Victoria.

(Actually, I'm wearing one of them right now. I'll just get a picture of it right now...

Cute, hey?)

Me. Going to a football game. Wearing green and cheering loudly. I don't know if you process how unfathomable this is. But I loved it! It's been years and years since I've been to a game, and I didn't really understand what was going on except for touchdowns back then. This time, it was hard not to get caught up in the emotion even from the beginning, moving along with the sea of green. (The excitement was heightened by the potential of going 5-0 for the first time since the 1930s.) It also helped sitting with Chris, who was explaining the plays as we went (it also helped that I've been watching football on TV with Chris for the past year). I found that I couldn't help but leap to my feet with the exciting plays. I found that I loved yelling as loudly as possible to throw off the opposing team's defense.

I even cheered loudly through the driving hail, and booed when they postponed the game for weather.

So, I had fun.

Again with the photo-blogging!

I'm back from the wedding up north (and it was lovely, by the way, and everything that a family wedding at a farm should be). Now I'm going to stay put here in Regina for a few weeks. It feels good to say that; we've hardly been in Regina since we got to Saskatchewan.

For your entertainment (either for those who know Ang, or for those who are interested in pictures of rural Saskatchewan and my extremely amateur attempts at photography), I've uploaded my pictures from the weekend onto Flickr. I devoted one set to pictures from the trip to Park Valley, since we stopped at the SkyTrail in Outlook with Chris's parents and walked the length of it. I also have a set of pictures devoted to Ang and Errol's wedding (with some pictures of the farm and the trip home thrown in), which includes a few shots of the next Teen Girl Squad picture (with an alternate Cheerleader, the original having been taken away suddenly by her husband's allergic reaction).

Highlight of last week

Sign of the sort of history nerd I am: last week, while I was on vacation, I got all excited about going to the North Battleford archives with my Dad. I'd run up to different friends and announce "Dad and I are going to the archives!" and they'd sort of back away and then say, "That sounds...fun?"

We were there to get these pictures:


They're of my grandpa*, from when he was the last milkman in the area to use a horse for milk delivery! He apparently ended up having his picture taken by Saskatoon's newspaper (the archives also gave us a digital image of the article), and the top picture is the one that ended up in the paper. But the newspaper gave their negatives to the archives, and so we have high resolution digital copies of the whole photo shoot. (The picture that ended up in the newspaper is particularly huge -- I had to resize it just so that Blogger would let me upload it.)

(Would you believe that we had no idea that such pictures of Grandpa even existed until this Spring? Mom happened upon the first picture by chance, when she ran across a display from the NB archives that included a big print of it, identifying the horse but not the milkman. It was included in the city archive's photo gallery online, as you can see here, even though you have to click on the picture of the horse to see Grandpa.)

* This is my father's father, husband of Little Grandma.

Launching out

Tomorrow morning I supervise a final. Right after that, I catch a ferry to Vancouver, pick up a couple of cases of personalized fortune cookies (wedding season is funny), and the next day we leave for Saskatchewan!

I can't believe summer's already here. We've been so busy, and then all of a sudden, bam! We're on holidays.

See you in Saskatchewan! (Unless the spirit strikes me to blog from Meg and Karl's house. Or to use the wireless internet at our KOA campsite...)

Reinforcing the stereotype

One of my students is from Regina. Which then began the "How do we know each other/how are we related" conversation that Saskatchewan people always end up having when they encounter each other out here.

It really isn't helping the whole "Everyone in Saskatchewan is related to each other/inbred" stereotype that persists on the smug West Coast.

Eating our celebratory chicken

And marching triumphantly around the house.

It's about time. Seriously.

(This is officially Chris's best day ever. He's weirdly silent right now; I think he's in sensory overload.)

Why we're so excited

I've noticed that Styleygeek has been kind enough to provide some background to the Australian politics that she's been discussing. And so I thought I'd explain, for those non-Saskatchewanians in the audience, why this particular Grey Cup is such a big deal to us.

Seriously, folks, this is High Stakes Football.

The Saskatchewan Roughriders have the country's most rabid football fans (I'm not saying this just as a Saskatchewanian -- it's well known). At any Rider game across the country, there's a serious contingent of fans in green, wearing watermelons on their heads.

Even out here in Victoria, it's hilarious. We -- with our flag flapping from our car -- drove past a truck today that had two small Roughrider flags flying from the front of his truck, and a giant flag flying from his hitch. The driver was painted green and had a watermelon on his head. Chris said he's seen him driving around the city for a few days now. They both honked and cheered. Some of our neighbours now have Saskatchewan flags in their windows. (The funny thing is that we've only seen Saskatchewan fans around the city.)

At the same time, we've only won the Grey Cup twice ever: once in 1966 and once in 1989. We haven't even gotten as far as the Grey Cup since 1997.

At the same time, we have a fun rivalry with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. (And, now that the Winnipeg Jets are defunct, the Blue Bombers are also Manitoba's only professional team, as the Roughriders are for Saskatchewan.) We play against each other every Labour Day Weekend. But we've never played against each other in the Grey Cup before.

And they haven't won a Grey Cup since 1990. In a league that currently only has eight teams. Everyone's saying a lot of "this is our turn" on both sides.

Okay, I'd better attend to my World's Best Nachos. (Baked in a skillet, topped with green and red papers, jalapeño peppers, avocados and both cheddar and Monterey Jack cheese.)

Apparently I'm more than a little excited today.

Green is the colour

Chris and I are both wearing green to church today (granted, his green shirt is more sage and mine is kind of grassy green; neither shirt is quite neon-green-that-stabs-you-in-the-eye Roughrider green). Chris is sitting at his computer, playing different Rider songs. Our car has become this Saskatchewanian monstrosity, with Saskatchewan plates, Roughrider front plate, and flappy green flags. I may have taunted my BC-born students on Thursday about the fact that we were going to the Grey Cup.*

Our (hopefully) celebration supper** is already started in the crockpot, and I think we're going to be eating some variation on nachos for lunch.

I don't even recognise myself anymore. At least I haven't suddenly found myself a season ticket holder, unlike some people I know.

(Note to Ariann: Chris just found a video clip of Taiwanese schoolchildren singing "Green is the colour." Are you or any of your family members involved in this? Update: actually, it turns out that Alec Couros made this video. Janny is thrilled in 3...2...)

* Fun/Depressing Fact: the Saskatchewan Roughriders last won the Grey Cup in the same month that the Berlin Wall came down. It was a big month in my household.

** I'm trying a recipe for Chicken With 40 Cloves of Garlic. This is the best day ever, even for that fact alone.

Times when I miss Saskatchewan

It's 5:00pm and nearly pitch black outside already.

Daylight Savings Time can go sit on a tack. (And I know that we've now gone off of Daylight Savings Time. But in Saskatchewan, they just stay on DST all year round! Not that I understand what that means. All I know is that it's dark outside and I'm grumpy.)

(However, if the Saskatchewan Party wins the election today, I will be making far fewer "I miss Saskatchewan" comments. You've heard it hear first. Please, Saskatchewan, don't mess up my province.)