Mostly lemon based

Category: Canada

  • Retirement should be fine.

    So, despite cramming in many hours of working on the house, I’ve spent the past few days catching up on some reading. You may recall that I spent some time at Mr. B’s Emporium, having what they term a ‘book spa’. It was a delightful*, and the charming chap who spent time talking to me about my tastes, and even coped with my complete mental block on names of authors I like (not uncommon) turned up with a massive stack of books. I’ve read my way through some of them, others lurking on a list of ‘buy when you see them’ have popped up in second hand shops and thus been added to the pile.

    He / It have added some new awesome authors to my ‘to buy when seen’ list, too**. Indeed, with some effort on my part I’ve managed to squash the urge which says “I MUST WORK MORE”, and have actually sat last night and this morning with Zoo City (finished it in the very long bath I took), and have relaxed a teensy tiny bit.

    It’s weird trying to crush the ‘BUT I SHOULD BE DOING SOMETHING’ urge which hides behind me, leaping out. Yes, we need to get the house ready to flog for when we go to Canada. Yes, I need to prep for the exam***. But none of it needs to be done right this instant. Although I’m quite keen to get the bathroom fully in service for Christmas.

    Anyway, I have delighted this morning in not doing anything that could be construed as work (watched ‘The West Wing’ over breakfast, read Zoo City, had bath (and read more Zoo City), made lunch and ate it watching MASH), and now I’m going to go the garage (in the rain, no less), and do some present making. Just like Santa.

    Yay.

    * The only very minor discomfiture about the whole experience was that it was a bit chilly. It’s always a bit chilly in there, and I forgot to take warm socks.
    ** Dorothy B Hughes and Lauren Beukes for example.
    *** The book arrived today full of Canadian Exam Prep questions.

  • Slicing the cupcake.

    So, having submitted and paid for the Nova Scotia nurses board registration*, that’s given us a sort of time line for departure. Not a fixed “we’ll be leaving at point X” timeline. But a rough idea timeline. 6 months for registration, a few months for finding a job and selling the house, and lo, we should be gone.

    We’d also like to do some travelling. And saving up. But essentially. Timeline.

    Which means that however I slice the cupcake (and I’ve tried many ways), I don’t think I can really schedule doing the Minor EV conversion before we go. I’d love to. I look at the sums and say “we’ll spend probably a grand on fuel, just going to my mum’s”. I think, every time I fill up the car with petrol ‘oh god, I hate petrol cars’. I despise supporting Esso, Shell and BP in their destruction of the environment. Whenever I’m stuck in a traffic jam I just am filled with this unutterable disappointment in the modern world, and in the fact that my friend Nikki was so ahead of the curve on this, and I’m still trailing along.

    But it’s a simple case of “we aren’t rich enough for that”. The old adage about quick/quality/price kicks in, and to do the project quickly, to the standard I want to do it, would cost vastly more than I have. To do the project at all requires me saving up some cash, but to do it to the standard I’d like to do it, it’s simply not going to happen at this point. And as John pointed out yesterday – I don’t want to get half way through and then need to move, and need to move with an immobile minor. Not a good plan.

    On the plus side, most of the bits I’ve got will remain ‘good enough’ for the project. The DC-DC, the pump, the motor and the controller are all fine. I’ll just have to package them up and ship them over… Which is irritating. But the disappointment of having pulled the Minor off the road for months, only to put her back on (when I get the diff fixed) with no improvement in her environmental impact is staggeringly sucky.

    The only upside is that when we get to Canada, having a car will be handy, and Rebecca is likely to have to step into that role rather quickly.

    Anyhow, I need to get on with cooking, grouting and painting. So, back to the grindstone with me. :)

    * So they can tell me whether I’m eligible to sit the exam, which we think/hope I am, which will mean I can sit the exam and then register as a nurse, and then get a job there**
    ** Anyone want a registered emergency nurse in Nova Scotia?

  • Eeek.

    So along with shipping everything in the world (USian family prezzies, Ebay soldness) I also sent the Registration documentation to Nova Scotia. Eek.

    Good eek, but eek.

    I’ve been working on the bathroom… and Kathryn’s present… so after lunch I’ll be going ‘back into the bathroom’ with the sander and a vacuum. Wish me luck.

  • Thanksgiving

    So, we did thanksgiving. I realise Turkey day has either been-and-gone or not-arrived-yet depending on where in the world that you are, but in our bit of the world it’s not given as a day off, and thus we tend to have it at the weekend, when we can arrange days off, and our friends all have days off. It is a fairly effective system, and this year, the many gathered in our house for an inordinate quantity of food.

    The turkey, having had a delightfully exciting, and thankfully uneventful ride home:
    As the Beatles once sang, she's got a Chicken to ride... Although this time it was a turkey...

    Was cooked. It was a 6.5kg turkey this year – I think that’s about the same size as last year – although this year we went with a different recipe. The turkey was, as usual, insanely expensive (we get really good turkey from a very respected place, because if we’re going to kill a damn-huge-animal we’re going to have it treated well before hand. That and they taste excellent), so the ride back before cooking was fraught with terror. That and I also had a large number of potatoes and two bottles of booze on my back, so whenever I stopped was thrown forward with some force. Anyhow, cooking. Cooking was simple and it was ready more or less on time. Again, the pop-up timer didn’t work, but the juices ran clear, and the meat looked right, so we ate it. I’m not dead yet. :)

    Many good friends and associated miniature people descended (one of my oldest friends managed to make it down, too, which was excellent), and much food was eaten (seriously, every year I make the same eyes-stomach related error), a large quantity of which was brought by our friends, thus saving my sanity*. The small people watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, and later on Nikki got excited about The Birth of Cool again. I also shared my Serbian EP, or at least, the side with the songs we all are likely to recognise.

    We chilled out, chatted, digested, ate Kate’s ‘Heavenly Hash’ which is a concoction of cream, marshmallow, fruit, and coconut. Insanely unhealthy, but excellent :)

    And then people dispersed, and we loaded up the dishwasher, washed up, and went to bed. Pretty much perfect, as Thanksgivings go.

    And then, in a shock move, Kathryn and I also had today off, to chill out and recharge after the franticness of yesterday and the last few days of cleaning. We spent the day discussing moving plans, and are more or less settled on a course of action. The only rather fearsome bit being the price. The beginning of the nursing registration process is a cheerfully insane $469.20 (CAN).

    * Last year, I did a large chunk of the cooking of the entire meal by myself, before Kathryn came home. All of the food was prepped and cooked in our kitchen. It was an error, in so far as whilst the food was yummy, I was on the brink of insanity by the time it was all ready, which was also very late.

  • Where to land

    So, we’ve started looking at moving to Canada again. Where once we had a simple plan*, we now have a diffuse vague notion with a definitive desired endpoint**. The thing is complicated by the fact we would like to end up near Kathryn’s family, but Kathryn’s family are near BC, and BC is expensive.

    On the other hand, being anywhere in Canada means that visiting Kathryn’s family becomes much cheaper, wherever we land up (well, I suppose, if we went to very far northern bits of Nunavut or the Yukon it might feasibly still be similarly expensive, I’ve no idea, but they’re kinda more remote than we were thinking).

    The thing is also complicated by the fact we’ve looked at a lot of Canadian towns and been unimpressed by the architecture***. I think something I need to get used to is that I’m not going to be seeing Tudor timber frame buildings on shopping streets anymore. And that stone and brick architecture is something that I’m just not going to be looking at so much. But there are things I think are attractive that you can do with timber frame buildings, and a lot of the ones we’ve seen have just been butt-ugly****. Or dull.

    Obviously we’re not going to rock up and buy a house. That would be dumb. But since I’ll be signing my life away for indentured servitude in a deal to get money to move over there, we want to land up somewhere we’ll like, and since it’s going to be probably for 3 years (otherwise we have to pay back the forgivable loan) then it better be somewhere where we can start putting down some roots.

    Having been treated to the oldness of Toronto when I visited (which has some gorgeous neighbourhoods) and having seen Vancouver, trying to find somewhere which fits with my European sensibilities*** and Kathryn’s Craftsman style desires, and fits our feeble income, is proving to be challenging.

    Indeed, our selection criteria for places to consider is basically:

    – Has a hospital with some sort of Emergency Department.
    – Has something cultural going on such that we can feed our love of culture.
    – Has not hideous property prices.
    – Is lesbian friendly.
    – Is fairly rural.
    – Is not hideously far from a decent size city (to get our fix of museums and theatre occasionally).
    – Looks pretty.

    Opens up a lot of the country, then excludes a fair swathe of it as well. We’ve basically looked at random small towns the country over…. Still poking at it is fun :)

    * Move to Vancouver, BC.
    ** Move to Canada, we’d like to be somewhere fairly rural.
    *** And I realise this is wholly cultural, and because of where I’ve been brought up.
    **** Which is not to say that there aren’t pretty houses, but the areas we’ve randomly looked at have either been utterly gorgeous and completely impossibly remote (with no hope of employment) or butt-ugly boxes.

  • Distance

    So, the plan remains to move to Canada. As those of you who are up on the whole plan thing are aware, this has been the plan for a long time, and we poke this plan with pointy sticks every so often just to check its not curled up in the corner and died.

    It hasn’t, the plan is still the same. Kathryn found somewhere that looks gorgeous, and there are, incredibly, jobs posted to work in the ER of the local hospital. Well, I say the ER. They are to work in the entire local hospital, including the ER, because the entire local hospital has fewer beds than my current ER. I was going to say ‘less than my current ER including the observation ward (8 beds)’ but then I realised the addendum was unnecessary. It’s actually fewer beds than majors and resus combined, completely disregarding the trolleys in minors.

    Wow, that’s dinky.

    So I’d guess that you just are a nurse there, and that anything that comes in is ER’d right there on the spot. So that all sounded quite fun. And the area is simply gorgeous. The photos of it just make my soul sing right there and then.

    Valley.
    (looksie, more)

    I just look at those photos and will myself into being there. So I took it upon myself to explore the two slight problems that exist with this concept. See, you may have noticed that we’re not straight. There’s a certain amount of gayness in our union, and communities out in the boonies can be less than accepting of such things. They can also be awesomely, totally pro such things. Indeed, Hebden Bridge is one fine example of exactly how cool places can be (all things considered*). But some places can be less pleasant, and if, say, you were going to move thousands and thousands of miles and landed up somewhere that was filled with homophobes, that would be bad. So that was problem the first. I have no idea whether they’re pro-or-anti gay, all I’ve managed to discover is that the area is represented by the NDP, which is positive. But hardly a resoundingly solid answer. But at least it wasn’t a *bad* answer. No, it’s the other one which makes things a bit sticky.

    So, we found the job spec for the nurse there, and there, after the happy little ‘3-5 years ER experience’ was their Mission Statement. It was….god-y. Quite god-y. And we posited the (optimistic) possibility that it was a phrase more honoured in the breach than the observance… So I’d held onto that until today. When I watched a sort of, well, I suppose an infomercial for the hospital and it turns out that it is really quite a problem, in that the hospital is part of the United Church of Canada, and they’re quite shouty about it. Well, maybe not shouty, but certainly… it’s something they mention and say it’s an important part of how and why they do what they do.

    If you can imagine me deflating somewhat, that’s what happened. See, I’m not Christian. I’m sort of vaguely Buddhist, if I needed to put any kind of fixed thing on it, but even that’s really overstating it. But being in a strongly Christian workplace? That would work out to be rather friction filled, I suspect. I’ve helped patients maintain their faith, that’s fine, but I think I would struggle and find myself really uncomfortable in a place where it seems expected to make Christianity part of your life. Ah well. Never mind.

    And I’d gone and subscribed to this blog’n all. Still, I guess it’ll give me a flavour of life in remote Canada, anyhow. Feh. So I guess we keep on looking :-/

    * Don’t you just love NPR? I love NPR almost as much as I love the BBC.

  • Restless self syndrome

    So, the wanderlust is back. It’s been back for a while. That urge to move to the middle of nowhere; to some small remote place and be in the world. It’s funny, the cacophony made by the part of me that wants to be away from all of city and civilisation as it fights with the geeky bit of me that loves technology. The two don’t have to be separated, but it’s certainly easier to have high speed internet when you’re in a city, really.

    Part of my frustration with the world today is that faint feeling of spinning my wheels*. That I’m ready to move to that phase of our lives that involves upping sticks and moving to Canada, and the fear that that move might not work out, and the plain simple fact that it’s not happening now anyway. All that kind of restless energy that doesn’t really get you anywhere, but does leave you wondering whether you’re doing life wrong. Anyhow, so that’s that.

    * pretty much literally today! ;)

  • ‘m okay!

    So, my good friend Nikki rang me up after the last post, concerned that I sounded very down and wanting to check I was okay. She’s kind and thoughtful like that.

    So I thought I’d just say, I’m okay. It’s perhaps a healthy dose of realism time. I’ve been sticking solidly to the “the house will sell for enough and we’ll go to Canada” belief because of the options we’ve got it’s my favourite. To use the house metaphore, it’s the one I’ve built foundations for, I’d been looking at the plans and preparing to get contractors. It worked thusly:

    Buy house
    Fix house
    Sell house, use funds thus obtained to enable us to
    1) Go to Canada
    2) Me to pay off *all* my debts
    3) Have some savings to live off in Canada if it all goes pearshaped
    And I’d added:
    4) Hopefully have enough that some of those savings can be scooped off for our notional world trip in a few years time.

    There wasn’t really a plan B. I knew that the housing market was going to plummet in just the way that bricks do, I just hoped it did it after I’d (now) we’d sold. Unfortunately, my hopes lacked the strong foundations of reality.

    The new ‘plan’, for want of a better word, is to finish the house (because whether we’re living in it, or selling it, I’d rather like it not to niggle like a splinter. The unfinished floor in the lounge, the dirty old door* in our shiny new kitchen), get it valued and make the rest of the plan based on the outcome of that.

    – Sell and get to Canada ASAP
    – Sell and move somewhere else in the UK (I don’t need to clear my debts to do that**)
    – Enjoy the lovely environs of Slough.

    I’m rooting for A, hoping that at worst B comes off and trying to think about ways to make C more bearable. Ironically, the house is coming together to be a really lovely place. The garden should be beautiful this year, and even more so next; there should be fruit and fresh veg, herbs and gorgeous flowers…

    If it weren’t for the builder’s yard right behind it would be glorious*** .

    Anyway, so I’m okay. I’m just…. disappointed.

    In other news, I just realised that I’ve owned Rebecca 17 years. That was quite a shock. And in another quirky thing I’ve never noticed before; she was first registered on my mum’s birthday. How bizzare is that? It’s funny how coincidence pops up on you.

    Now, What shall I do with this last hour before I go to work? I’ve swept the bedroom (and put clothes away), and looked depressingly at my Student Loan deferment thing (I think I may finally have to actually start paying back the loans****). Hrm, maybe I’ll watch some Holmes on Holmes.

    Tomorrow is another day, and I’m hoping a day when bits of DAF might turn up.

    * Needs the 1960s hardboard overcoat taking off, then it needs stripping and painting.
    ** I don’t, I suppose, technically need to clear my debts to move to Canada, but it really makes everything a lot more complicated if I don’t. And it makes living much harder to do. It’s bad enough here where I can go and chat and shuffle my lack of money around. There… well…
    *** It *was*, when I moved in, a wild untended lot. It was pretty.
    **** Confusingly my loans are owned by two separate companies. I’m not sure if I’ll get two separate student-loan-deferment letters, and need to make payments to two separate companies. That would be distressing. But only one of them has been flagged as ‘needing payment’ in this letter. It appears I won’t make my dream of never paying them back by remaining a poorly paid wage-slave.

  • Visitation

    So, Lauren and Chrissy are coming down today, we’ve given the place a little bit of a once over (bathroom needs doing, and that’ll do us); bizzarely this has prompted me to finally (finally’s a bit extreme really, it’s only been a week or two); get around to replacing the light switch in the kitchen. Not that there was anything wrong with it, apart from being manky. And the 1970s decision to replace screws with plastic? Not so hot.

    We’d taken it off the wall while we painted and for the last couple of weeks it’s been held loosely in place by one of the plastic screws which, while I attempted to undo it, snapped in half.

    Still, a pair of pliers and some patience had it out of the wall, and the kitchen light switch replaced with a more modern looking one. I then wandered upstairs and did the two bedrooms, but, annoyingly can’t do the stair-one (which really needs replacing because the rocker’s awful on it) because while I stood in B&Q and thought about the number of lightswitches that need replacing (7) and therefore opted to buy a multipack (5) I didn’t think that the stair ones (2, but one’s a double and was going to wait anyway) are two-way. Well, one of ’em is.

    Still, it’s handy that I didn’t get all 6 because I actually have enough places to use the lights up, it’s just annoying I couldn’t do that one at the top of the stairs while the power was off.

    I also spent 5 minutes throwing the plastic ducting onto the wall (ducting? pipe-things, y’know, for wire) by the extractor fan – thus making it look marginally neater than the wire trailing across the wall. This is, one presumes, one of the few benefits of waking up at 6:30 every day.

    In other news: this is making me want to live in Vancouver (community market! zines! cool bookstores!). It’s funny, because the house is finally getting to the stage where it’s honestly just a pleasant place to spend time. It’s light and airy, and warm (most of the time) and clean, (much of it). And if it were in Canada I’d actually really like it. I do really like the house. Just it’s in the wrong place. And we need a garage.

  • Moving away

    In a virtual sense. More contemplation on Canada*.

    One of the noteable things about nights and, indeed, the days after nights is that I’m tired and I spend more time than normal in a slightly less than positive mood contemplating things. Not out-right negative, but tired and slightly low. The tiredness takes the edge off happiness, somehow.

    I tend to counter this with lots of loud music and smiling (‘cos your brain can’t tell the difference and feels happier).

    Anyway, one of the interesting things that occurs to me is the distance between me and my past. Most people have links to their past. Often close links. For long and complex reasons I’m not likely to go into here, an event in my past made a lot of what happened to me seem in my childhood seem like it happened to a different person.

    And I suppose it did, in many ways. The person I was then and the person I am now have very little in common. It’s not like a whole separate person distinction, there’s a connection there, but it’s tenuous and weak; like melting strands of cheese, between me now and my memories of me then.

    And each step I take in my life takes me further from me then. But the things that have happened to me, then, now, they very much make up the person I am. Experience made me who I am, so however far distant I may feel to a somewhat unhappy past, the pain of my dad’s death, and however happy I am now, when I’m tired the strands of the past sometimes wrap around me and I find myself looking back.

    What interests me is how impossibly hard I seem to be to link to my old life. I’ve changed so much, and so far separated myself from me then, that with the exception of the links I’ve deliberately maintained (one friend, one person who found me) there’s almost nothing that links me to that childhood past. And I’m slowly moving on from my dad. I know I’ll never be free of the sadness of him dying, because he meant so much to me, and he’ll never see how happy I am now – because when I came out he supported me – and talked to my mum to help her come to terms with it all.

    It seems strange to consider that in a year’s time I’ll be living in a new country, with many new people around me, a new job, a new life. But there won’t be a new me there. There’ll be the me with those fragile, insubstantial links to a life lived in another place and time.

    * Interruption to thought process: It’s amazing how bad the acoustics of a Morris Minor at 70mph are. There’s entire instruments on The Ting Ting’s album I’d not noticed were there.