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Staying Put in Canada


I’ve mentioned before that there was a possibility we’d be heading overseas to live for a while. Rob was pursuing a position on a project that would have taken us to the UK and then Saudi Arabia. It would have been a 4 or 5 year gig that would have allowed us to move on to the retirement/second career thing in the mountains a bit sooner than later.

But the job is off. I am not at liberty to go into details, but it had nothing to do with Rob’s suitability. He is, despite his ambivalence, a sought after commodity in his line of work. This was an employment case of “it’s not you, it’s us”. Literally.

So now that we know for sure we are staying put, things that have been on hold or plans that we discussed in only the vaguest of terms are suddenly wide open dreamscapes.

One of the most pressing issues is our home. Rob has been steadily renovating the house we live in for … ever. Or least as long as he’s lived here and that’s a decade plus of years.

And the house is not done. Not even close.

One might wonder that this has been a non-issue for me since moving here going on three years ago now. And it’s not that I am oblivious to my surroundings, though I come quite close to that sort of space blindness, it’s just that I am not a Better Homes and Gardens type. I have a serviceable kitchen, a comfy bed and a place to write. What else does a person need?

Rob thinks we need an addition. One that will attach a garage to the house, add a new master bedroom with en suite and provide us with a large kitchen area. This is not a small project that upends the house a room or so at a time. This is gutting the back yard, tearing out half of the back-end of the house and ripping up a deck that consumed the summer of 2008 and the cement sidewalks that consumed last summer.

On the plus side, an attached garage. I never had one until the last house I bought with Will. I’d lived in Des Moines for 15 years, parking vehicles on the street or driveway and dealing with the weather. The whole first year of Dee’s life was coping with baby carriers and rain or snow or bitter cold or blistering heat or whatever other plagues of Egypt came our way in terms of weather. I loved the attached garage. Somedays, especially after Will was nearly blind and precariously balanced, not having to load the two of them up after somehow getting them outside was the only thing I had to be thankful for all day.

A new master bedroom would give us three bedrooms upstairs and mean that Dee could have our old room, which is twice the size of her current room. We could ditch the playroom downstairs and contain all things child in her larger bedroom space. And she would have a walk-in closet. She would be in heaven although she would have serious en suite envy. She totally believes that she should have a bathroom of her own – attached to her room. Where does she get such ideas?

Aside from hearth and home, there is also employment to consider. Staying means looking for part-time work. I put working on hold for a variety of reasons, but one of them was not being sure we’d be around long enough for me to find and settle into a place before we’d pack up and be gone. Since I didn’t need a paycheck for our survival, it seemed unfair for me to take a job knowing I wasn’t going to be in it long.

My mother’s first words upon hearing we were staying was “Well, now you’ll be able to get a job.”

I start my yoga teacher training this weekend. My current instructor indicated that she would be agreeable to my teaching at her studio, once I am trained and that would be this summer, so yoga is a real possibility as part-time work. It is not a living by any means, but it’s somewhere to start. I want to someday have a studio, somewhere. Be a business owner. I think that is my upbringing. I love to write and blog, but they don’t feed my need for tangible employment. Probably seems silly to some, but I like the idea of going into work. Actually leaving the house kind of work.

We’ve talked about trading in the tent trailer for a holiday trailer, and using it for vacations. Rob wanted to travel the SouthWest U.S., but with the border as it is, I am less keen. And though Americans don’t seem to have any sense of impending doom, the news we get looks more and more dicey. In fact, this coming summer it seems it has never been a better time to stay out of the States.

I am only a tiny bit disappointed about not moving overseas. It could have been fun and interesting in a way that most people’s lives never get to be. But it would have been work and Dee would not have been as happy about it as we would have been. Our mothers were distraught, and the older girls, though they’ve put on brave faces, would have felt abandoned to varying degrees. It is not great for Rob. He gets to continue on as a workhorse and he deserves more. Everyone takes for granted that he will be there to fix things, give advice, loan money and generally make sure the trains run. I doubt that anyone but me really worries about his needs, or wants for him, when it comes to that. Having been in that thankless position, I know how long it can make a day seem.

Although Rob doesn’t think much of the place, there are far worse little towns than The Fort to call home. It will not be home forever, I don’t think, but it is good enough for now.

Funny, I just read a blog piece about “good enough” and how that kind of settling is a bad thing. I didn’t really agree.

The Cutesy FaceBook Breast Cancer Awareness Meme


Last week at some point I noticed that my female FB friends were posting colors as their status updates.

Blue. Black. Pink.

I saw only single colors. None of the “orange with lacey trim” updates. If I’d seen the latter, I would have realized what they were talking about despite the fact that I have donned undergarments only a handful of times in the last two years.

Puzzled and on the verge of finding it really annoying, I posted a query in my own status update bar and received several private messages informing me that it was a trick that we women were playing on the men.

Psst … post your bra color and they won’t know what we are on about … tee hee hee. Pass it on.

Only one of the messages I received informed me of the “raising awareness for breast cancer” aspect of the meme. Just one. So much for raising awareness because I think quite a few women playing along had no idea why they were supposed to be doing this. They thought it was a neat in-joke on the men who followed their feeds because as anyone who ever played the game “telephone” knows, passed along messages drop parts of or garble context as they travel.

Once I knew the purpose, I spent a whole 5 seconds contemplating it before going back to updating about me. I had no bra color to update, that’s true, but I am not kindly disposed towards awareness campaigns that are never ending, as breast cancer is, and I still have issues with the whole “raising awareness” for certain diseases and not others.

For example, my late husband died because of a genetic metabolic disorder. There are about a half dozen metabolic disorders and nearly all of them are life-limiting in gruesome, family destroying ways. They are rare. Which is their bad. And no famous people have been afflicted by them that I am aware of, which means no one can start a campaign that will touch the hearts of the masses. No fun little “remember the genetically afflicted” FB meme’s for the victims of metabolic syndromes, alas.

I have noticed, perhaps you have to, that diseases afflicting the famous in some way are the ones that most people hear the most about. Or diseases that are noticeable and inflict hardship. On men. Losing breasts is hard to cover up, so to speak and it strikes at the “heart” of how women are judged on the attractiveness/desirability scale – by men. If women were being afflicted with a cancer no one could see, or that wasn’t connected to men’s sexual needs in some way that doesn’t make them squeamish, we wouldn’t hear a thing about it. It wouldn’t matter. Breasts matter to men. So breast cancer is a big deal. Cervical cancer and ovarian cancer are inside and icky, and men don’t want to know about anything below the navel save that there is a hole they can stick themselves in, ergo no walks, ribbons or year round assaulting awareness campaigns for cancers of the naughty bits or plumbing.

Rob’s late wife had melanoma. Do you know what color the ribbon is? Black. Nothing frou-frou or girly or uplifting about that color or even the tiniest bit hopeful for melanoma victims. Do you hear much about melanoma except for the yearly half-assed media censure against tanning salons that usually come out around the time that little high school girls are getting ready for spring prom?

No. You don’t.

Heart disease actually kills the most women every year while we are being encouraged to believe that very moderate exercise is okay and that fat should be a beauty standard.

Lung cancer is slowly moving up on the killer of women scale. Did you know that either?  Probably not. Lungs, unfortunately for them, are hidden underneath the most important of female assets and therefore, don’t count.

Someone on my FB friend’s list was upset by the “backlash” against the campaign. She thought we were heartless people not fit to be good friends and play along because you never know who might someday be stricken. That’s her opinion. I can see why she might feel that way. I offered my experience with the meme and was basically told to “fuck off” by some of her friends, and so I did. In the yoga sutras, Patanjali advises use of the fourth key in some instances and this was one of them. But pretending that something was a good idea or properly executed when it clearly wasn’t is not the way to go about promoting anything but discord and does more to turn people away from awareness efforts than not.

I didn’t post my lack of bra status. It was dumb regardless of the true reason though probably not as dumb as Farmville.

Coy outreach programs = advertising fails, but that’s just my opinion, as always.

Men with Brooms: The Review


We watched two dvd’s on Friday night. First up was the family film The City of Ember based on a novel for tweens of the same name. Mick recommended it to us over the Christmas holiday and had given Dee a copy of the novel, though she is still a bit too young to read it to herself.

As usual with fare aimed at families, dead parents were plentiful. The main characters had two dead mothers and a dad between them and the girl’s grandmother dies in her sleep just to add to the authenticity. I should really get over this particular dramatic effect because I totally get where the plot point comes from – most children’s greatest fear is losing a parent in some way.  Dead parents throw a child into a world that requires them to take care of themselves which is another childish fear – who will take care of me?

I just wish that  kid movies did something more than play on well-recognized fears  or portrayed live adults in children’s lives as incompetent and/or stick up the bum prigs.

But the City of Ember wasn’t really too bad though it hammered a bit on the whole eco-collapse thing due to man’s wanton waste (not surprising as Tim Robbins was featured and it was produced by Tom Hanks).  Still, it had a lot to say about the current state of modern life as played out in the future effects of short-sightedness.

And the character who directs much of the problem-solving, as it is a bit of a mystery, is a girl. I like girl heroes.

Later, Rob picked the “grown-up” movie for himself and I, a Canadian comedy from 2002 titled Men with Brooms. It’s about curling and a fictional Stanley Cup of the curling world – The Golden Broom.

“I’ve seen this,” he told me. “And no one is dead.”

The film begins on a lake with beavers singing and quickly takes us to a father and daughter on a boat, retrieving a curling stone that somehow wound up on the bottom of the lake.

The young woman dives down to attach a line to the stone and then helps her father haul it up. Curling stones weigh 42 lbs after all.

And then the father drops dead of a heart attack and the young men he coached all show up for his funeral and are urged by their dead coach at the reading of his will to reunite one more time to compete for The Golden Broom.

Using a curling stone that is doubling as his urn.

Let’s see … one of the daughters is a recovering alcoholic who is in love with one of the men who left her sister at the altar ten years earlier resulting in that sister getting degrees from McGill and Harvard and becoming an astronaut. The vied for gentlemen in question has “issues”. He cheated the last time that the rink (curling team) competed in a match together.  His dad is a legendary curling champion who was away from home much of the time his wife was dying (yes, I know, I know) and father and son are estranged.  Another teammate is a drug dealer who can’t remember the names of the women he sleeps with. A third is an undertaker in a lifeless marriage.  The last man is desperate to impregnate his wife but has a single digit sperm count.

Oh and there is a lesbian local police chief being chased by a waitress that has no relevance to the plot in any way but keeps coming up.

And quacking beavers swarm the roads.

Rob says that beavers don’t quack but people who live in Ontario apparently don’t know this because the beavers in this movie make a noise that is very duck sounding.

Oh, and curling? Major sport. Major. Not like hockey is major but more like how softball rules in some parts of the midwest. I have a writing friend whose son is heavy into curling. It’s like being a little league baseball mom.

The soundtrack for the film is all Canadian and it rocked. The film itself picked up speed and meandered away to subplots but was charming and funny. Leslie Nielsen, who hails from the Northwest Territories, plays the estranged father who grows “magic mushrooms” and is quite good – and surprisingly attractive for such an old man.

It’s not as heavy-duty a movie, and already I’ve forgotten much of the point of it, but I don’t lament the time lost and that’s hard to say about so many movies these days.