The Adventures of Yarn Salad

unbounded joy

2012-03-01T12:48:00.001-08:00

I have spent much of this morning feeling happy. Not for any particular reason, as in we are still waiting for news of my immigration and I'm still waiting for a big chunk of money to fall into my lap, but I feel good. Jubilant. Full of joy.

I'm on to Day 11 of the Chopra Meditation challenge. I have started reading the works of Doreen Virtue who is the leading expert on angels, who also writes about crystals and chakras. Yesterday I finally encountered Louise Hay, whose book You Can Heal Your Life has passed through my hands hundreds of times when I worked at the library but that I had not encountered until I watched it in DVD form yesterday.

I started working my way through A Course in Miracles earlier this year and have been enjoying the videos of Earl Purdy as a guide to the Course.

My mind is exploding.

The message I'm getting from all of this is that I can change my mind. And once I change my mind, the reality that I am experiencing changes with it. I can look at my present situation as being stuck in Canada without my husband, or I can look at it as a gift of time to heal, recover, rediscover and learn more about myself while I have this time of solitude. And a gift of time it is. Every night when I go to bed, I go through my daily 'gratefuls'. I am grateful for my husband. I am grateful for my cat. I am grateful that I get to spend so much time with my beloved friends in their house. I am grateful for the food in my belly, the roof over my head, a warm bed, clean air, safe drinking water, my awesome truck (I love my truck!), knitting, literacy, for my health, etc. The list can go on and on, depending on how soon I actually want to fall asleep. The point is that I count my blessings to the Universe every night and don't dwell on the lack. If I dwell on the lack, the Universe will manifest further lack.

So.... I am changing the way I think and the way I speak. I am trying to speak only in positives, and eliminate negatives. I would like to be free from saying or thinking 'should', which is not a very helpful or loving word. Also, I am speaking what are called affirmations. One of the messages from the material I encountered yesterday was that if you pray and wish for something, telling the Universe that you want or would like something, then it will perpetuate your want, rather than helping to manifest the thing you want into your present reality. Therefore, I drew some pictures of things that will manifest soon in my life:

This is me and Dan and Sam, driving in my red truck to North Carolina. I normally would have redrawn this picture in ink, but I was just too excited and left it as is, in pencil. So what is not really visible here is me knitting, or how unthrilled Sam looks while we're driving. Also of note: I need to knit some seat belt cosies for the truck!

This is the important one. This is me and Dan and Sam, all together in North Carolina. I think I will actually redraw this one, make it larger, and post it somewhere visible in my current location.

While writing my morning pages this morning, it occurred to me that I could also draw pictures of what it would look like for me to not have any worries about money. What would I be doing with my time here (while waiting for immigration) if I wasn't worried about money? To be honest, I wouldn't really go too crazy with spending, since I want to keep the amount of stuff I move to the US to be minimal - I can buy things when I get there. But what would I buy while I'm still here? I would be able to contribute more to the family food budget here at Backyard Feast. I would buy a few more art supplies. I would buy some exercise clothing and equipment. Really though, I would be just happy to pay off my debts. I would love to cross the border debt-free. Then, when I start earning an income in North Carolina, I can put that money towards buying a house and replenishing my yarn stash and wardrobe. See? These are all things I have to be drawing pictures of. As I am imagining my life in North Carolina, I am going to get really good at drawing the map of the state. That can only be a good thing.

the four needs of the heart

2012-02-28T11:16:00.000-08:00

I have to blog about this right now while it's fresh in my mind. Normally I would just write in my journal about it but I think it is profound enough to share with you.

As I mentioned, I am working my way through the Chopra Center's 21-day meditation challenge. Today was Day 9. The meditations are getting more and more intense, and each day I find more resonant than the previous day.

I am in a head space right now where my mind is tingling with learning. I have always believed that everything happens for a reason and that when we are meant to receive messages, all we need to do is pay attention. I have started praying recently, and have asked for all kinds of help, and my prayers have started being answered. The message that came through in the Chopra meditation today was exactly what I needed to hear.

Davidji led today's meditation and in it he discusses the four needs of the heart: Attention, Affection, Appreciation, Acceptance. We were invited to chant these four words as mantras, either silently or out loud. As I was chanting these mantras, I flood of realizations came into my head. I may have these needs, but so does everyone else! I can apply this to the stressful family situation at hand. This will help me to have a more peaceful and loving response when and if the phone call comes. I can be mindful of their need for attention, affection, appreciation, acceptance. All negative emotion comes from fear, and that fear is a call for love. I can offer love. I can be loving to my relatives who are expressing these negative emotions.

Now I must tell you something. I have started working my way through A Course in Miracles. Since I have made this decision and begun this study, lots of interesting changes have been happening in my mind and in my life. I was introduced to the videos of Earl Purdy, who teaches the Course. I spent ten years being a Pagan and have never felt so close to the Divine as I do now, and this coming after two years of rejecting religion and spirituality outright. This is the reason I have come to accept why I am delayed in immigration - because I have a lot of learning to do right now. I am praying for the processing of my green card (and hopefully you are too - if so, thanks!), but in the mean time I have made peace with my situation.

getting in the way of my lovingkindness

2012-02-28T10:31:00.000-08:00

I have encountered some criticism lately. First about my hair and then about blogging about personal details about my life. This criticism has come from family members.

The family member that came down hard on me for not following the status quo (as in vanity) offered an unsolicited apology the following day, which I accepted and have forgiven them for. They realized that they had missed the point entirely about me shaving my head: that it was something I had always wanted to do, that it was a letting go of my past, and stepping away from vanity. So I'm happy to report that got resolved.

In the last few days there has been a maelstrom of emails sent and phone calls made - not to me - about my blog, its contents, and how I write. Harsh criticism cloaked as 'concern'. This has brought about considerable stress and I am considering how to do deal with these unjust and irrational criticisms in a way that will keep me in the state of compassion, lovingkindness, and peacefulness. It's not easy. I'm not sure how to respond, really.

I blogged about the situation last night, then deleted the post ten minutes later. It was too inflammatory, and it might have caused more of a problem than the original post. It is my compulsion to write, you see, writing is how I ground myself and how I organize my thoughts.

I have been told to expect a phone call from one of the three parties that are all riled up about the content of the blog post from a month ago where I mentioned my depression and poverty. In preparation for this phone call, I wrote pages and pages of things I might say in response, in an attempt to practice lovingkindness and forgiveness on the page. I am a Tiger and have been victimized by bullies in the past, so when I know something like this is coming, I seriously get my back up.

I'm going to guess these three critics of my life and writing aren't regular readers about my blog, or they would have also come down on me hard for shaving my head. But in the off chance they are, I have this to say to you:

Only I get to make the decisions about my life.

Sure things are sometimes difficult, but on the whole I am happy and my relationship with my husband is solid.

If you have an issue with what I am saying then tell me rather than going behind my back and kicking up drama.

This behaviour your a displaying shows me the level of respect you have for me and subsequently the amount of my trust you shall have.

I forgive you for not understanding the whole story, I forgive you for thinking ill of me, I forgive you for causing me pain.

May you be filled with lovingkindness. May you be well in body and mind. May you be safe from inner and outer danger. May you be truly happy and free.

What can I tell you?

2012-02-26T16:32:00.000-08:00

I haven't felt like blogging lately. There. I've said it. On the one hand, when I'm doing things and taking photos of things, I think about their blog-ability, but then I think well, if it fits into 140 characters, then I'll just tweet it. I know I have a few readers who aren't on Twitter, so I apologize to you.

I'm still knitting a lot, and I've started meditating. This week of the Sounds True course, we are to meditate for an hour each day. So far, after two weeks of meditating every day, I have already experienced the benefits of meditation by having improved sleep.

A few mornings ago, just as I was getting up, I turned my head the wrong way and pinched a nerve in my neck. This led to subsequent shooting pain down my shoulder and back, had really impaired my mobility. This used to happen to me a lot, like once a month or so, but it's been quite a while since the last time. It's annoying for a number of reasons, but I am loathe to take medicinal relief for this. Muscle relaxants make me feel dopey and drunk, and I don't like feeling like I don't have control. Ibuprofen could help but I don't want to be reliant on pain killers. I take only the bare minimum to get me through. Hot water bottle, rest, baths. I have also decided that a bit of physical activity is good for me, so I have been out walking, doing gentle yoga, and pulled a couple of unwanted bushes out of the garden yesterday. Another night or two and I'll be back to normal.

My bread production has slowed down, I have put the sourdough starter in the freezer. We had all gained some weight (!) in the time I was baking bread so I thought it might be wise to take a break.

I'm also doing this thing on Twitter called #plankaday. The idea is that you hold yourself in plank position, as in like a pushup but you have your forearms under the ground, shoulders directly over your elbows, for as long as you can. I'm up to a minute. The idea is you hold yourself rigid and it builds core strength in your abdominals and lower back. Then you tweet about having done it.

I am currently listening to The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon as an audiobook through Audible. Claire and Jamie are in North Carolina!

Today was my first day in a month that I have been sad. I wasn't flat-on-the-floor depressed, just a little down. And that could be hormonal. Let's face it: I'm a pre-menopausal woman. When I had my tubes tied, they told me I could experience early onset menopause, having not had children. My first thought when they told me was "great! Maybe I'll be done with acne then!" I did go through the five-month course of Accutane in 2007, which more or less cleared up my severe nodular acne, but I do still get little breakouts from time to time.

I have also been reading a lot. Like a lot. In fact, I have discovered that I am able to get through some of these books, cover to cover, in less than a day. Okay okay I'll tell you. I'm reading about - how to even describe it? - lots of things: animal communication, psychic abilities, spirituality, meditation, Reiki, etc. There is a lot going on in my head that I'm still not able to set down into one coherent blog post, but I am encountering lots of similar messages that confirm some truths for me. At the same time, I am confronted with my own ugly truths. I want to be less judgmental and be filled with lovingkindness. I want to feel inner peace. I want to be able to forgive easily. After two years of having declared myself irreligious, I am once again finding myself in prayer. It's kind of blowing my mind.

I thought I had some photos of all my current knitting projects but apparently I don't. With my 2012 knitting plan to knit 12 hats this year, I have five done already, and I have only blogged about one! So I'll get on that soon.

Still no word on immigration. If the "five more months" thing from early January is true, then that will have me here another three and a half months. But I have a plan, see, and you can help! Here is my plan: the next step is the third Notice of Action. This will mean a package comes to me that tells me how to set up my appointments for the immigration interview and health check in Vancouver. I would like that to happen in the next week. Then, with everything being approved, all they need to print my green card and send it to me. With a miracle, this will happen in mid - late march. Then Dan books a flight and fly here for Easter weekend, where he'll get to see his family before we start our journey south on Easter Monday.The good people reading this blog may just help by praying for me, that I may be reunited with my husband soon so I can begin my life in North Carolina.

This is my plan, Universe, and I expect a miracle.

check one off my bucket list

2012-02-19T16:53:00.000-08:00

Adventures of my hair continue.

Today I had a bath, then decided it was time to give my hair a trim. I wasn't especially fond of the shade of auburn it was turning out to be and was thinking about how long it will be before it grew out long enough for me to cut it off leaving my natural colour. I got out the scissors. Snip, snip. It's not easy cutting your own hair when it's really short, especially the back, so I got the clippers out. Just to do the back. Not being in any way adept with these things, I wasn't able to make a smooth transition from the shaved back of my head to the two inch strands on the top. I could have waited and asked the Toni or the Skipper for help with tidying it up but... I thought no, I'll just keep going.

And so I did it. I have always wanted to have a shaved head, and not necessarily completely bald. but this will certainly do.

The camera only catches a few of the whites, but there are a lot more than is shown here. And there are a lot more than there was before I started dyeing my hair blond in 2010. So I come to face the reality of my hair, the ebbing of my vanity, and, surprisingly, the freedom that is really short hair! My first thought when I looked at myself was: I look like Pema Chodron! Which, considering she's an awesome Buddhist and all, is not such a bad thing.

See, changes are afoot in my head, and I'm reading and studying and learning so much right now it's hard to gather it all into a group of words and organize them into a blog post. I have started meditating. In fact, I started an eight-week meditation course presented by Sounds True (it's free!) last week and have been meditating every day. I am also beginning a new yoga practice. I have long been a fan of yoga and was once quite adept, but have been shocked lately to see how inflexible I have become. I must get my body back to that supple and limber state.

I have had to face the music with something else as well: I have gained some of my weight back. I stepped on the scale again and felt only a little discouraged but have new resolve. We have been having an awful lot of fun with food here at Backyard Feast, and I think we have all three of us gained weight since I've been here. (Sorry!) I think I had better slow down on the bread making. I want to have more and bigger salads. I'm not employed and while I have some 'duties' (tending the chickens when my friends aren't home), my schedule is my own so I need to organize and manage my time better, especially now that I have new things in my routine like meditation, yoga, and reading (I have been reading a lot of books from the library lately). This is all to say more changes are in the cards for me and while I have been sorely neglecting my readers, it's really for my own good. I have lots to tell you, all in good time.

knitting content! I finished a hat!

2012-02-18T10:48:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry I've been so AWOL lately, dear reader. I have been extremely busy doing lots of stuff and I realize I haven't given you any knitting content in a long time. So here is my most recent finished object.

It's called the Hermione Hat. See, I woke up one morning with a strong compulsion to knit something in red, the colour of the base chakra, Muladhara. Don't ask me why I'm suddenly interested in chakras, that's a long story that I'll get around to sometime. At any rate, I went through my small and dwindling stash to see what red yarn I had. This I bought when I was working at Knits by the Sea in Tofino. It's Blue Sky Alpaca sport, I had two skeins of it. I went to Ravelry's advanced search and asked what I could do with this amount of yarn. It said, among other things, this hat! It's a free pattern, I had the needles, and I could get started just as soon as I wound up my yarn into balls.

Sigh. I so desperately wish I had a swift and winder. It's not so bad doing it by hand when it's a skein of worsted or heavier yarn, but when you are doing, say, sock yarn, that has 400+ yards, that means winding for like 20 minutes, precious knitting time! I just can't afford a swift & winder at the moment, so I go by hand.

At any rate, this project consumed me until I got it done, and I couldn't put it down until something like 11pm on Wednesday night (started on Monday). It's pretty. I like it. It's soft. Today I will cast on for an accessory to match this, with colours that are next up the chakras.

me, redrawn

2012-02-12T16:03:00.000-08:00

I would love to have skills with drawing and illustrating. Once I had big plans to make an illustrated history of my family. Skills require practice though, and I have only ever dabbled in drawing, so no great skill. Thus, whenever I have drawn myself, I have always drawn me as a stick figure.

Stacey as stick figure

In mid January, I decided it was time, suddenly to cut off all my hair. Part of it is that I was not interested in maintaining the artificial colour anymore, and part of it was that I had always wanted to experience really short hair, possibly a shaved head. I was telling Toni about this over breakfast and then, that morning, I felt so compelled to cut it off that I could think of nothing else until I got out the scissors.

Stacey with scissors

Scissors and hand mirror

So I went at it. I have been cutting my own hair for a very long time and have gotten rather handy with scissors, hand mirrors and angles. Here I go!

I looked down and saw all my hair on the floor.

I discovered the real reason people give themselves Mohawk haircuts. It's because even if they can do a fine job on the sides, getting the middle and especially the back is hard.

In this process, I made a couple of important discoveries. Discovery the first: I have big ears.

Discovery the second: with not much to weigh this hair down, its natural inclination is to stick straight up! This will not do.

I made a wonderful discovery after this. For Christmas I received a most excellent running cap, and not only does it warm my head and protect against the rain, but it also squishes my spiky hair down into a smooth flat mane.

As a knitter, I was excited to have more excuses to wear hats (short hair = cold head!) Below is a triumphant me wearing my favorite hand-knit hat, my Brattleboro hat made of Malabrigo Worsted.

Something bad happened. When Dan was here, and I was doing laundry one day, somehow my beloved hat made it into the laundry and I shrunk my Brattleboro hat! It went from fitting my 22 1/2 inch head to having only a 15 inch circumference, suitable only for newborns. This sure made me sad! I still have the pattern and once I get some replacement yarn I will knit another one.

But the real dilemma, and the point of this post, was that of how to draw myself when I have short hair? What am I going to do? I spent a fair bit of time drawing different incarnations of myself with different hair, some of it quite imaginative. Me as a stick person with short hair itself is not very interesting so I think I will actually knit a headband with a feature like this to wear around until my hair grows out a bit. I should also probably knit (or sew?) a bunch of triangle-shaped dresses to make sure my stick person persona matches the reality!

Rabbie Burns day

2012-01-31T09:53:00.000-08:00

I know, I know. It's "Robert", but see last night when I was listening to the Caithness Craft Collective podcast, Louise in her Scots accent made it sound like "Rabbie" so I'm going with that.

In the middle of last week's depressive episode fell Robert Burns' day. I've never celebrated this nor even knew how, but Toni and the Skipper decided we should have a haggis and a special meal. They were both at work so I was sent out to buy the haggis. I didn't even really know what haggis was. I was told that basically it's ground up (lamb) organ meat traditionally, but now they probably just use the meat itself, along with oats and spices. I know, right? Doesn't sound awesome. I don't like the taste of lamb. I have tried it in all kinds of ways, because I would like to like the taste of lamb but I guess the fiber artist in me just can't bring myself to eat a fiber animal. Having said that, I was willing to try haggis because dear reader, you know that I am always up for adventure and having an Interesting Cultural Experience.

So here it is. I had a slice of haggis. Also featured is sausage gravy, "tatties" (mashed potatoes), token greens (cabbage), and "neeps" (mashed turnips). I tried a wee bit of the haggis. I could have just given it to the Skipper, because in truth I didn't enjoy it, but I thought no, I will do this. I decided if I was going to get this down, I would need to have something strong to wash it down with.

Enter the Scotch.

Toni and the Skipper have been trying for more than a decade to get me interested in drinking whiskey. They have tried me out on all kinds of awful things which they love, and they have quite an impressive collection of them. I think the Skipper especially was always trying to get me into the smokey flavors, and there are very few things that are smokey that I like - bacon and salmon are the exceptions. I'm not fond of chipotle (am irritated, in fact, that a chipotle somethingorother is an integral part to most restaurant meals because it's fashionable right now), don't like smoked cheeses, and I sure don't like smoke flavor in my beverage.

So on Wednesday when we were sitting down to have our Rabbie Burns supper, I smelled Toni's glass, smelled the Skipper's glass. He had a smokey whiskey, she did not. When I tasted the haggis and said "I'm going to need some whiskey to get this down", it's like I won the lottery. There was triumphant music, there was confetti, flashing lights, dancers, and a fair amount of squeeing. Ok not entirely true. There was definitely a "woo hoo!" and a "finally!" I tell you, I have never seen the Skipper move so fast as when he was leaping up to pour me a dram of Glenlivet.

So I cleared my plate, emptied my glass. Really. I had that whole dram of 48% and didn't feel so much as a buzz (this is good, I am working on building up my alcohol tolerance for when I get to North Carolina and hang out at the brewery a lot). I felt happy, to be sure, as we were celebrating. CBC radio was on and the Burns poem was read.

Part of the nightly routine here at Backyard Feast is that after we have dinner, we head downstairs to what has been coined "the comedy room" where we watch last night's episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report via the Comedy Network website. Sam comes out to join us, jumps up on my lap, then she walks over to Toni's lap and settles in. Given the Republican primaries that are happening right now, these two shows have a lot of material to work with in their political satire. It's good. In this way, I am getting my education about American politics.

Last night, as mentioned in the opening of this post, I was listening to LouseJHunt's episode "Mr. Burns". In her podcast, she threw a party to mark the event. What a scream it was! She made sure everyone had enough to eat, more than enough to drink, and there was music and dancing. My name (yarnsalad) was mentioned, so apparently I was there! All the guests were given two tea towels (I'm imagining their awesomeness). Louise is great, dear reader. Even if you are not a knitter or crafter, she has a great wit and lively conversation. A new segment at the end of her show is called the Drams section, where she and her husband sample whiskey. How could you not love that?

a dropped bag of rice

2012-01-27T19:46:00.000-08:00

It's a metaphor. The other day, I had a bit of a money shock. See, I'm not really employed at the moment and I was expecting a small sum of money, and then it turns out I misunderstood and won't actually be getting that money. I can't go into details about the whys, but suffice it to say, I took that news really hard.

I haven't been wanting to ask Dan for money because he just forked over a bunch for a plane ticket to come visit me and then a bunch more for the application for my temporary visa. But the truth is, I am so beyond broke that I have less than no money, and that is very stressful.

A friend of mine keeps pointing out to me that I have been enduring multiple traumas over the last six to eight months. I didn't really take her seriously because I generally try to be upbeat about my situation. I think about things on a cosmic level being everything happens for a reason. So I am adaptable and flexible and accepting, which is all very great. But there does come a point, I realize, that I do have to admit that I have been under a lot of stress ever since, well, a long time.

We moved to the Pacific Rim area for a job that Dan took in 2010, but within a few months of being there, it became painfully clear that this job was not going to work out and we would have to figure out either how to make ends meet in a place that has almost no winter employment and that is, because it is a super popular summer tourist destination, an extremely expensive place to live (not to mention very remote). I never felt I could really settle there, and we despite our working two and three and four part time jobs, couldn't make things work. It came clear that we had to leave the area to be able to build a life for ourselves, and if it meant moving to another country, then we would do it. I was not really sad to leave the area, save for a few good friends I made while living there, because eight months of winter rains and cabin fever really grate on someone like me.

So in May of 2011 I experienced the parting of the love of my life, as he drove off to forge our future on the other side of the continent, three time zones and 3,200 miles away. I had the task of packing up our life and moving.

Then I spent the summer with family in Alberta. Having grown up in that province I have always felt like I 'got away'. I witnessed some unpleasant family stuff that I obviously can't go into here, but which was stressful. I also got really sick in August, enough that after coughing all night long one night I saw a doctor and was given some medicine. I have never recovered from that illness, have had some manner of cough ever since, and have been told by friends in health care that I'm probably still recovering from injured lung muscle on top of the bug that's hanging on.

Then came the shock at the border (moving a second time) at the end of September, where they said NO. By that point it had been four months since I had seen Dan and we were together for barely sixteen hours when the border guard told me I could not cross the border with him. We spent the next ten days together, often in sadness, knowing that we once again faced the uncertainty of our future, not knowing when we'd see each other again, when I would be allowed in the country.

Then I stayed with his family for the following two months. The house was a bit crowded, and my cat did NOT get along with the house cat, which was extremely stressful for me. Toni and the Skipper offered their spare room, so I moved again.

Dan is busy working long hours, as his responsibilities at the brewery have been increasing. With the time difference, it is often difficult for us to connect. We communicate largely by text messaging, and if we are lucky, we have a phone conversation on the weekend.

So I have been dealing with missing my spouse, moving, ill health, uncertain future, poverty, and all of that snowballs into bouts of depression. Back in November I had suicidal thoughts, which is something that never happens to me, so I knew things were bad. I had frequent anxiety attacks where I my brain would just shut down and I could cry for hours on end, with no apparent reason. Sometimes it was linked to PMS, sometimes it was just missing my husband.

I have had a very predictable menstrual cycle for years now, so last month when there was a blip and then a late start, I was concerned. I've already had an ovarian cyst and my right ovary removed, so I didn't want to take any chances. So I had an ultrasound this past week, and it turned out to be nothing. So that's good. But it was still a source of stress.

So with the money shock this week and then just feeling like there was no way out from under, I felt like I was a bag of rice that had fallen, spilled, and then soaked in water. Could not see my way to get up. I worried that one day Toni would come home from work and find me on the floor in a heap, crying for no apparent reason. Wednesday was a total write-off for me (well, until the evening, when we celebrated Robbie Burns Day, but that's for another post) and I wondered what it would take for me to get well.

Last night at about 10:15pm, which was 1:15am Dan's time, I had another anxiety attack. I really hate to disturb him, especially this week knowing he is putting in extra long hours before he's away from work for a week, but he has always said contact him any time I'm feeling bad like that. So I did. It was a text message conversation but it worked. I said "Tell me everything will be okay", and he did. My husband, he is so freaking good at giving me pep talks it is amazing. As I told my Twitter friends, he "texted me down from the edge".

I know I haven't really told you much about my inner workings, dear reader, at least not on the Internet. One must be careful what they put up for public consumption. I am in no way seeking sympathy or pity or anything like that. I'm just being honest with you and letting you know that yes, this has all been very hard on me. Luckily I have dozens of good people in my life here, dozens more on Twitter, and tons of friends-I-haven't-met-yet waiting for me in North Carolina. I will see Dan tomorrow, he'll be here for an eight-day visit, and I can reset my mental health. (So if I don't post between now and Feb 4, it's because I'm busy with my husband!)

New hair

2012-01-23T11:23:00.000-08:00

I've been reading this book* and it has me thinking a lot about stuff. I'm not going to go into it right now because I'm just full of previously unthought thoughts and processing them all is taking a bit of time. But Friday morning, I was writing in my Morning Pages, and my mind clamped on the idea of me cutting off all my hair.

I have long wanted to have the experience of feeling what a shaved head looks like, but my vanity always got in the way. What if I look awful? Would that hurt my chances of getting a job? (And back when I was still single) how will I attract a mate?

As you may know, the colour of my hair has been a moving target these past couple of years. I went from my flat mousy brown with strands of white to blonde in 2010/11, with the blonde getting increasingly lighter. I wouldn't do any touch-ups or roots, I would just apply the stuff in the box to my whole head and I was pretty close to platinum, I think. Every 5 - 8 weeks I would have to reapply, as my hair grows at about a half an inch a month. After all that abuse, it sure wasn't feeling healthy anymore. I wasn't too concerned, it's only hair, it will grow back. I know this.

Just before Christmas I decided to go red as an intermediary colour. I did blog about that. The first round of red (which was more of a burgundy) quickly faded out and my hair was turning the dreaded copper colour that just makes me look dead. Two weeks later I tried again with a box that said "Ultra Violet". They were great colours when they first settled in, but it too got to washing out.

I decided it was time. It was time to cut out the colour and go back to my natural. It's been almost four weeks now since I last coloured, so I have almost half an inch of my roots showing. Wow. There is a lot more white than there used to be. This being apart from my husband for eight months has aged me. Well, no big surprise.

As usual when I want to change my hair, I want to do it now, and I have long owned my own hair-cutting scissors. You may recall in June when I went from long hair to shoulder length, I Tweeted my way through the process. This time was no different. After chatting with Toni about the idea of me cutting my hair, I went for it. Put the garbage bin on the counter, leaned over, and just started hacking.

It took a couple of days for me to keep trimming and fixing. I'm just about where I want it. My original idea was to get out the clippers and get rid of all the red, but when I asked the Skipper to help me out he refused. "Nooooo, Stace, you can't! Wait until Dan leaves...". Harumph. Okay then, I'll sleep on the idea and see if I still feel the same way.

After some trimming and reshaping myself (I am mighty acrobatic with scissors and mirrors), I am pretty happy with it. It was really spiky and sticky-uppy- at first, but I soon discovered that if I put my running toque on while it's still wet, it will tame the hairs that are sticking up. It's cute now, says Toni, and I feel like I am channeling my inner pixie.

So I probably won't take the clippers to it now, I kind of like where it is right now. This was on the outset me confronting my vanity and it seemed really hard at first, but I felt utterly compelled to do it and so it had to be done. Not only that - where previously I would not have left the house without having my hair and makeup done, for some strange reason I feel less of a need to have make up on at all. There must be a sea change in me.

I also don't know the future of my hair. I assume I will grow it out again, and even with the prospect of that awkward growing-out length, I will simply have to knit more things to wear on my head either to hide or control my crazy hair. And my crazy hair will have more whites, I am finally okay with that.

*The book I refer to is The Disappearance of the Universe

Poilane style miche bread

2012-01-23T10:51:00.000-08:00

I am working on developing my bread making skills, as I think I mentioned in a previous post. My sourdough starter, the barm, is now ready to use and I have been having great fun with it. I made my first sourdough bread the other day, and yesterday I made the bread on the cover of the book I'm using, The Bread Baker's Apprentice. If you read the introduction of this book, the author tells the story of having this bread for the first time, then taking it to a friend's house in Paris, and the friend gets mad for "ruining" him for other bread. I had to make it.

Breads like this take two days to make. I'm nowhere near ready to explain how and why all this works, as I'm a newbie, and I'm just working on my skill and technique. The firm starter takes a day, then the dough is made, kneaded, proofed, reshaped, proofed again and then baked.

This particular loaf is massive. When it was done & baked it ended up being five pounds. When I was kneading the dough, I kneaded by hand for 15 minutes (the book recommends 12-15), and then I was tired. Toni suggested letting the dough rest, though she kneaded it for a bit as well. She suggested we get the Skipper to give it a knead as well (he is much stronger than we), but he was out at the time. I gave it another ten minutes of kneading and decided that I can live with it not getting to the "windowpane stage" of elasticity.

When it was time to bake the bread, I put the pizza stone in the oven. Toni and the Skipper have a pizza peel, so I covered that in corn meal before putting my Poilane on it. The oven temperature was at 500 degrees when I started, and there was a pan of water in with the bread. I slipped the bread from the peel to the stone. When the bread went in, I reduced the temperature to 450.

The book says to turn it after 25 minutes, but it was baking so evenly in the oven that it wasn't necessary to turn. It was, however, starting to get too dark, so the book says to lay a sheet of foil over the loaf to protect it. I did that. Gave it another 30 minutes, now at 425.

Here is how it came out:

This is the bottom. It's is so beautiful!

Toni and the Skipper tried it last night, after it had cooled for two hours. They said it was really good. I had some for breakfast this morning. This is the best bread I have ever tasted and it was worth all the effort. So I really do need to buy this book. With this loaf weighing in at 5 pounds, it should last 5-7 days, just like the book said.

wooden hangers

2012-01-19T16:07:00.000-08:00

Here I go again, into #purgemode

I case you don't know what I'm talking about, I am referring to the beginning of the getting rid of all my stuff that happened in May/June last year, just after Dan left and as I was getting ready to move away from Ucluelet.

Each time I go into Victoria now, it seems I am getting something out of storage. Last week I had a list of a few things I wanted to get. While I was rooting around in my stuff, I couldn't help but notice the wooden hangers.

What an odd thing to keep. I know. After several cullings, somehow those made the cut. But see, I put a lot of thought and effort into those wooden hangers. They symbolized a shift towards more quality items instead of plastic hangers (which, I must point out, are much lighter and take up less space).

So I thought about them for a few days and decided that even though I have a small collection (there are about 20 of them, maybe not as many as that), I'm going to leave them behind. They don't need to travel across the continent. I'm willing to bet I can buy wooden hangers in North Carolina, and for cheaper than I paid for them here.

My consciousness is shifting. I am continuously reconsidering all those things I have packed and repacked. I have yards of fabric that I plan to sew "someday" even though I gave my sewing machine away and I'm not actually excited about the fabric anymore. So that should go too. So should the patterns. I barely know how to use a sewing machine, I'm a knitter for crying out loud.

So here I am, whittling down my stuff even further. I'm not culling my kitchen tools - they are too dear and carefully selected, and besides I don't have that many.

The last thing I may have to reconsider is - gasp - my books.

Dan and I have a lot of books. Not as many as we used to, but at the moment it stands at about 25 boxes, with the majority of them being Dan's science fiction paperbacks. I admit I am not excited about the idea of revisiting our collection and making further decisions about what should go, especially in the middle of winter in a cold, uninsulated basement. Dan and I may have a conversation about the books when he's here. One could argue that because I'm doing further culling of my other things that there will be more room for the books. I'm just thinking about packing all that stuff into the back of my truck and driving across mountain ranges.

Don't tell Dan, but I'm hoping I can convince him to take some things back with him on the plane. Nothing in particular, it would just be nice to have less stuff to pack when, someday in the unforseeble [sic] future, I can cross the border with my green card. Sure do wish I knew when that would be. Yep. That would really help me do things like plan my life.

my Sweety is coming to visit!

2012-01-16T18:03:00.000-08:00

Okay friends I can hardly contain my excitement! Dan is coming here to visit me!

After we got the news(?) last week about my immigration taking five months, we turned our attention to having Dan come visit, because it's now been three months since we've seen each other and almost seven months since we have lived together. It took some doing but Dan has finally found travel arrangements to get here - and he'll be flying into Victoria!

This will mean that chances are I won't be blogging much, if at all, between January 28th to February 5th.

We'll probably spend our first five hours just looking at each other.

As for the whole five months thing, well, the lawyer isn't sure what's going on. My processing was supposed to be in Texas, not California, so there is a lot of confusion about where my file should be. No one believes it will actually take five months, which still makes planning anything difficult. I just don't know.

Hey - offhand - how do you come to read my blog? Do you follow the link I post on Twitter? Facebook? Am I in your bookmarks or RSS feed? Do you subscribe to my blog? I ask this because I'm curious about how much of a disruption it will be when I make the move over to WordPress (haven't decided when that will be). Please let me know either in the comments below or some other means, thanks!

WordCamp Victoria 2012: a brief recap

2012-01-15T12:07:00.000-08:00

I love conferences. I love going to these kinds of events where a whole bunch of interesting brains are in one space and having one big gigantic brainstorming love-in, with lots of different options of which session to go to. During and after each session I always feel like I want to press the "pause" button so I can run off and write in my journal about all the thinks [sic] I'm thinking. But there is no pause button alas, and I just simply have to take copious notes and hope that I remember to revisit every detail later in writing. Is that even possible?

Here is what happened: On Thursday, someone retweeted that there were extra tickets available for WordCamp Victoria if someone wanted to attend but couldn't afford it, just go to the website and contact the guy. This was a right place-right time situation, and I was on it. I contacted the guy, was registered and two days later I was there.

So were 300 other people. Holy cow, this was a thing! This un-conference (as it was billed) is for WordPress enthusiasts, but I figured there would be lots of content for people who are social media fans and bloggers in general. I knew that I might perhaps be lured to move my blogging activity to WordPress. You have been warned. There is an actual Social Media Camp in Victoria in June, but by then I'm sure I will be long gone to North Carolina with green card in hand.

I will do another post about the specific sessions I went to, because there really is just way too much content to put into one post (and you might not be interested in it anyway) but there were some general observations and themes throughout the day that I would like to share with you.

Who was there? Good question. I didn't actually interact with a lot of people in person, believe it or not. I spent most of the day being an audience member, and as so many people were live-Tweeting, it meant that those same people (I was one of them) were not interacting with other attendees. That did feel admittedly odd, since the whole point of an unconference is to interact with people. But that's the thing, right? It's about being online. I did get to meet a few people from Twitter (was starstruck by a poli sci prof from UVic, @janniaragon who is interesting and prolific, she later referred to me in a tweet as "statuesque"!) and made a bunch of new Twitter friends. It was kind of surreal. In one session, someone I follow on Twitter (@scribbler9) was tweeting about the same seminar I was in, so I tweeted "where are you sitting?" she said "second row, red water bottle", and I said "I'm in the third row, blue water bottle". Then later, a new Twitter friend/follower asked if it was me knitting with the pink yarn (I think I was the only person knitting there). It was like public stalking, but in a good way. In terms of demographics though, it seems everyone was proportionally represented, given the demographic of Victoria. I would say more than half the attendees were 45+, more than half were women, there were not many visible minorities. Lots of technogeeks (as evidenced by the sheer volume of iDevices) and WordPress superfans. There were writers, photographers, graphic designers, social media junkies, academics and laypeople. And all of them were Tweeting.

There were seven sessions, one per hour between 9am and 5pm, plus lunch. There were two keynotes and I missed the first one (I think I was confused about the schedule) but everyone was live tweeting the content so I felt like I was there. I'll talk later about the specific sessions.

What surprised me: people schedule their blog posts. Then they schedule the tweets announcing their blog posts. There is software to do this for you. Does this seem weird to you? It did to me. Some people tweet about their blog post three or four times to make sure everyone reads it. Then there was talk about linking from all the social media sites, Twitter and Facebook being the main two, but Google + being a leading contender and people are actually using LinkedIn. (For the record, I hate LinkedIn, never found it useful when I was on it and would go back with a great amount of resentment if I had to). There is a feature in WordPress that gives you suggestions on what to blog about. Um, what? Toni and I were talking about this the day before, about what an odd thing that was. Why blog at all if you can't think about what you want to write about? What I found hugely surprising is that no where in any of the presentations I saw was there any attention to language skills, to grammar, punctuation and spelling, or to the conventions of writing. Is that a given? Is it even an issue for people who blog that if you don't have the language skills that you might not retain a sophisticated readership? As a word nerd, I was rather shocked by this absence.

It also gave me cause to give some thought to why people blog, tweet, and otherwise engage in being an online presence and social media. There was a very clear message early in the day about being your own PR manager and creating your own personal brand, because everyone, it seems, has something to sell. Lots of people want lots of people to come to their blog so that they will attract advertisers so they can make money from blogging. This made me uncomfortable and I have to do some thinking about why I blog. At the moment I blog to keep people up to date with what kinds of adventures YarnSalad is having, and I hope that will always be interesting. While I think I have lots to say and I am delighted that I get more than a thousand hits to my blog every month, I do need to think about the future of my blog. A future employer or publisher could be reading my work here so this must be a consideration. I'm sure if you Google my name this comes up high, and it is true that potential employers and landlords are using Google to see what kind of person their applicant is. I am one of those people with a unique name (and not a Kevin Miller or something like that) and a solid internet presence, so I do have to be very mindful of the content I put on the Internet.

At any rate, by the end of the day my mind was full and exhausted, but I am so glad I went. I will start paying attention to more things like this in the future because I think unconferences like this will proliferate and, well, you know me, I like to be on the cutting edge (that was sarcasm). Something to consider though, is how to keep the balance of being a smarmy salesman engaged in shameless self-promotion and being a sincere human being behind the keyboard? Hopefully, dear reader, I will keep it real and that will mean you will continue to hang out with me.

The Bread Maker's Apprentice

2012-01-13T17:07:00.000-08:00

This is a book I need to own. It's been on my amazon wish list for quite a while (ahem) and someday I will own it because it's awesome. Toni and the Skipper have it here at Backyard Feast and I have decided that I am going to work my way through it and learn how to make bread. It's a fascinating subject and I love how making bread is both art and science, and I consider myself both an artist and a scientist.

Yesterday I started what is called a seed culture. Basically it's flour and water that hang out four four days, getting added to every day, until it becomes a barm. After a week or two, if I remember correctly, this barm is what is also known in common parlance as the sourdough starter.

When Dan and I were living in East Sooke, I was using the bread machine at least every other day. Without getting too deep into the hows and whys of breadmaking, I somehow managed to create a sourdough starter back then that was not too bad, but I don't remember going at it with the scientific precision I am this time around.

This time around, I have time on my hands. I mix up some stuff and then set the timer on my phone to let me know when I have to do the next thing. So today was day 2 of adding to the seed culture. Tomorrow I'll be at WordCamp, so Toni will attend to the seed culture for me.

Seed culture, day 1

Meanwhile, I am reading my way slowly through the lengthy introduction of The Bread Maker's Apprentice to get a better scientific understanding of flour and gluten and temperature and humidity and all those things that combine to create the magic that is bread. And, not wanting to wait until my sourdough starter is ready, I baked my first loaf from this book, a light wheat bread.

Light Wheat Bread beginning of second proofing

Light Wheat Bread end of second proofing

Light Wheat Bread just out of the oven!

An event for writers

2012-01-12T22:06:00.000-08:00

Gotta love Twitter. It's a case of being in the right place at the right time, and I happened to see a tweet that said there were still spaces left for WordCamp Victoria 2012, this coming Saturday. I'm in! It's largely directed at Wordpress users (and I am clearly a Blogspot user) but I'm sure there will be some useful content there. There will be 275 attendees! Will report.

How much stuff does a person need, anyway?

2012-01-11T20:13:00.000-08:00

I am not a person who has a strong personal attachment to things. I don't know where that came from, but I have often credited it with my early pursuit of Buddhism. Not having an attachment to things comes in very handy when, say, getting ready to move house. Throughout my whole adult life I have moved house a lot. I could try to count, but I think I would lose count at about 20. The longest I have lived in one place was two and a half years, in East Sooke.

When we moved from East Sooke to Ucluelet, we did get rid of a lot of stuff but it seems like we took a lot too. We also seemed to acquire rather a lot while we were there. We had a big house to fill, after all. Dan has an amazing ability to scavenge and repair things, such as aluminum boats and theater seats.

When we knew we would be moving to North Carolina, we agreed that we would only take what would fit into the back of his truck (aka the floundertruck), a 1986 Nissan 720, and my truck, a 1999 Ford F150. We spent two weeks getting rid of as much stuff as we could, inviting friends and acquaintances to come by and pick through everything, take it all away, please. The theater seats went first, oddly enough. Sofas and tables and shelves were highly coveted.

Dan left on May 25th. I spent the next several weeks doing further culling, which included (eventually) three trips to the dump, a garage sale, and a trip to the thrift store. I drove away from Ucluelet on July 2. I spent a week on the south end of Vancouver Island and then headed for Alberta, to stay with my sister until immigration came through. We all know how that went. When it came time to leave, I did a further culling and reduced the volume of my stuff by half.

Returned to the Island on September 30th after being rejected at the border, then unloaded all the stuff from my truck into the basement of The Stately, the basement of Dan's mum & stepdad, where I was to reside for just over two months. I have now been in Cowichan Bay for a month, and just today I popped by The Stately to get some things out of storage.

I was looking for a few specific things. I found a new home for my beloved vacuum cleaner, so that's one awkward thing that I won't have to take with me. I will use up the rest of the bag of pine kitty litter. I found a couple of books and magazines that I can read here and then give away. Found a pair of old socks that I am not especially fond of and don't really plan to wear them ever again, wonder how they had made the cut of the first few cullings.

The news from yesterday, the whole 'five months' thing and the possibility of me going to North Carolina on a temporary visa to wait out my immigration has not surprisingly reframed how I am looking at my situation. If I am going to fly there and leave all my stuff (including my truck!) here in British Columbia, what will be the essentials that I take with me; what can I not live without for a few months while I am reestablishing myself in Kinston? Well, I don't know. It will depend on how much I am allowed, and how much extra luggage costs.

The most important thing of course will be the kitty. She hates traveling by plane and is terrified of being in a box/cage/kennel. I didn't want to have to do that to her, but in the bigger picture, it might be better to just get her there in 14-16 hours of travel rather than six or seven days in the truck. Yes she'll hate the trip, bit it will be over quickly.

And then what else? I have been thinking about this all day. Lately, as I have been interested in my Russian roots, I have been watching a lot of films and documentaries about Russia and Europe, many of which are set in the first half of the 20th century. There are so many tales of displacement and evacuation. If you were forced to leave your home forever, what are the important things? I realize that I am not in such a dramatic position, but really, what do you need on a daily basis and what can you live without?

The other night I asked the Skipper about photos of himself when he was younger. He had a massive stash of them and we were able to see what he looked like at all ages. That, and the beautiful photo album Dan's sister gave me for Christmas full of photos of Dan when he was younger, made me realize that there are probably very few photos in existence of me when I was younger. I know I don't have that many - I have moved too many times. The few that my mum had (she fled her crappy marriage with my dad on a day's notice, so didn't have much) may not have been saved from the mold-ridden basement suite she lived in back in the 90s. I doubt my sister would have many of me and well, I'm pretty much done communicating with my father. So probably I'll just have to draw photos of myself.

At any rate, back to the topic at hand, what would I take with me if I was boarding a plane for North Carolina? I'm not sure I would bring my entire yarn stash. Gasp! you say. Well no, I don't actually have that much yarn anymore. I would actually bring all my tools though - all my needles and hooks and notions. I don't own very much clothing anymore. I can't recall if I told you all those months ago - before I left Alberta in the fall, Dan had told me not to buy clothing because everything is cheaper in the States. So I didn't. I just had a small selection of summer clothing. With all the weight I had lost, most of my stuff didn't fit me anymore anyway. So, when I ended up coming back to Vancouver Island to spend the winter here, I had almost no winter clothing. I had one wool sweater and a couple of hoodies and some jeans. (Lots of hand knit wool socks though!) Dan's mum lent me a sweater dress and then decided I should just have it. Zola lent me a pile of sweaters (I still have one of them, and it will be returned to her). Toni had a big stack of clothes she no longer wore or no longer fit, so I have been getting a lot of mileage out of all these lent garments. Most of them will stay here in Canada though, so there will not be a lot of clothing coming with me either.

So then what? My computer, obviously. Dan has a Kindle now, so I don't really need to bring books. I will use the library anyway. Believe it or not, I will probably fill my luggage with small kitchen utensils. Again, we'll see what I'm allowed to bring.

Which leads me to something else - I don't own luggage. I have a 40 litre backpack and that's it. This raises another question then - would I be able to use Rubbermaid bins as my luggage or will I have to go and buy something? I am probably putting the cart before the horse here, because at the moment we aren't even allowed to apply for my temporary visa, so me actually boarding a plane is unimaginable. This is what happens to me when I have lots of time to myself to think, my mind gets me into trouble.

My last consideration in all this is while I'm waiting for immigration in North Carolina, what would I actually be doing? Believe me, I have no problem filling my hours. Between my computer (Twitter, blogging, podcasts & movies) and my knitting, I'm happy as a clam. I can go running (if I'm there by March, my friends-I-haven't-met-yet and I will be running an 8k race). I can be the Queen of My Kitchen! And, I suspect, we'll be doing a lot of entertaining. So that just means I'll need to make sure I also bring my running gear and my party dress.

So... dear reader, if you were in my situation, what would your essentials be, what could you not live without?

One of my most precious possessions: a one-cup pour-over coffee filter cone that I bought in Japan for 100 Yen. That thing goes everywhere with me.

I'm feeling numb

2012-01-10T15:14:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Dan received an email saying that my immigration file had arrived at the visa processing center in California.

I didn't know how to feel about this. We know that we were waiting for the third Notice of Action, and that after that a package would be mailed to me with instructions on setting up appointments for my immigration interview and health check in Vancouver. After that my green card would be printed and I'd be home free. We were led to understand that processing time was counted in days, not weeks or even months.

Then today Dan received a phone call from a very friendly immigration agent, cheerfully telling him that my file was at the top of the pile, and that this should all be settled in five months.

Um, excuse me?

O yes, this time last year processing time was about seven months, so they're catching up.

Five months.

It's already been seven and a half since I've lived with my husband. It's been almost four since I have seen him.

I'm numb. I don't believe it. I don't know what to think. I don't believe five months. That's June. I don't believe it.

What do I do in that time? Get a job? If you read my post yesterday, you know that just getting a job is not that easy. I even went into a place that said "Help Wanted" but they want help with FoodSafe and first aid and cash handling experience (I only have the latter). And they probably don't pay more than $10/hour.

So the next thing is that I need to see my husband. We need to see each other. He's going to make every effort to come here for a visit sometime in the next month. That will really help.

Something else: once we get to a certain stage in the process, we can apply to get me a temporary visa that will allow me to wait out my processing time in North Carolina. I won't be able to work, but I will get to be with my husband. But we're not there yet.

I'm numb! When I was rejected at the border, the information made contact with my brain immediately and I was sick to my stomach. Everything was churning and I spent some time in the bathroom. But now, well, I don't know. It doesn't seem real. I can't quite believe it. I feel like I need more data in order to be able to process this emotionally.

I just don't get it.

The value of a piece of paper

2012-01-09T22:09:00.000-08:00

I have a Master of Science degree in Health Information Science. Most people with this (HINF) degree are either clinicians wanting to deepen their skills and perhaps encourage greater linkages with the field of informatics, or are people with a programming background with an eye toward management. I fall into neither category, as my first degree is a Bachelor of Arts in English.

In 2005 I started the Bachelor's program for Health Information Science, as I was advised, and I completed half that degree (to gain experience in the field) before switching to the Master's program. One could say I have two and a half degrees, or one and a half bachelor's and a master's. Of course I have nothing denoting my half a bachelor's degree, I only hold two pieces of paper.

When I enrolled in 2005, we were basically told that a degree in this burgeoning field was a license to print money, the world was our oyster, blah blah blah. Then what happened? I don't know, perhaps the world economy caused a shift in the need for health informatics professionals because when the time came, lots of people in my field found themselves scrambling, even those who graduated at the top of the class.

I think I have mentioned before that because I have a weird set of skills and background for someone with this MSc, it makes me a bit of an anomaly. The skill set I pursued was that of qualitative health informatics research, not programming. That, and I can write.

I have been thinking a lot over these past few years about my work and the nature of work in general. While I was writing my Morning Pages this morning, I was musing how whenever I had to compete for a job among many others, and under which there is strict criteria for a position, that even though I may have interviewed well, I might not have answered the questions right to score the points. I have often grumbled about my resume or curriculum vitae not making it through the keyword search software that some large organizations use when trying to weed out potentially inadequate candidates.

Truth is, I'm not sure I want to work for an organization where I have to fight that fight - to jump through just the right hoops (as in craft my resume with just the right key words) just to get an interview. Some of the best jobs I've had have come from word of mouth or by people who knew me just offering me work. I don't know what kind of opportunities will present themselves to me when I get to North Carolina, but I am excited about the prospects because I have a lot to offer in terms of workplace skills.

On Friday night, the friend I was staying with in Vancouver had arranged a dinner for a bunch of us HINF grads. I have the MSc, all my friends have BSc. One friend launched straight into pharmacy school after he graduated. Another is now in her second year of nursing school. Her husband joined the RCMP. I am technically unemployed, leaving only one of us, the friend I was staying with, to be the only one at the table actually working in the field we went to school for. And everyone was happy.

I found this extremely interesting. They were all good stories about why they are not working in HINF, why they are now following their dream. It turns out HINF is not a license to print money. I feel compelled to go back to the School at UVic and tell them this - that the people they are graduating are not happy with their career options once they graduate.

A few years ago I was at a conference and one of the discussions we had was about core competencies. What certain sets of skills should our graduates have, that employers can depend on? This conversation, as I recall, was occurring in tandem with a conversation about credentialing our field so we all had to carry licenses or be registered with a college of our own creation. I don't remember the sentiment in the room at the time but I am (now) strongly opposed to this idea.

Something I have discovered in the past ten years is when looking for work, employers, particularly ones of institutions like governments, health care organizations, and universities, are seeking applicants who have a long list of credentials. It seems like they want a piece of paper that confirms that you know how to use a keyboard, how to spell medical terms, how to change the toilet paper roll. Even though I have nearly nine years experience of working in the food service industry, I couldn't get a job in a restaurant now because I don't have my FoodSafe certificate. (This irks me greatly, because I was trained in these practices long before FoodSafe was a thing, I have the skills, I don't need a F#*&ing piece of paper to prove it). My issue, then, is that employers want evidence that the people they hire have the skills they need, when really, in my view, the piece of paper only indicates that the person did what was required in terms of jumping through hoops in order to get that piece of paper. Bare minimum, in some cases. It's like that old joke - what do they call the guy with the lowest grades in med school? Doctor.

I don't know how rampant this credentialization of work is, but it is absolutely stifling our workforce in British Columbia. And they wonder why people can't find jobs! They want me to take a FoodSafe course (for example, nobody really wants me to do this, I'm just speaking hypothetically) so that I can handle food in a restaurant but really what they want is me to pay $80 to the college and I'm sure at some level, the government gets a cut of that. This leads then to the larger issue - the more things are regulated and licensed is just one more way the government makes money of the backs of the people who elected it.

So then when Dan and I were trying to claw our way out of the Pacific Rim, it was much easier for Dan to find work. He has a much broader skill set than mine (even though mine is also quite broad) but he has tons more work experience (I have spent nearly a decade in post secondary, remember) and dual citizenship. His resume is impressive and his skills are in high demand. He was lucky enough to find an employer who recognizes is skill and lets him use his brain at work. He has a certain level of responsibility as well as the freedom to be creative. They appreciate his talent. And like it or not, Dan had to go to America to get this job because things sure weren't working out for us in Canada. Dan is happy there in his job and he is certain that once I get there, I will have no problem finding work. I am excited about this. I am excited about working again and about working in a new environment - I'm a fast learner and can adapt well to new social settings. I also feel like the attitude is different. Maybe I'm jaded after being on the west coast for too long where there is such an "I'm better than you" attitude but I'm looking forward to being in a place where I can let my work speak for itself.

/end rant

A whirlwind trip to Vancouver

2012-01-08T20:51:00.000-08:00

Involving public transit...

Did you know that when the ferry starts to reach the destination terminal, they start playing what I call "get out" music to get the people to return to their vehicles?

I worked at the Greater Victoria Public Library for a number of years. When it was 20 minutes to closing, someone would put on the announcement that "The library will be closing in 20 minutes" and then some obnoxious music would start playing to let patrons know it's time to get out. I called it "get out" music.

So when I heard this on the ferry on Friday, I was mildly irritated.

Today, when I was making my return journey, I was settled in a window chair with my headphones and my knitting. All a sudden I heard the loud noise of a football game. I didn't know what was going on, I looked to the people sitting behind me, was really mad that some jerk didn't at least turn down the game on his laptop or use headphones like I was, and then I saw that on the flat screen in front of the rows of seats where I was, the game was playing. BC Ferries was playing a football game and blasting the audio for everyone to hear, like it or not.

Well shit. I'm certainly no fan of football but each to his own. But really BC Ferries? If you're going to put something like that on a screen, can't you at least do what the airlines to and get your passengers who want to hear the action to use headphones? Where has courtesy gone?

I'm a bit too tired to tell you all the details of my adventures between my ferry rides, but suffice it to say that I had a great time and learned lots of stuff and saw some cool things. I'll tell you about that tomorrow and show you some photographic evidence.

happy kitty

2012-01-05T15:35:00.000-08:00

so... This is Sam, laying happily in front of the electric fireplace that is in the room we are staying in. She's pretty happy. This makes me happy.

I have lots to share with you, I have for some reason been incredibly busy this week. Tomorrow I head to Vancouver to visit some friends, and then next week I will dive deep into my farmhanding at Backyard Feast.

I'm not ignoring my friends

2011-12-31T22:30:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting here in the living room at backyard feast while our good friends from Stellar Coffee are here visiting. We are curled up on comfy furniture, knitting and beverages to hand, having had sushi and pound cake for dinner. It's been an awesome New Year's Eve party.

So when I say I'm not ignoring my friends, I mean my friends in the room. I'll rejoin them shortly. But you know me, I'm a bit of an Internet junkie so I just had to come see what you are all doing. Go see Amanda - she has completed her goal of knitting/sewing/crocheting a scarf/cowl/neck thing for every single day of 2011. Stop by and congratulate her for getting there! And while you're out visiting my friends, go tell Ellie you're glad she's finally joined Twitter.

Right, not to partying like it's 1999 (but I admit I'm having way more fun tonight).

Matroyshka themed Christmas

2011-12-30T15:05:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I mentioned a sudden and intense interest in researching my Russian heritage. I don't actually know if I have Russian heritage or if my relatives were true Volga Deutsch - was my great grandmother a Russian who married a German? Or were they both German?

I have big-ish rather unfeminine hands, and I have always referred to them as my "Russian working woman's hands". This is not a slight to myself, because they are also strong and competent hands (if I do say so myself).

At any rate, each year when I'm thinking about what to do for the family for Christmas, I have quite a few creative stages. In the first few years I did one really big thing for one family member (as in knit a super-involved thing). Then it got to two, I think, unintentionally. This year, as mentioned in a previous post, I didn't think I would have time/money to knit something for everyone. What could I do to channel my creativity that wouldn't cost very much, that I could put together quickly, that the whole family would appreciate?

Once I figured out what everyone was getting, I hit upon an idea: I would wrap the presents matroyshka style and I would draw each family member to indicate who would get the next present.

Sketches of the family - early version

These, I might add, are very accurate depictions of my family members.

Younger niece

Dan's older sister

Dan's step-sister

Dan's youngest sister

Dan's older sister's husband

Dan's stepbrother (a story about the monkey that says OVERDUE on the tail: one morning while I was staying at the Stately, Thor came downstairs after having had a dream where he had borrowed a monkey from the library and it was overdue, woke up in distress because he didn't know where the monkey was).

Dan's stepfather. Now remember that everyone in the family has a 'thing', and John's thing is toast.

Oldest niece turned 16 a few days before Christmas and got her 'L'. For those of you not in British Columbia, this is the first step in a graduated-licensing program for people who want to drive. You get your L for a while, and you have to put this big magnet on the back of the vehicle you are driving to tell the world that you are LEARNING to drive. After a determined amount of time (a year? I don't actually know) then you can take the road test and get your N, which is a different magnet, to tell the world that you are NEW at driving. There are certain restrictions around this, like you can't drive after dark, there have to be people in the car who also have valid driver's licenses, etc. It's dumb, and I'm glad I grew up in a time where I didn't have to go through this rigamarole. But there it is.

My mother in law. Her thing is chickens. This drawing of a chicken here is from the kitchen table which she painted, and the model she uses is of a chicken sculpture somewhere in the Stately.

Wrapping begins. I didn't (remember to) take photos of every step, but you get the idea.

Getting bigger and bigger

By the very last wrap I had run out of paper. I had this done four full days before Christmas, which is unheard of for me.

On Christmas morning, I walked into the house with just the one big present. Everyone wanted to know what the one big thing was and who it was for. Dan's mum saw the drawing on the big one (for her) and knew that all the others were nested inside. It was great and appreciated. And tons of fun for me! I've had a few bursts of creativity lately so I already have the next two Christmases planned out for the family. It's a good thing because each year someone tells me "you've outdone yourself". (Just what my ego needs, more praise. I mean thank you!)

The reason I go to so much effort is because it's fun. Christmas with my family of origin was never really fun, not even as a kid. We held the German tradition of opening gifts on Christmas eve. I think Santa brought presents for Christmas morning, but we were pretty young when we figured Santa out and after that I don't think we even had stockings. Christmas was just about seeing family, eating, and just being together. With Dan's family it is so much more. We each of us exchange gifts, and with nine other people that can seem a daunting task. But this family specializes and revels in things handmade. It's wonderful. I found a recipe for some Spice Almonds on the Internet, gave that to Thor in a food storage container, and they were gone within two days. That's what Christmas is about - fun, thoughtful gifts and having fun with each other. I love it. I fit right in and I have a great time every year.

stay tuned

2011-12-29T22:42:00.000-08:00

Hi there readers.

Lots has happened and I have big things planned for my blog in the coming months. This week with all the Christmasing has been very busy and we've had a bit of news immigration-wise (nothing really big yet). However, I haven't had a good night's sleep in days and I always get nailed pretty hard with cramps on the first day of my period (sorry, TMI, but I'm being honest with you), so haven't really been in the mood to write.

So please stay tuned.

post Christmas post

2011-12-26T17:11:00.000-08:00

I have so much to tell you.

I won't be able to do it all justice in one post, so I'll see if I can just throw a few photos in here and maybe that will tell part of a story.

My tender cargo. The present was the only one I brought with me, but little did everyone know, the presents for everyone were nested in here, matroyshka style.

Does anyone know the answer to this?

What I didn't get a photo of is the three raptors (or are they T-rexes?) above this. It was hard to get a good shot of this with my iPhone - no flash and the room wasn't very well lit. But if you look closely, you should see a bicycle rim with a bunch of wood cutouts in the shape of insects, painted green, among the Christmas decorations.

Dan's mom was the first to open the big present. With the drawings I did (accurate depictions, I may say) of each family member, she figured out right away that the whole gift was a nested present.

Again, my poor 3GS iPhone, not great at capturing action shots.

Slipper socks!

Turns out, we had a bit of a theme going on here. I had been talking about matroyshkas and I guess the family heard me. These beautiful earrings are from Zola.

Matroyshka measuring spoons! How awesome is that! Later, Zola's boyfriend came by with a gift for the family, turns out this same company also makes matroyshka measuring cups. Too awesome.

This here isn't any old Scrabble, it's Super Scrabble. Extra board, twice the number of tiles. Dan gave this to me as a New Year's present our first year together. It makes for a long game but it is something we all look forward to every Christmas! (No, I didn't win).

The salad rolls make their final appearance for the season. I plan to do an entire post about this (I have photos of each ingredient) so please hang tight and all this delicioiusness can be yours.

This here is what Thor called "Iranian Sunrise". As we near the end of this year's inaugural Alcohol Advent Calendar, the beverage was rum, grenadine and grapefruit juice. And it was good.

When I got home after having been out for 14 hours, Sam didn't care if I was tired, she was ready to play String. This is ribbon that would ordinarily go around gifts, but it gets much better use as crunchy string. You know, the best cat toy ever.

I went to bed, extremely full of food and love, for it was a great day. Hadn't much of a chance to communicate with Dan very much, as we were both pretty busy but we did pass each other a few text messages. I had moments of sad throughout the day, wishing he was there. At some point the fellow that hosted the party Dan was at Tweeted me and said "we have decided that next Christmas you and @flounderguts are hosting". I'd like to know how that came about. We'll see where we'll be a year from now, for the family would rather we were in Victoria for Christmas, I'm sure!

Lots more to tell you but I'm really just too knackered from all the activity and food.

DISCLAIMER: I know that "deliciousness" isn't a word. As the author, I am taking poetic license, as is my right.

Knitting considerations

2011-12-22T12:39:00.000-08:00

This post may seem a little incongruous, given that it's just before Christmas and I have all my Christmas knitting done and wrapped. I have been thinking about a post like this for more than a week now, have even made notes! So here we go:

I listen to a lot of knitting podcasts and communicate with hundreds of knitters on the Internet. Lots of people have large yarn stashes to knit from and still seem to acquire more yarn. When the hot new pattern comes out, many people will simply go to their stash and find the right yarn for the sweater.

Knitting isn't really a cheap hobby. It can be if you choose to use acrylic yarn or yarn found at garage sales or thrift store yarns. Just over a year ago I came into a huge amount of yarn, which was mostly natural fibers but much of it was so old or had an acrylic content that I was not happy knitting with any of it, so I gave it all away. While working at Knits by the Sea in Tofino, I came to really appreciate knitting with good yarn and good fiber. So, here is my list of things to consider when knitting something:

1. How much money to spend on yarn?

While working at the yarn shop, I was given a generous discount on my purchases, which is mighty dangerous. I wasn't making a lot of money overall so I had to be mindful of how much I could actually spend. Depending on the pattern and the yarn, a sweater's worth of yarn can run anywhere from $50 for cheap yarn and averaging about $120 for anything I would want to knit. So that wasn't going to happen. They say it takes the same amount of time to knit a pair of socks as it does a sweater, and since one skein of sock yarn is much cheaper (ranging $18-30, most landing in the $22 range), that seemed a more economical way to go. Lace weight yarn makes your yarn dollar go even further, as lace is slower to knit and you get way more yardage per dollar.

Many new knitters opt for big yarns and big needles, but what they don't realize is that is the fastest way to burn through your yarn budget. If you give me a skein of bulky weight yarn, I can knit that into a hat in about three hours. (I know this for certain because it happened last Christmas). If you give me a skein of sock yarn, it will take me 40-60 hours to knit that up, which leads me to my next consideration:

2. How long will this take to knit?

I was at the Moss Street Market Christmas Fair recently and saw a number of hand knit garments. I don't think there is ever a way to make money selling hand knits, unless you think you are worth 10 cents an hour. As I looked at the garments and the prices, I thought - those handknit socks that have a $45 tag on them would take me 40 hours to knit, but a faster knitter could get them done in 30. Subtract the probable cost of the yarn and that knitter probably earns $1.25 an hour. While $45 seems expensive for a pair of socks, it's cheap compared to the labour that went into it. At another stall I saw a knitter selling hats made with bulky Lopi yarn. The yarn cost $6.00/skein (I know because Lopi is a favourite of mine), the hats probably took 5-8 hours, she was selling them for $20 per hat.

I was commissioned to knit a hat for a woman's baby while working at the yarn shop in Tofino, but when she heard the price of the hat, she decided not to pay for it after all. (I still have the hat). That made me realize that I will never make money from knitting so there is no point in even trying. The only way I would accept a commission is if it were for an art piece and I would be paid for my artistry.

As mentioned in a previous post, I have had rather a lot of time to knit in the past few years. I love knitting, so this is no real hardship for me. When I was planning my knitting before the Cookie A retreat last April, I figured I could bang out one sock per week, even working almost full time (I knit during every coffee and lunch break). That turned out to be optimistic, and instead of the planned eight socks, I got through four and a half. So now I am getting a sense of how long things take to knit and planning accordingly. How much time do I need to knit X amount of things before Christmas, for example?

Also, as mentioned in a previous post, I hadn't planned on knitting gifts. And then I ended up knitting ten gifts. Some of them were small, completed in just a few hours, some of them took a few days. I'm getting the hang of estimating how long it will take and I planned well; I finished everything yesterday. (What will I do with myself on Christmas eve if I'm not finishing last-minute projects?)

3. Knitting from Stash

As a part of my Great Migration and in an attempt to pare down my possessions to only what will fit in my truck, I have been knitting from my stash. In a #knitchat earlier this year, we had a conversation about knitting from stash as a way of coping with these rough economic times - that having a sizable stash insulates us from the brunt of less money to spend on our hobby. If I look at my stash as it is right now, I have enough yarn to get me through about six months, assuming I'll be working full time from February onward. That's pretty good. My informal goal was to not have more yarn than I could knit up in a year - partly for ease of transport but also because it felt insensible to me just have yarn laying around, yarn that I would have to keep track of, move, keep from getting dusty, organize, and think about. (Other people are way better at keeping track of their yarn, so I am not suggesting *you* are insensible, I just know my own habits). I am trying to be methodical about my knitting plans and goals, so I would rather buy yarn with a project in mind rather than just buy yarn because it's pretty. There will always be more yarn. I repeat: there will always be more yarn. I don't need to buy this bag of yarn because it's a screaming good deal - I've done that and then that bag sits and collects dust. No thanks.

4. Knitting for others: will the person actually wear and care for the thing?

This can be tricky, especially if you have never given a person your hand knits before. I lucked out with the family I married - everyone loves and appreciates my knits, which always encourages me to knit more for them. (I'm planning to do a post about some of the more creative knit projects I have done as gifts over the years, as a sort of recap). My own family needed a bit of training about my knitting - washing instructions, the mending of things, and how long it will take things to knit. My niece (my sister's daughter) asked me for yellow mittens, so I knit some and sent them off. She *loves* them, then asked for a scarf, some slippers and a pair of socks. All in good time, kiddo, but it is a tall order. I have fifteen other people to knit for too.

5. Searching for patterns versus being captivated by patterns

Okay now here I get a bit stuck. We all have our own pattern-searching methods. Ravelry makes it so easy to find just the pattern for the yarn, skill level, technique, and yardage that you want to knit from. It is the best database I have ever encountered. For example, when Zola asked me to knit her a turban, I went to Ravelry and typed in "turban". A bunch of stuff came up. Some of the patterns were patterns that you pay for, so I rule them out. I clicked on the "free" search criteria and the list of turban patterns was significantly diminished. So if you are in a position to pay for a pattern, especially a popular one, then go for it. But I'm limited to free just now, so sometimes I just have to make something up. (I really do need to start writing down my one-off designs. I will have some time after Christmas, I think). When you find the pattern you want on Ravelry, you can either "cast on" right away or put it in your queue. Then you can organize your queue into categories (hats, neck, mitts, sweaters, etc.). If there are enough things in your queue, and you feel like you need to knit a hat, you can go to your hat folder in your queue and maybe find the yarn in your stash to knit it with. This all sounds very organized, right? These kinds of plans get derailed when the new knitting magazine comes out. It happened to me last week. I had to knit Escargot, it was haunting me. So is the Bandana Cowl, but I don't think I have the right yarn in my stash (and I can't buy yarn until I have a job) so it will have to wait.

Sigh. At the moment, given my dwindling stash, I'll be knitting mostly socks for the next few months, but that's good. I like knitting socks. In fact, through the knitting of the Christmas gifts, my hands were missing sock knitting. So, sock patterns? The only knitting book I have with me in Cowichan Bay is Sock Innovation. I do also have the Internet at my disposal, so we'll see how many socks I can knit between now and when I leave.

an enriching experience

2011-12-21T22:08:00.000-08:00

I just had a really good experience tonight and wanted to share it with you.

I have mentioned here before how much I love Twitter and the Thursday night #knitchat that has been running every week for more than a year now. #knitchat began with Natalie from the Cloudy with a Chance of Fiber podcast, and her co-host Rachel (who recently gave birth to a son) is often an active participant.

During this year of being a part of the #knitchat community, I have made some pretty great Twitter friends, I feel like if/when I actually meet these people in person that it will be just like old times, like no time had past, as if we've been friends forever.

Natalie is a self-proclaimed tech geek (you did say that once, right?). She works in tech, so is always in the know about cutting edge technologies, especially when it comes to social media. A few days ago when I suggested that we have a "weaving in ends" party (note for non-knitters: when you are finished knitting a project, there are always tails of yarn that need to be woven into the fabric) for all our Christmas gifts. Natalie made it happen. She opened up a discussion thread in Ravelry, gave us the link with information on how to set it up, and announced to Twitter when it would be.

It was my first time with using Google Hangout, and I think you have to be logged into Google+ for it to work. I haven't been using Google+ very much (though I signed up for it a few months ago on Natalie's advice) but Google Hangout is a very powerful tool. It's like Skyping with nine of your best friends. Or up to nine - I guess there is a limit of 10 people, but tonight there were only three of us.

Natalie beckoned me on Twitter to come a bit earlier, to make sure it worked. After some fussing with my computer, I was able to hear Natalie and she could hear me! We talked about our knitting (and I confessed I had no ends to weave in because I was compelled to wrap all my Christmas gifts today, hence the ends were done already). I am very familiar with Natalie's voice because I listen to her podcast - but none of my Internet friends had heard the voice of yarnsalad until tonight. :-)

It was great. I blog, Tweet, and post on Ravelry and Facebook, but of course what you read here is the cleaned up version. I have to be politic about what I write so as not to offend anyone or air any dirty laundry. With Google Hangout I was able to have a fairly intimate conversation with someone I have long considered my friend, but with whom I had never had a discussion with until tonight.

Maia joined us after about half an hour, and there was some interesting conversation about yarn shops (in Portland, Northern California, and Victoria), some TV shows I will have to see when Dan and I get Netflix (he doesn't know we're doing this yet, but we are). We talked about the #knitchat KAL (knit-a-long). By the way - if you want to participate and haven't voted, you should TOTALLY go vote for Nathan's Scale Mitts. They would be a quick easy knit to do, in a worsted or aran yarn. Another pattern is leading the polls right now, but it has a dumb name and even though it's pretty, I feel a special allegiance to Nathan, who has long been a participant on #knitchat and is also a dear friend I've never met.

Sam got to participate in this hangout too. She was sleeping, but I got her up, held her in front of my webcam, then put her back on the bed. She wasn't really interested.

courtesy: a dying breed

2011-12-21T12:15:00.000-08:00

Okay okay, I'll admit the title of this post is cynical. I don't know if lack of courtesy is just something I have become accustomed to because it is no longer around or if it is unique to the particular geographic location I currently inhabit. I could go off on a long rant about the sense of entitlement that a few demographics (in my opinion) seem to feel, like they should be the first in line or that things should just come for free.

Something happened to me while in a shop yesterday that I feel compelled to write about. I was in a grocery store, and was only buying one thing. As it is the week before Christmas, of course every checkout at the store had a long lineup, and especially the express lineup. If I have time, I don't mind waiting, so I went to a regular checkout, behind an older woman who had a cart full of groceries. As she was unloading, I saw her look at me, look at my one thing, saw that I was paying in cash, and then she said it:

You have only one thing, why don't you go ahead of me?

Thank you, I said. I wanted to say "that kind of courtesy is so rare these days!" but I didn't want to spread my cynicism. I was perfectly willing to wait until her transaction would have been completed, it would have taken ten or fifteen minutes out of my life. I expect to stand in lines at any store at this time of the year. It was nice to know that it is still possible to people to be considerate of others.

movement on the immigration front

2011-12-19T10:36:00.000-08:00

Right now they are just words. But this morning Dan sent me a text message saying that we have received our second Notice of Action. My application has gone to visa processing. It should hang out there for ten days (though the office closes Dec 23 - Jan 2) and after the issuing of the third Notice of Action, I will receive the package with my instructions on setting up the immigration interview and health check. That's the last step before the green card is granted.

It could happen that I get to cross the border in January!

new hair, new hat

2011-12-18T16:09:00.000-08:00

I got tired of having to bleach my hair blonde every six weeks, and my poor hair was also ready to back to dark I was a bit scared of what might happen, so the woman who cut my hair a few weeks ago recommended an intermediary color before going back to brown. I chose chocolate cherry.

I have been doing this a long time and have been pretty lucky as far as mishaps go. Sigh. Until yesterday. It wasn't a complete disaster, but there is a band of yellow (only noticeable in some light) on the back of my head where the darker color didn't saturate entirely.

Well, it *is* an intermediary color. And Dan likes it, so how can I complain? At any rate, this gave me the impetus to knit like a woman possessed and get my first Escargot done. Yes, you heard me, my first. I fell in love with this pattern as soon as it came out last week and have been thinking about little else until I could get to knit this hat. So here it is.

I'm not one of those people who normally knits the new "it" thing as soon as it comes out. In fact, I seldom pay attention to those things. But someone on Twitter mentioned the new Knitty was out, so I looked, and WOW I must have that hat. Soon.

So please don't tell my mum but I opened the Christmas present from her early. I had to, see, because I am in limbo right now and I thought that her gift might be a useful thing and I sure didn't want to have to lug around a box of something. It turned out to be yarn. My mum is so sweet, buying me yarn. It's Sirdar Family Worsted With Wool, with a 75% acrylic content, which I wasn't very excited about (I hate knitting with acrylic), but it has actually been a pretty good yarn to knit with. She gave me two balls of green and two of ivory, about 800 yards in total. I can probably get four hats out of that. My next Escargot will be ivory with green trim.

I had issues with this right off the bat because it wants you to cast on 240 stitches. Whoa whoa whoa, right away, once there are more than say, 60 stitches, I run into problems if I don't use a stitch marker. (Remember the Mezquita?) I had way too many, so took a bunch off, then I think there was a problem with the second row and me not reading the pattern right (that's what I get for watching movies with subtitles while knitting), so I frogged and restarted. And then I just couldn't put the thing down.

It was at about 11pm last night where, less than an inch away from starting the crown decrease, that I actually had to admit I was tired and needed to go to bed. So I did. But you can bet the first thing I did when I got up this morning (after I made coffee of course) was pick it up. I had it finished and ends woven in by 2pm today, with a few interruptions (or else it would have been done sooner).

I haven't blocked it yet, and I have several items that need to be blocked so I think I will get to that in the next few days. But I'm pretty excited about this hat and think that you should totally knit one too.

not knitting for everyone this year

2011-12-17T11:07:00.000-08:00

As you know, I am a hand-maker-of-things. Knitting is my craft, I can do rudimentary crochet, am a not-to-shabby cook and I pride myself on my baking. I am okay with a sewing needle, a menace with embroidery, draw great stick people and can do rather a lot with pencil crayons and paper.

Since being with Dan's family, I have created almost exclusively knit items for the family for Christmas. They appreciate it, see, and it is way more fun to knit things for people who appreciate them. (A few years ago, someone in my family threw something I had knit in the garbage because there was a hole in it, not realizing it was a simple mend). So with Dan's family, that's about ten people. Then if I knit for my sister, her kids, and my mum, we're up to 14. For the past few years, almost every gift has been knitted or at least handcrafted in some way. This is largely a function of time and money, since we haven't been in a position to spend lots of money on presents, but also because of my state of paid employment. I'm finding myself for the fifth winter in a row with not much work (2007 & 2008 I was in grad school, so that sort of doesn't count).

I joke about being "a woman of leisure" at the moment, because I have so much time on my hands. I go to bed and wake up when I want. I take my time with my morning coffee, and my to-do lists for the day are generally small and flexible. All this sounds wonderful, right? To be honest, I feel terribly inefficient. I mean, on the one hand, it is very good for my health to be able to relax this way, to get some much needed rest, and I am getting some time to work on my 'stuff' (there is a lot of stuff going on in my head, I'll tell you about it sometime). On the other hand, yes, I would love to be working and earning some money, which would take my mind off my 'stuff' and provide some framework for how I organize my day. But I digress.

One toast mitten for Christmas 2009

There have been a few late-night Christmas eves where Dan and I would be madly working trying to finish up the last few gifts to take over for the family on Christmas Morning. The toast mittens in particular took WAY longer than I thought, because after they had been knit, they still needed to have the ends woven in and the liners inserted. By 2:30am we decided that John would just get one toast mitten for Christmas and the other for his birthday, two days later. That was one of those years where, after knitting gifts for everyone, I said NEVER AGAIN, and "next year, everyone is getting gift cards!"

The other toast mitten joins its partner two days later in 2009

So.

This year, because of my state of uncertainty and not knowing where I would be for Christmas, I didn't make any plans to knit things for the family. Not really. I also didn't think I had enough yarn in what was left of my wee stash to be able to pull it off in time anyway. Then, by late November, it became apparent that yes, I will still be in Canada for Christmas and yes I will be with the family on Christmas day. And I have no income. Crap. Better figure something out.

So then I got really creative. Of course I can't tell you anything about that just now, but list-making and planning and knitting began in earnest.

Now, I will say right here that I did not sign myself up for a breakneck knitting schedule, not everyone will receive knitted items this year. There will be a few small items that will be purchased, some have been purchased already, and I hope the family will understand why they are so modest. I'm sure they will.

So as I am knitting on the last thing for a Christmas gift, I am really looking forward to preparing the other family Christmas surprise, which I will blog about afterwards.

For Christmas 2010, Toast mittens are joined by the Toester

There is really a lot of stuff happening in my life that I simply can't blog about. All I can tell you, dear reader, is that when someone says to me "how are you?", I can honestly answer "pretty well, all things considered". I've been living almost seven months without my husband and he told me yesterday that I will see him next month, whether for a visit or for our grand road trip to North Carolina. With our luck, it would be in deepest, darkest winter. He will see the lawyer today and maybe there will be some news, maybe not. But I'm hanging in there, making the best of things. After Christmas and all this knitting/crafting is out of the way, I will turn my attention to being the Best Farmhand Ever for my friends here at backyardfeast.

migrating north

2011-12-14T10:21:00.000-08:00

To recap the nomadic ways of Stacey and Her Cat Sam, Dan left on May 25th. We were living in Ucluelet then, and after a couple of weeks I realized I could not stand to be in that big dumb house alone (much less afford it on my little income), so I decided to go wait for immigration at my sister's farm in central Alberta. Left Ucluelet on July 2.

Arrived on farm on July 8. Was there almost three months, left on September 28, thinking we were going to cross the border (Dan flew into Edmonton, we left that night), but were rejected the next morning. Drove to Victoria, arrived September 30 at his parents' house also known as The Stately. Dan stayed a week, then few back to North Carolina. I stayed on. Just over two months in Victoria.

The other day Sam and I moved up to Cowichan Bay to stay with Toni and the Skipper. There are fewer people and more bathrooms, and I have a room to myself here. I will get to be a farmhand (hopefully this can wait until all the Christmas knitting is out of the way!) Sam is the only cat and she has been alternating between lazing around and kittycatting around at night. It's good.

I'm still working away at this small project for the Cancer Agency, so that's good. I've started studying Russian, and I'm going between movies and podcasts to keep me entertained as I'm knitting. I have a whole new area to explore while running, and my running is steadily improving.

It's been a very interesting process, really, living with other people and becoming accustomed to the rhythms of their households. I do miss being the Queen of the Castle, but I know that will happen soon enough. I have learned a lot about the way other people run their households and am filing this away for the day that I once again have my own.

Mercury went direct yesterday, Uranus went direct on the weekend, around the same time there was a full moon eclipse. Whether you believe in astrology or not, there are some big changes afoot. At least one person I know has already experienced the effects of these movements. I am expecting to hear something from Dan's lawyer this week regarding my immigration. Fingers crossed.

Last weekend I was able to catch up with the friend that had introduced me and Dan, he's been overseas for a year and a half. The party that was thrown in his honour was a wonderful and relaxing event, I felt very at home and comfortable there around lots of old friends and acquaintances.

Now that I'm not at the Stately, the paths of the Alcohol Advent Calendar are diverging but they are still happening. I'll be drinking mostly wines and beers, I'm sure, and I am perfectly content with that.

As I write, Sam is sitting on my lap, wishing I would stop moving around so much so she could settle into a nap. She isn't normally a lap cat while I'm sitting, so I don't quite know what this means, but I take her moments of affection as they come.

On Christmas Day I will drive south over the Malahat (the mountain pass that is the gateway to the south end of Vancouver Island) if it is not closed due to weather, and join the family at the Stately for Christmas. I'll head back to Victoria on Boxing Day for a friend's annual Boxing Day party. December 27 is my step-father-in-law's birthday, which will mark the end of the Alcohol Advent Calendar. So lots of driving these three days, weather permitting, but it will be a fun and festive time.

That's it for now. I know I owe you all some photos of my recent adventures - worry not, they are on the to-do list.

Alcohol Advent Calendar post Day 9

2011-12-10T12:46:00.001-08:00

To review:

December 1st: red wine
December 2nd: bourbon
December 3rd: Scotch
December 4th: rum & egg nog
December 5th: port
December 6th: mead (the very mead that Dan and I made at our wedding)
December 7th:Carolan's Irish Creme
December 8th: Double Chocolate Stout
December 9th: sherry, followed by the emptying of the bottles of port (day 5) and mead (day 6)

This is going great and I'm having such a good time. I have so far managed to avoid a stinking hangover, but it's not like we drink our faces off every night. Sometimes it's just a sip. I think tonight we're having Caesars, which I understand is a uniquely Canadian drink. Bottoms up!

Alcohol Advent Calendar

2011-12-07T13:58:00.001-08:00

I'm staying with my in-laws right now. There are five people in the house, and attendance at dinner ranges from three to five of us. One night at dinner, Thor (was it him?) suggested we do an alcohol advent calendar. Well okay then. We started December 1st. Here is the list so far:

December 1st: red wine
December 2nd: bourbon
December 3rd: Scotch
December 4th: rum & egg nog
December 5th: port
December 6th: mead (the very mead that Dan and I made at our wedding)
December 7th: ?? I don't think we are decided yet, but at the moment the liquor stock is increasing and we have a number of options available to us. On deck for future evenings: sherry, vodka, porter, stout, and cherry brandy (so far). I hear some Bailey's is on its way and we found an unlabeled bottle (thanks to Dan) that could either be mead or the cider we made in 2008. All very drinkable stuff.

Also: as the family patriarch's birthday is on December 27th, the advent calendar will run until then.

And someday, if I remember, I will post photos.

This just in: Carolan's Irish Cream just entered the house!

overdue photos: Muppet cupcakes

2011-12-07T13:43:00.001-08:00

O dear. This grand event, Zola's 25th birthday, happened more than a week ago and I have not yet posted the photos! Here:

I can in no way take credit. I decorated some of the Mup-cakes, but it was entirely Zola's idea, and her sister S brought all the decorations as well as the cupcakes themselves.

Cookie Monster

Elmo

Bert

Grover

Camilla

Animal

Dr. Tooth

Oscar

Janice

Zoot

Ernie

The Swedish Chef

We had a great time doing this! I highly recommend a theme cupcake-decorating party.

no news, just knitting and research

2011-12-02T16:19:00.001-08:00

As I go about my day, I often think of something that would make for a great blog post topic. And then I forget it. I'm sure I'm not the only one this happens to. I have taken over a hundred photos in the last week, some of which are worthy of blog posts. but some days (sometimes a few days in a row), I don't feel like turning on my computer. Or I just don't feel like blogging.

This past week has sped by so fast, I have to think for a minute to recall just how I filled it up. What did I do? On Monday I went to my doctor to see about my lung/cough problem. She said it could be reflux, or asthma, or (depending on what the lab says when they analyze my specimen) it could be something else. Well, I'm a runner. I don't get winded when climbing a few flights of stairs. I have no allergies and don't wheeze, so it is unlikely to be asthma. Reflux? How does a gastrointestinal ailment affect the lungs? I'm a bit puzzled by the whole thing, but my doc gave me a sample inhaler meant for asthmatics and sufferers of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), and sent me on my way with a specimen container and instructions on how to modify my bed to reduce reflux.

I saw a friend of mine later in the day, a former pharmacist, and he was fairly certain it was not asthma, that the inhaler would not help, and that if it is reflux, here is what to do... It's great having friends who are health care professionals.

It was around that time that I "made contact" with my late great grandmother, my mother's mother's mother. I don't really want to go into too much detail about that, just in case you think I've gone loopy, but it suddenly has me extremely interested in researching Russian history and language. I knew that my great grandmother Marie came from somewhere along the Volga River. And yet they were German. Or were they? There was a group of Volga Deutsch, Germans living in Russia. I didn't know many details of what had happened, but I know that at least a few of her eight children had been born when she (and later, her husband) came to Canada. There is a family story of how uncle Louie as a baby was made to swallow a lump of gold as the only valuable they had left, and hidden inside the baby the Bolsheviks would not be able to take it away.

That was all I knew, really, about the story. Years ago I had asked one of my mother's aunts about these stories, to fill in more detail, but was met with silence. They must have been painful memories that did not want to be disturbed. But now it's too late to ask the living, as the two remaining children of my great grandmother are in their 80s and in declining health.

Whenever I get interested in something, my very first place to search for information is always the library. Luckily, I am currently in Victoria which has an excellent collection. I have been able to source books, audiobooks, DVDs, and language learning kits. It's time I at least learned Cyrillic and then perhaps some basic conversation. The library has 21 DVDs that show up when I do a search for Russian History. One of my favourite podcasts is the Russian Rulers History Podcast.

I don't know exactly when my great grandmother came over, but I'm fairly certain it was around the time of the Russian Revolution. She was born in 1898. Where did the boat leave from? Where did she land? How did she get from the east side of North America to the southern interior of British Columbia and why go there? This will require some excavation, but it will be helpful to me to understand what was happening at the time. It was not a safe or comfortable thing to be Volga Deutsch in communist Russia.

I have a lot of beloved dead, dearly departed. When the question was posed, which of my beloved dead would I most like to communicate with, I did not hesitate. I thought that was interesting, because my great grandmother died when I was a child, maybe when I was 13. I think she is the one of my ancestors that I think I have the most in common with.

At any rate, now I know where my week has gone. It has been thinking about and researching this topic.

Also: on Tuesday when I got home from shopping downtown with a friend, I felt extremely compelled to enter all of my yarn stash into Ravelry's database. I ran out of time before I got it all, but after about an hour and 15 minutes, I probably got at least 75% in. I don't have a big yarn stash, but this process requires taking a photo of the yarn, entering the yarn's name, colour, date purchased, how many skeins I have, etc. It was as a result of doing this that I was once again motivated to get knitting for Christmas.

I didn't think I was going to be able to knit many of my gifts this year. I think for the past two or three years, most of the 15 people in my family have each received hand knits. I am not in a position to buy yarn at the moment, and stash reduction is a really good thing with my border crossing imminent. So I have watched some DVDs about Russia (finished Miss Marple when I finished Mezquita on Sunday) and gotten two gifts finished in the last two days.

Oh, and running. I'm up to 5 1/2 miles when I go out. On my last run I ran 7 minutes, walked 2, six times, plus warm up and cool down. Today was a run day for me but I'm feeling some flu symptoms, so will take it easy today and see how I feel tomorrow.

what the lawyer said

2011-11-26T11:17:00.001-08:00

I admit I was hoping for News. All we know is that everything we submitted is fine, there should be no further obstacles, and now we wait for packages from the USCIS. My package will have information about setting up the appointments for the interview and the medical check. Hopefully this will come in the next couple of weeks, but we just don't know really. All we know is that if things go well, we could be crossing the border before Christmas, and if not, then late January-early February at the latest. We sort of already knew this but it has been more or less confirmed. So that's good. I have one or two months left here in Victoria, on the Island, in Canada. I may or may not be here for Christmas (though this I'm sure I should know in the next two weeks).

It's so hard to plan with uncertainty looming. Well, it looks like I'll have more work from the BC Cancer Agency so I can keep my brain busy, at least. I'm almost done the Miss Marple series, which also means my Mezquita shawl is almost finished. I think I have about five or six rows (l o n g rows) left. The cats have been kept apart with success, though Sam saw Yuki outside through the window and was disquieted. Not in a mad-because-I-see-another-cat kind of way but hey-that's-a-BOY-cat kind of way. I only recognize it because she doesn't make that noise very often. Will wonders never cease?

If you look close enough, you can see the scales and slime from these shortspine thornyheads.

So. Now what do I do? I feel like I should finally get in touch with the people I haven't seen yet, even though I have been here for almost two months now. I also think that repacking my Rubbermaid bins would no go amiss. Believe it or not, I'm thinking about sending holiday cards, but I'm not sure I can get myself organized enough to do that. And what would I say? Happy Holidays, read my blog, it's all there. Last year Dan and I sent Merry Fishmas cards. I took a bunch of photos while I was working on the fish plant dock, of fish with a Santa hat or in a stocking. Dan Photoshopped them and we made them into cards. I will give making new cards some thought, I'm just not sure if I'll have time.

a little information can make me so happy

2011-11-21T09:15:00.001-08:00

On Friday Dan received an affidavit of support that he had to fill out and return. This happened only one week after the petition was sent. They processed the payment last Monday, the first business day after.

I had an hour-long conversation with Dan last night. It was great. We don't get to actually talk very often, and when we do, we have this bit of awkwardness because neither of us are good at small talk. We haven't been Skyping because a) you need Internet for that and we don't always both have it and b) Dan's netbook broke and he's waiting for replacement parts. So we have still largely been communicating by text messaging.

In our conversation last night, Dan told me all sorts of wonderful things:

He needs from me a list of every employer I have ever had including dates, addresses and phone numbers. Well holy crap, I have had a lot of jobs in my 23 years of working life. He also needs our rental agreements to show that we have in fact been cohabiting for a long time.

The US Immigration service has a new thing where you can sign up for email updates of what is happening with the processing of your case. FINALLY!

It is possible that if we apply to have my immigration interview over the Internet, I won't need to go to Vancouver for it.

Also, there is an immigration doctor that comes to Victoria every other week, so I might not need to go to Vancouver at all. (I'd still sort of like to, I have people in Vancouver I would like to see, but it's nice to know that this whole process can be easier).

Dan will be sending me a PDF of an affidavit that I have to fill out and sign. Only, I have to sign it in front of a notary public. And guess what? On Friday I attended a Tweet-up where I met and made new friends with a notary public. How's that for synchronicity?

Dan will see the lawyer on Thursday. Cosmically, that's the day that Mercury goes retrograde but I'm not at all worried about that. The retrograde period is a time for finishing things, tying up loose ends. In this case, the Susan Miller horoscope for Aries in November said some big stuff is coming on the new moon eclipse on November 25th. She even said "green card" so I am pretty stoked.

The best news? Dan said that if nothing is happening with this processing by early December, he'll come for a visit. If things are happening, then he'll sit tight if it looks like he'll need to come make this trip with me soon. Obviously I hope for the latter, but one way or the other, I will see my husband in December.

knitting!

2011-11-19T13:58:00.001-08:00

I've been busy. I can't post everything that I've been working on with my knitting just in case a recipient is a reader. But here is some stuff:

Mittens for my niece that she requested. The yarn is Sandnes Garn Smart, I knit on 4mm dpns. I really didn't like this yarn, it made my hands hurt as I knit these mittens. I know it isn't just a function of doing stranded knitting, because when I was knitting the pink & white mittens for myself, which are also stranded, my hands didn't hurt then. So I'll never use this yarn again, but it was a DK superwash and didn't cost very much. And they're done.

These are for my mum, who I'm fairly certain doesn't read my blog. Mum was telling me a few weeks ago that she needed to get some mittens. I asked what colour. She said "are you going to knit me some mittens?" and I said "I'm not promising. Just what colour would you like?" Navy. I happened to have some navy Cascade wool that was almost three different things, including a hat and a scarf, but the yarn didn't want to be either of those things. Also knit on 4mm dpns, I really enjoyed this, actually. 32 stitches, 2x2 rib for a bit, switch to stockinette, did afterthought thumb. Instead of a tapered decrease at the top, I decreased evenly all the way around and I like the effect. Someday I will knit mittens from a pattern. I finished these last night at the coffee shop with all the knitters!

This is the Molly Beret by Alana Dakos. I bought a few of Alana's patterns while I was working at Knits by the Sea in Tofino. I've been carrying these patterns around in my head, wanting to knit them because I hear such great reviews of them. This is the second of Alana's patterns that I have knit now, the first is a secret (for now). The yarn I'm using is Sandnes Garn mini alpakka. I'm realizing that I haven't met an alpaca yarn that I didn't like. They are all the same in character and I just love the hand on them. I can wear alpaca around my neck and not have it itch (which alas, is not true for wool, even superwash). So this beret begins on 2.25mm needles and holy crap that is small. I'm used to knitting socks on needles this small but knitting at such a small gauge for a hat is really an exercise in patience. I'm two rows away from switching to the the striped section, which other than increases and decreases, it's basically stockinette on 3.25mm needles, so should go way faster. This is intended for a gift but... well... we'll see. It might fit me.

This is the one I am most excited about right now, in terms of my WIPs. This is the Mezquita Shawl. I don't remember where I first saw this pattern but I put it in my queue on Ravelry and it has been niggling at me ever since. At one point, the pattern said to me "Hey Stace, I bet I would go really well with that Handmaiden Sea Silk that you bought in Kelowna last year". And I said "but I don't have a 5.0mm 40" Addi Turbo circular needle!" And then some money came, and then I went to my favourite yarn shop in Victoria, and all barriers to me knitting this pattern were removed. This is the shawl I mentioned in a previous post, the one where I had to cast on 361 stitches. I haven't had much time in the last few days to knit on this, because it does require some dedicated sit-down-and-knit time, but I am anxious to get it done so I'll have my aforementioned matching set. The weather in Victoria has gotten cold (read: below freezing temperatures!) and I'm finding the need to have something on my neck. I have been wearing my Darcy Shawlette that I finished in the summer, but it's azure and blue, so doesn't exactly go with my hat and mitts.

And now that I have cast off the mitts for my mum, I'll take those 4.0mm dpns and cast on another thing for someone else. Boy, after Christmas I'll have a few things to tell you all about. And look! This here is finally a post about knitting.

Wait - one more thing- I must admit I am absolutely itching to knit socks right now. I have two single socks that need to be finished, one for me, one for Dan. I really do want to knit on them just now, but I'm feeling like the gift-knitting season sort of takes precedence over knitting for ourselves just now. It will all depend on what happens in the next five weeks, really.

O Hey

2011-11-17T12:52:00.001-08:00

There I go again, neglecting my readers. Sorry friends.

I had a fantastic weekend chicken-sitting in Cowichan Bay last weekend. Sam and I drove up on Thursday and we stayed four nights. The photos below don't really reflect what I did over the weekend, but hey, it's all I have to show for it.

Soon this place will be home to a wood stove. I can't wait.

Mittens for my niece! She asked me for yellow mittens before I left Alberta. I didn't have enough yellow yarn, so I had to use white as well, which made them look a bit like scrambled eggs. O well. I have discovered that an afterthought thumb is my favourite.

Sam slept on every surface in the house, I think.

Cherry brandy! Earlier this year I was reading one of Diana Gabaldon's books and Claire was visiting an apothecary in Paris, drinking cherry brandy. So I needed some too.

On Saturday morning I went into Duncan (the closest town, 10 minutes drive away). I don't know what happened to my old travel mug but I have been without one for - well, I don't even know. Five months? I don't really go into stores very often, not wanting to be tempted, but I thought I'd pop into London Drugs to look around. They had a not great selection of travel mugs but I did like this one. I'm thinking about something that will fit into the cup holder in my truck (I really think the people who design travel mugs should get together with the people who design cup holders in vehicles), something that is dishwasher safe, and something that will match with the car we might own in two years. Brown is a popular colour for newer vehicles and I really dig it. But I didn't buy this mug. It was 26.99.

I had to buy lottery tickets. That's what one does when one needs hope, right?

Action shot of Sam. Here she is rolling around on the floor. That's how I know she was happy!

Aw. Sam is cleaning her cute kitty face. So cute.

This! Ok so Toni had grown way more tomatoes than they could possibly use, and for about six weeks, they had tens of pounds of tomatoes ripening in crates in their dining room. These tomatoes really needed to be used up, so I cut up as many would fit onto a baking pan. Added a few rather large cloves of garlic, drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with rock salt. Put it into the oven. That was as far as I had gotten in my plan, but it was going to be a component of the dinner I would make for my friends when they got home from Vancouver.

I can't remember what temperature I put them at, but boy they sure smelled good. I decided they would either go into a pasta or perhaps on a pizza, would let my friends decide. The vote was for pizza, so I threw together a crust.

Toni helped out by spreading pesto on the crust. Then on went the tomatoes & garlic mixture, we threw on some chopped artichoke hearts, Kalamata olives, feta and some amazing cheddar. Oven was set to 400 degrees, we had it in for about 25-30 minutes.

I didn't use a recipe for the crust, just sort of threw it together. During the pizza assembly we were drinking beer too :-) so the 'throwing together' was a bit more literal than figurative. It turned out well though and between the three of us, there were almost no leftovers.

What else did I do? I watched Brokeback Mountain. Have you seen it? I had heard a reference in the news to the 'gay' penguins in the Toronto Zoo (who are probably not homosexual but are just very good friends, ah how we humans have to anthropomorphize everything) to the movie and decided it was time I saw it. Holy crap. I won't drop any spoilers here but gosh that movie had me thinking about it for days and days. I even tried to overwrite my memory with a few Miss Marple episodes (so much knitting while sleuthing for the murderer!). I'm not a fan of murder mysteries, but a few months ago on Twitter during a #knitchat, we had a discussion about knitting in movies and television, someone mentioned the Miss Marple series. Hey - it's BBC and has knitting in it, so it has to be good. And it is! The stories are all expertly woven together a la Agatha Christie. What I love, though, is the setting. All the stories are set in post WWII England in the late 1940s to early 50s. I love that era, especially the fashion of the times. That alone is reason enough for me to watch the series. Nuff. said.

I also went running a few times. It was so nice running around on country roads where cars aren't going highway speed and there isn't actually much traffic to speak of. I found some lovely enclaves, long straight flat stretches, and some beautiful scenery. The weather cooperated while I was there also.

I didn't take any photos of the chickens this time around, but I did hang out with them. The first night I was in charge, it was super stormy and blustery. The row coverings for the raised beds threatened to blow away. I worried about the chickens, but they seemed not to notice the storm. They were just excited when I came out to give them their treats (involving sunflower seeds). Chickens. The Skipper had built an automatic door opener to the chicken coop that is set on a timer, so that all I had to do was open and close the door to the outdoor pen. Happy chickens!

I also went into a feed store on Saturday, while I was in Duncan. The vet Sam saw in Alberta for her pre-border-crossing checkup & vaccinations gave us a free sample of dental formula crunchy food. Sam loved it so I promised her when it next came time to buy food, she would get that brand. It's amazing how much she likes it. And I don't know if it is having some variety, something different, or if it's just the 'new' bag of food. No matter. She likes it and that's all that matters.

I did a fair amount of knitting on the weekend too. Finished the mittens for my niece, started another pair for some other family member who doesn't read my blog, and also cast on for the Mezquita shawl. Three hundred and sixty one stitches. 361. Do you have any idea how long that takes? Because first you cast on, and you're counting, and maybe you're also watching Miss Marple so you lose count once or twice, but casting on takes a l o n g time. And then you recount your stitches like five times, getting a different number every time. Then you decide you need stitch markers but didn't bring any, so root around the kitchen for twist ties and voila! I put a twist tie every 50 stitches, counted them twice to be sure, and ended up with 362. Off by one. Easy to fix. I have since learned that one episode of Miss Marple, about 100 minutes, sees me knitting exactly two rows of this shawl. I'm not a fast knitter, but I'm certainly not a slow knitter. It's just lace and counting and thinking and going back and fixing. I'm 10 rows in now, have 10 more rows of the lace section before I get to the short row stockinette section. I haven't taken a photo of this yet or I'd show you. Maybe tomorrow.

I try as best I can to be cheerful and optimistic about my situation, but sometimes it's hard. The immigration lawyer Dan hired filed the application on Friday, having sent it registered mail. Immigration processed the cheque on Monday already, so that was very encouraging. When Dan filed the first time in the summer, they never even processed the cheque, so this seemed like a big thing. Apparently this is a slow time of year for applications for green cards, meaning I should get processed fairly quickly. Fingers crossed. Then yesterday I had an avalanche of sadness. This seems to be happening on a weekly basis at the moment, where I'll just feel like I'm scraping bottom. I'm oversensitive to everything at the moment, it seems, particularly my cat.

Sam fully recovered from the fight on Halloween, but on Saturday night she started oozing some pus out of her right eye. I called the vet hospital on Monday, the same one she got her sutures from, to see if the two might be related and she said no. She said it's probably not much to worry about unless it was accompanied by loss of appetite and lethargy. Well, her appetite is just fine. And lethargy? It's hard to tell. She doesn't have a lot of space to roam so she's probably too bored to do anything but sleep. I don't know.

Then, two days ago, she stopped being lovey with me. She's not an especially lovey cat but still. I haven't heard her purr since Monday night. She's all I have right now, you see, my dear cat that I brought home with me from Korea in 2003, this cat who has been by my side through all my depressive episodes and a few of my surgeries. I need her to love me. That's her job as my cat. Her eye goo is lessening and she is otherwise acting perfectly normal. I just want to hear her purr.

Yesterday this lack of affection hit me really hard and I just crumbled. Had an anxiety attack, actually, which is something I've not experienced in quite a long time. And you know, it's not just because of the cat, it's a combination of everything. I am bothered by this not so much because of the sadness but by how much it inconveniences me. Crying like that takes a lot out of a person so you're left exhausted. And I have things to do! I may not be working full time but I do have this little project I need to get finished. And the sooner I get finished, the sooner I can get to my knitting, non stop, in front of Miss Marple and underneath the electric blanket, tea to hand. Sam will be fine, she's just having a mood (just like I do). I will be fine too.

FO: mittens for me!

2011-11-09T16:41:00.000-08:00

A knitting project I can tell you about!

I know they don't look exactly the same, and that's because they're not. I started this project, oh, about a year ago or more. The pale pink is I think Diamond Luxury silk & merino worsted. The white is some Aran yarn I had in my stash. And the Aran is different in each mitt. I improvised the pattern and made the mitts to fit my right and left hands exactly. I finished the right mitt so long ago I can't even remember when.

And then, what usually happens when I set out to knit two of something from an improvised pattern, I think "I'll knit the second right away, I'll remember, I don't need to take notes!". And then months or years go by and I have to 'read' the first thing to figure out what the second thing needs to do. This was the case here. I mean, I'm pretty sure I used 4mm needles, but I got a way different gauge on the right mitt (40st) than the left mitt (36st), and the left mitt is arguably roomier. So it's a bit confusing, they are a bit mismatched but I guess you could say it's a metaphor for me. I make it up as I go, I figure it out, I make do. They're warm and they match my pale pink Brattleboro hat from Interweave Knits Fall 2010. I love this hat, I get compliments on it every time I wear it. I would like to make more, and as soon as I get my hands on more Malabrigo worsted, I will. And while I'm at it, I'd need a second skein of Malabrigo worsted for the Shawl-Collared Cowl. Wanting a complete set, then I'd need to find some mitten pattern that uses more Malabrigo worsted...

Ok back on track. Mittens. Yes, I am so close to matching! And since winter is/will be settling in here, I need to be warm! I'm pretty excited to have mittens again. Can you believe it? In the intention of moving to North Carolina, I got rid of ALL my mittens and gloves. I know, right? What was I thinking? I mean, it turns out it even gets cold in North Carolina. So, I will plot and plan to make another full set of warm for myself... well, maybe after Christmas knitting is done.

I'm not actually doing that much Christmas knitting this year. I'm just so up-in-the-air with where I'll even be over the holidays that I feel like I can't plan. I also can't buy yarn, as I have no money. I've pared down my yarn stash so much that it could probably all fit into two shopping bags. So, for the next few weeks, I have to think very creatively about how to give some interesting gifts of my own creation with my creativity, my current yarn, beads, and other things I can dream up. There may be edibles.

Tapas feast

2011-11-07T10:13:00.000-08:00

There has been a lot of talk about Spain in the house recently, as Z and the parents spent some time there in the spring. There has also been a lot of talk about food, as I cannot stop obsessing about cooking and baking and all around foodie stuff. So one night someone suggested we have a potluck tapas night, each of us prepare two savories and a sweet. So we did. There was a great and fantastic feast.

Kebabs with only vegetables. I brushed a sauce made from a packet on. We don't have a barbeque, so I placed the skewers on a baking pan, whose edges were just the right distance for the food to hang in between.

Same kebabs, only with chicken also. Some of the chicken went upstairs to Sam later. She was a HAPPY KITTY after that.

I don't have a lot of experience with pastry. I can't recall having made a lot in my life but I do think I made a pie earlier this year. Well, this is a shortening pastry, which was not very interesting. My big plan was to make lime cheesecake in the pastries. It was a good idea, but I'm pretty sure I have never made a cheesecake before and one thing I learned for certain: you can't just wing it with cheesecake. Later I discovered I needed way more cream cheese than I had (three bricks instead of one) and I needed sweetened condensed milk. So, while tasty, they aren't exactly cheesecakes. We've been calling them 'lime tarts'.

This was fun. Salad rolls. I took a head of lettuce and washed & dried the leaves. Once I got them to a uniform size, I took thin slices of carrot and green onion, bean sprouts, some mung bean vermicelli (Z called them 'glass noodles') and a few peanuts, put them in the lettuce leaf. The sauce to accompany them is somewhere below.

Kale chips! Sister S made these. She baked some kale and collard greens after seasoning them, and they were so extremely tasty that they were the first to go.

O shoot. I forget what this is. Spanish potato salad? Russian potato salad? S made this too.

O hello. Olives and feta. Pure decadence! Made by Z.

I'm totally going to botch this reference because I wasn't familiar with it. S made ham and jam on crackers as a tribute to so-and-so the something something mouse from a children's story they (three siblings) all knew about.

The sauces. Basically they are the same thing: raw garlic & ginger, sesame oil, rice vinegar, soy sauce. The one in the back also has peanut butter. The close one was for the salad rolls, the far one was for the kebabs. Normally I would have added sweet chili sauce too, but we didn't have any and it wasn't missed.

Spinach and garbanzo beans with a lot of olive oil. There are only two ramekins in the house so Z used a mason jar. We are on a bit of a mason jar kick, with wanting to use mason jars as vessels for cooking and serving food in.

O dear! Here I am realizing that I missed two of Thor's offerings. Featured above is hard boiled eggs in a bowl of onion peel on a piece of bread. Atop the egg is paprika and caramelized onions. Aside from the raw onion, I really enjoyed this. Thor also made this very interesting... what to call it? A quarter of a large tortilla held some banana fried in curry spices. It was delicious. Thor also fried up an avocado in butter, sugar, bourbon and a a cinnamon stick.

Also missing (see by the end I was on my third glass of wine so...) was the finishing chocolate. I'm going to mangle this name too - ciocollato de calde? Basically a thick hot chocolate that was like a warm pudding. Z made one with caramel, one with chili, one with citrus sugar and one with vanilla. I think I got the citrus sugar one, though it was so mild I couldn't taste it. But Yum it was.

I really enjoy mealtimes with this family. I've been a part of it now for nearly five years and I'm still getting used to all the singing. :-) I loved being able to serve raw garlic and ginger and nobody batted an eyelash. I loved all the experimenting with food. It was great having leftovers. Yeah, we had a great time on Saturday.

Halloween at the vet hospital

2011-11-06T13:42:00.000-08:00

I know, several days have passed since this event, but I was at first too exhausted to write about it and then I was just plain busy. So here we go.

Recap: Sam and I are staying at the house of my in-laws while we wait for my green card. Dan's mom & stepdad are currently out of the country, so I am currently housemates with Dan's brother, sister, and Yuki the house cat. Yuki is male, twice Sam's size, and sure doesn't like having another cat in his house. We have all been making every effort to keep the cats in different rooms so they never have to see each other, but that doesn't always work. The room I was staying in downstairs has a glass door, and the cats would often yowl at each other through that door.

Last Monday I was out running along Dallas Road. (Week 7 of the Couch to 10k program, I logged almost 6 miles between running and walking). I was about 10 minutes away from home when my phone gave me the you-have-a-new-email buzz, and someone tried phoning me. This is not unusual so I ignored it. When I got back to the house, I walked into the room Sam & I were staying in and at the same moment read Thor's email "there was a cat fight..." as Sam came from under the bed, paw dripping with blood. I guess Yuki had made his way into the room we were staying in and they had it out.Yuki won.

I immediately put her on the bed (luckily there were two towels and a hoodie to put down on top) for her to take comfort in my presence and start cleaning herself. There was a lot of blood. I like a lot. I have never had problems with a pet before, Sam is the only pet I've had in my adult life, so I didn't really know what to do. I started texting with Dan, sending him photos of the paw that wouldn't stop bleeding, sent him a 37 second video. He said to take her to the vet. Well, I had to shower first because I wasn't going anywhere all sweaty and gross. Sam had started shaking, probably from shock.

At this point, I was still in nurse mode, so was fairly calm. Thor was home and offered any possible assistance. He came with us to the vet hospital.

We were put into an exam room right away. Sam had been all wrapped up in her bloody towel, but as soon as the door was closed she looked for a way to get up high (her favorite place) or at least a place to hide. She settled on behind the laptop in the room. The vet tech came in and checked Sam's vitals. She was mostly fine (she did just see a vet in September prior to our border attempt), but the tech took her away so they could clean up the paw & get a better look at it.

Away.

They took my kitty away.

Waiting, waiting. Of course I didn't bring any knitting. And we didn't know how long we would be or both of us I think would have brought something to occupy our minds with. Thor found Halloween candy. Looked to see if there were any games in the laptop (!) (There weren't).

Later we were told that Sam was "not cooperating" (no, really?) and they had to sedate her to look at her paw. What they found was quite a large laceration where her paw pads met, hence all the bleeding. She required some very tiny stitches, a bandage, the Cone, and some antibiotics.

When we got her home, that's when I started falling apart. Thor made me dinner and gracefully helped me get through the evening. Sam & I moved back upstairs, to where the mattress is on the floor (and therefore more easily accessible to an injured kitty). It's a part of the house Yuki isn't really interested in, and (most importantly) the cats can't see each other through any window here.

When we went to bed, Sam was mad at me. Mad for having the cone on, mad about the bandage, mad about the car ride, the vet, the fight, all of it. The room was cold. I was upset and stressed out, which didn't help either of us get much sleep that night.

Mad kitty

On Tuesday morning the vet said the bandage could come off. I took the cone off too, knowing there was no way Sam would stand having it on for an entire week. She would have spent that entire week trying to get it off and probably further injuring herself in the process. I was going to help Sam remove the bandage but she was determined to do it herself.

I have to give her a twice-daily antibiotic pill for ten days. I figured the easiest way would be to crush the pill into almost a powder and mix it in with the canned cat food. Normally she gets this once a day as her 5:15pm treat, but at the moment she gets it 12 hours apart. She loves this getting served thing.

She didn't use her litter box for about a day and a half after the vet visit, which worried me some, but when she went poo I was SO happy I told the Internet (via Twitter). She was eating and drinking water right away, so I had no real concerns about her internally.

I haven't actually seen the wound or the stitches. She won't let me. I have caught her a few times trying to pull at them, but we're at day six now so I'm not too worried. The stitches will dissolve and fall off. My sister's husband, who is quite knowledgeable about animals, figures she probably didn't really need stitches. Well, I wasn't taking any chances. This cat has come with me from Korea, and is about to go another 3,200 miles east.

So things are much better now. I'm sure Sam will be much happier when we are in our own home and she can rub her own smells over everything with no threat from other animals, but in the mean time she is getting lots of loving and extra food.

Am I 1% or 99%?

2011-11-06T11:34:00.000-08:00

Normally I don’t like to write about political issues. Notany more. I spent a lot of time in the 1990s as an activist, first as a studentand then later when I got involved in the labour movement. I was all wrapped upin my activism and found myself simply being tired and angry all the time. WhenI discovered rampant hypocrisy and utter lack of integrity by leaders of thesemovements, I walked away. Life is too short to spend all my energy onnegativity.

I can’t ignore this Occupy movement. I mean I can, technically, by simply notphysically going by Centennial Square in Victoria. But I do think about it. Alot. I suspect that if I went down to the #occupyVictoria site, I would see abunch of people I used to attend protests with a decade ago. Well, maybe notnow, maybe in the early days of this Occupy movement I would have seen those familiar faces of people who just show up to every protest, but rumor has it thedemographic of the people at the site has changed.

Victoria and Vancouver have issues of homelessness and safeinjection drug sites, as do many major cities. When the Olympics came toVancouver last year, the city of Vancouver proposed to ship all the homelesssomewhere else (read: Victoria) to sweep them under the rug and away from allthe tourists coming here for Olympics. There has long been a call for moreservices to this disadvantaged set of individuals.

From the beginning I have been puzzled by the Occupymovement. I mean, Okay I get that people are angry about the rich not beingtaxed fairly while the middle class and lower have suffered greatly. But youknow what? That is a trend that has repeated itself historically ever sincehumans could build. One group oppressed another*. One group enslaved another.Ever seen St. Petersburg? That entire city was built on slave labour. So werethe Pyramids. North America’s early railroads (mostly Canada, but probably atleast in the western US too) were built by Asian immigrants looking for abetter life but were instead treated as expendable. I’m not saying that slavery is good or something we should continue (thanks to @idreamnsweaters for catching me on this), but justthat it’s not new. Read any Jared Diamond and you'll see how societies come and go, usually at the hands of this kind of movement from an egalitarian to a huge chasm between the haves and the have-nots. The way our current global economic situation is moving will probably lead to collapse eventually. But it is not just the result of our economic and political systems. (Hello overpopulation!)

I’ve been reading lots of the links that people have beenposted on Twitter, with opinions on either side of the Occupy movement. Oneinteresting YouTube video posited that the people behind the Occupy movementare some whiny poor-me Gen Yers who have a sense of entitlement and don’t knowwhere their food or their IT gadgetry even comes from (i.e. the corporationsthey rail against). I have also been reading the comments of the news storiesthat are posted on my local media sites. The people who are largely againstthis movement, in Victoria at least, seem to be those who are supposedly in the99%, that is, average people. When the City of Victoria turned off the powerand water that the Occupy protesters were using, there was public outcry fromboth sides. What? The city was providingwater and power for these people who claim to represent the 99%? No, more likethey just took it without sanction.

We have municipal elections coming up in a few weeks inBritish Columbia, so the Occupy movement in Vancouver and Victoria have turnedinto what the Vancouver Mayor calls a “political football” because it is nolonger about “sticking it to the man”. The Occupy movement in British Columbia hasturned it into yet another platform to draw attention to the issues ofhomelessness and drug use on our province’s streets. For this reason, bothVictoria and Vancouver want to shut the encampments down and I have to say Ican’t blame them. This is supposedly drawing criticism to both Vancouver’s andVictoria’s mayors and council. So says the media. We’ll see what happens on ElectionDay, as this is like to be the largest issue on which people vote.

A woman at the Occupy Vancouver site died yesterday,allegedly of a drug overdose. Two days ago, another man from the Vancouver sitewas treated for a drug overdose. What the media hasn’t reported is which kindsof drugs were responsible, prescription or illicit, but it is largely assumedthat it is street drugs that are the cause. This is the reason the people, the90-97% (a number I made up) of the 99% can’t get behind this Occupy movement.So many people who are not the 1% have said “these people do not represent me”,and I think that is an interesting thing to consider.

Ah, percentages. As a scientist, I am very interested instatistics. Not only the numbers themselves but just how the numbers werearrived at. As someone who studied Humanities early on, I have a loathsome disdainfor simple dichotomies, such as the proposed 1%/99%. In my brief foray intofeminism, and other minority labels, I grew to dislike labels, which coincidedwith my growing away from being a political activist altogether. So if you askme or label me as being on one side or other of these issues, I will tell you Ifall into neither category. I don’t question whether “one percent” isrepresentative, because I think it is. And 99 percent may be representative ifwe are only talking about monetarywealth, BUT, that does not mean myideologies fit within the framework that the originators of the whole OccupyWall Street movement envisioned. So this is where I get annoyed, because I hatebeing lumped into a category against my will.

I expect a number of books will be written about the Occupymovement in the coming years. It will be an interesting thing to look at allthis in hindsight, and to see from which vantage point this hindsight will comefrom. Will there be a further breakdown of the 99%? As in 37% of the 99%ers arebehind the cause, 54% aren’t, and the rest couldn’t care less? How will this data be gathered? Who will bethe objective independent third party responsible for collecting, analyzing andreporting this data? We will never know, and we must be content with neverknowing. That’s the problem with history – like it or not, we are in an agewhere multiple histories can and will be written and sorting out who is rightor wrong is too nebulous to comprehend.

I do believe I am rambling now. I will summarize by saying Ido not support the Occupy movement because it does not make any concretespecific realistic suggestions about how our global society can achievefinancial equity. Trying to guilt the corporations and the rich will simply notwork, and, as I see it, that seems to be the only tack the protesters aretaking. I do not support the Occupy movement because, while it thoughtprovoking, it is also causes people like me (who have had all kinds of bad luckand shitty things happen despite my best efforts to get out of poverty anddebt, and who is also highly educated and motivated to improve myself) toresent any sort of political movement that claims to want to help people likeme. I’ve been a part of a union and I’ve seen how unions as a whole protect themediocre and the lazy (I’ll save that diatribe for another time, when I’mfeeling sufficiently mad enough again), and the whole Occupy movement seems tome to be like one large union that forces you to sign the union card and takethe oath, even though you absolutely disagree with every word of that oath. Ialso think that if the Occupy movement had any real teeth, you would see WAYmore people out there on the streets. Since it doesn’t, I will continue to bustmy ass to make ends meet, to get ahead, and to be the best human I can be.

This post will no doubt piss some of my readers off (see, I'm even using expletives, which I abhor doing on the Internet, but this a highly charged issue), but I am tired of being silent on this issue. And I want it to be known that I don't support the Occupy movement. If I'm "missing the point" of the movement, that's not my fault. It's the fault of the people behind it for not making it clear for an intelligent person to comprehend. Even then, I might not agree. Gotta love free speech.

* An immediate response from a Twitter follower challenged me on this point. She said "Also you said for any other group to get ahead is to "oppress" another group. That isn't true." I don't think I said or implied this. I believe it is true that one group oppressing another has happened historically. I am very careful in my choice of words when I write. I said "I agree. But it also happens that some groups often do get ahead by oppressing others, which is the point of Occupy, no?" And she replied "NO that is not the point. I think you need to do more reading because by your blog post I see you haven't." So there you have it. Flack. I was expecting that. And this is all my opinion anyway, which I have a right to.

the whole point of having a blog

2011-10-31T09:57:00.000-07:00

In my case, one of the reasons I keep a blog is to keep you, my readers, informed of what is going on. Sometimes that turns out to be interesting random stuff, like picking rosehips from the side of Kennedy lake and turning them into a sauce for the duck to be roasted. Sometimes it's about the things we make. But lately, as my life has taken many turns and tumbles, it is really to keep you posted on what I'm up to and how I'm doing.

A long time ago there was a tradition of once-a-year form letters that people wrote & tucked into their Christmas cards. Then came the big blanket emails that some of us sent out to everyone, not wanting to repeat themselves or to save themselves the labour of writing out the same story 50 times over. For me, at this moment in my life, I bypass all that rigamarole and keep a blog. The Adventures of YarnSalad. Some people check it regularly and each time I make a new post, I tweet it and post a link on Facebook.

I was very surprised then to hear that someone who follows me on Twitter and is also a Facebook friend only realized yesterday that I was back in town. I've been back for a month. With all the ways I go to great lengths to keep in touch with people, communication can still fail and I have to accept there is nothing I can do about that.

tearing me apart

2011-10-28T12:30:00.000-07:00

I should probably wait until this big wave of emotion settles into calmness, but you know me, I'm "in the moment".

Just had a text conversation with Dan. He met with an immigration lawyer today and is pleased with the outcome. For some reason, I took that same information as the prolonging of agony. He said average is 90 days, could be as long as 4 months. I now know what four months without him is like and I don't like it one bit. Ninety days means end of January. I was really hoping to see Dan by Christmas.

But the lawyer told of a case where the processing of a French woman only took 11 days from the time the papers were filed, so who knows. If there is such a thing as looking on our case with compassion, I hope they do it. I hope they do take into consideration that form I signed at the border in September where I agreed not to attempt the border without the right documents. See? I'm cooperating.

It's the not knowing that is killing me. I miss my husband tremendously and missing Dan is by far the worst of it. But uncertainty is also this big evil cloud looming over my mood.

So what happens next is the filing of the documents by the lawyer and then (if I understood Dan correctly) within 30 days she'll have a timeframe to give us. I will be in pins and needles for all of November.

On the bright side (because I must think of a bright side, since that will help me get through this), in terms of knitting, Christmas is not that far away. If I operate on the assumption that I will see Dan at Christmas, I have a lot of knitting to get done before then. My sister's daughter would like her requested yellow mittens soon, well before her birthday, because the weather is turning cold there. Ok. And I started a new project yesterday. I shouldn't have, because I already have several projects, but as Christmas *is* coming soon, I couldn't help but cast on. And I won't even be able to tell you about my knitting for the next two months because most of the recipients will read my blog. (See that? I'm distracting myself from being sad. YAY knitting).

I am also very moved and touched by the outpouring of support I have received here and on Twitter, as well as my friends in Victoria and on the Island. Whenever I have encountered my friends here, they are sorry about my circumstances but happy to see me. Knowing I have such support and that I am loved by so many really does help me get through this trying time, and for that, my friends, I thank you.

a mouse

2011-10-27T09:33:00.000-07:00

I woke up before my alarm this morning and noticed the kitty wasn't beside me. She sometimes sits on the mat beside the bed, staring intently at or simply facing the small dresser.

I hadn't heard anything so I thought nothing of it. I pulled out the bottom drawer the other week and vacuumed under, looking to see if there was evidence of something Sam might be interested in. No, just dust.

This morning, a little while after Sam had resumed her position beside me, I heard some scratching that sounded like it was coming from underneath the dresser. Crap.

Neither Sam nor Yuki, the house cat, are especially good mousers. Sam can catch birds, mice & other rodents, but then she doesn't quite know what to do with them. Usually she thinks the thing to do is bring them in the house and let them go. Here you go! Presents for you! Look! It's still moving! Um, thanks cat.

Sam really got good at hunting when we were living in East Sooke. She had pretty much unlimited access to outdoors and forest, so there were thousands of hiding places. I can't tell you how many times we have had to pull everything out of a closet to trap with a box the mouse that was hiding there. It got to a point where I would keep a box around for the purpose of catching mice. I was pretty good at it too, I might add.

My sister's cats, farm cats, are expert mousers. Being farm cats, they must hunt for survival. One of the cats, Piper, was especially good. She would regularly bring home (only to outside) several mice a day. I know this because she had this special meow that alerted everyone that she had just brought home a tasty morsel, and the other kitties would come running. Unless Roxy the dog got to it first.

So, bother. I'm not excited about a mouse in my living space. It will be impossible for me to find it, so I will have to put out a trap. Near the end of our time in East Sooke, Sam had quit hunting but we still had infestation of mice. Turns out they were getting in through another part of the house, not from our suite but there was only a door that separated us from the laundry we shared by the landlords, so I often saw mice coming & going under that door. We put out glue traps.

Placed correctly, these are actually quite effective. If you are tender hearted and don't mind handling rodents, you can take the trap outside with the live mouse still in it and set it free. It takes some doing though, involving vegetable oil and cotton swabs, as you have to unstick the glue from this wriggling little creature. They are stressed out and trying to escape, which often leads to even more sticking to the glue, so you have to be careful what you unstick first and last.

Yuck. I hate the idea of dealing with that now but really, it's better than listening to them squeak squeak squeak as they die.

words that make no sense

2011-10-26T18:13:00.000-07:00

I'm confused.

I really like the whole world of social media. Except by "social media" I really only mean Twitter and blogging.

I was on LinkedIn for a while but it really seemed like a big old popularity contest and I reaped no benefit from it, so I left. I hate Facebook and every day find more reasons to find it loathsome. I had it on my screen earlier today, walked away for a bit, then an audio ad - a commercial - started blaring out of my speakers and I had no idea what the heck was going on. I find that kind of assault SO offensive that I make every effort not to go to Facebook. And yet I have friends who only seem to interact with their Internet peeps that way.

What I will say for Facebook and LinkedIn, is that they are real words with real names and meanings.

But as social media programmers try to find the next new big thing, and as bending and reshaping words seems to be in vogue, even though the new words might not hold any meaning (yet), it seems that social media sites are popping up with new and confusing names.

Pinterest

Flattr

Plurk

Klout

Tumblr

Flickr

I listen to a lot of podcasts and engage with many people via social media and many of them use some of these other sites. Last night there was something really interesting happening with the Oakland police violence, and it was being documented on Tumblr, but I could not access it from the newly downloaded Tumblr app on my iPhone. Today somebody posted something on Plurk and, not wanting to be out of the loop, I signed up for a Plurk account.

It seems like some of these sites are trying to take over the domains where Twitter, Facebook and blogs have taken a deep-rooted hold long ago. It's just too many. I know that not everyone will come join me on Twitter (though I wish they would), but thankfully programmers have allowed some applications to be used in conjunction with their own. Case in point, my five most recent tweets show up here. I am glad of that! And just today I did a thing on Facebook where my tweets can show up there too. It will save me from ever having to log into Facebook again. That would be awesome.

having a good week

2011-10-26T11:49:00.000-07:00

I love being able to put that as the title.

I haven't worked since June, and haven't had an income or means by which to support myself for several months. Living without money is stressful, and living too close to the bone is rather uncomfortable. It can be paralyzing, really, and for me that can be emotionally debilitating.

In the last few months at my job at the Tofino hospital, I paid into a pension plan. Since I'm not likely to remember the meager contributions I made when I am of retirement age in 2039, I opted to withdraw those funds now. But I had to wait three months past my end-of-employment date. I thought this would mean they would just send me a cheque but no! They sent forms to fill out. And they sent them to Alberta.

So my dutiful sister sent it off to me in Victoria and I received it Monday. Fill this out, send us proof of identity, and we will send you a cheque. You can do it by email YAY. I scanned and emailed the documents. Fingers crossed that this little cheque will arrive in the next week or two. It would really help.

I also started working on a project for Jeff, my former boss, former professor, dear friend and great cheerleader, who is the Director of Clinical Informatics at the BC Cancer Agency in Victoria. I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about it but it is something that I am very interested in and it is just what I need. Another relief.

I haven't needed any medicine for a few days. I'm still coughing a bit here and there, but it's nothing like it was.

Dan has been having some good days off in North Carolina too. He even cooked for himself two days in a row. This is a big deal, as when you're alone & working long hours, it's often just easier to let someone else do the cooking.

I've been enjoying having meals with my housemates, which is at present Dan's sister and brother. When Zola and I got home from Cowichan Bay on Sunday night, Thor made us omelettes. I have cooked the last two nights. The great thing about cooking here? I don't have to clean up!

I haven't been knitting as much as I'd like, for some reason I'm very busy (doing what?). But I have a list now, a list of things that need to be knit before Christmas. Not everyone will get knitted gifts this year, and that's okay. But my almost-seven-year-old niece requested yellow mittens so I have started those. I'm making them on the big side, will line them with fleece.

So for some reason, I am feeling cheerful and optimistic about the future. Dan will see an immigration lawyer on Friday to see what our options are. He has been informed that because of what we have been through already, and that we have been apart for five months, that they will look on our case with compassion. Also after having signed that document at the border (the one that said I will not attempt entry until I have the right papers, that I will cooperate with Customs & Immigration) will also work in my favour. Fingers crossed. I'm a good person, dear America, really, I will do right by you. Just let me in, okay? I really miss my husband.

Ok I think with that I'm going to attempt my first post-cough/cold run, then bake cookies.

Chicken Chicken Chickens

2011-10-24T12:58:00.000-07:00

I love chickens. When we were living in East Sooke, our landlords had chickens. Five hens and a rooster by the time we left, but it always changed. Sometimes the racoons got in, sometimes there were two roosters, chickens came and go.

If you have never had the pleasure of just hanging out with some happy chickens that aren't confined to a cage or the inside of a barn, you owe yourself a favour. There are so many breeds of chickens and some of them are quite beautiful. Not only that, they are quite personable and will love you if they think you have food. My mother in law is fond of chickens, and there are many paintings and sculptures around the house that feature chickens. I remember seeing a chicken calendar in the condo in Missoula. I can see why they hold such fascination!

I spent the weekend in Cowichan Bay with Toni and the Skipper. They have several different breeds and I never did get a full bird count but I think it is eight hens and three roosters. They all have names and personalities and were just a delight to watch in the back yard. I was finally able to take some photos and I'm just going to plaster them all below, unceremoniously. Note the gorgeous rust coloured feathers on the roosters. Here you go!

Stacey vs. flu

2011-10-19T13:04:00.000-07:00

So there's this flu and I that have this battle every day. It goes like this.

Me: [cough cough]
Flu: ha! I got you!
Me: NO [denial] I'm fine. I just need tea. Or soup or something.
Flu: How about I make you HURT ALL OVER
Me: Acetaminophen!
Flu: Oh yeah? How about I fill your chest with heaviness and pain!
Me: No way! I went to London Drugs last night and bought some Guaifenesin to kick your ass.
Flu: well you have me there, but it's only temporary.
Me: Yeah flu so I'm going to go about my day and you'd better just leave me alone

later

Flu: I noticed you forgot to take the Guaifensin. Take THAT! BAM!
Me: You bastard. Come here cold drugs

then

Sleep may or may not happen. If it does, it is likely to be intermittent, as I wake up coughing. Not a big cough, but just a stupid low, tickle-my-throat nagging cough. I take an extra strength Fisherman's Friend and try to go back to sleep. This has been going on for a week.

Meanwhile, I have been trying to get out for a run every other day. Yesterday was my run day and I didn't go because I wasn't feeling great. I want to go today, especially since it looks to be the last nice day before the rains come, but I fear the searing pain in my chest I will feel if I go. Sometimes it's okay to let yourself be sick, right?

You may recall I was incredibly ill in August. I was very sick for three weeks, and then it took rather a long time to recover completely - so long that I'm not sure I actually did recover completely. I'm not nearly as bad now as I was then (felt like a dull knife was being dragged through my lungs every time I coughed) but it is enough to be annoying.

Ok. So now what do I do? I want to exercise. My muscles are asking to go running. My lungs are not interested. Yoga would be a happy compromise, I suppose. I just feel blah. And it's a very wishy-washy sort of illness, since I'm not flat-out sick, it's just sort of nagging, like the younger sibling that hangs around no matter what you do to deter them.

confused

2011-10-14T14:16:00.000-07:00

I have lived in a few places in the last two years and it has me confused about recycling, garbage & environmentalism.

In the greater Victoria area, it is common for people to not flush the toilet unless there are solids in it. This has changed somewhat with the advent of low-flow toilets, with a little button for pee and a big button for poo, but on the whole, only brown goes down.

Victoria also has a sophisticated system of recycling. Everything. Whatever doesn't get picked up at the curbside, there is the Pacific Mobile Depot that makes its rounds in the capital region each month where you can take your soft plastics, your old computer parts, your Styrofoam (why did my computer insist on capitalizing that?). For many people in this area, they will only have one grocery bag a month that goes to the garbage, for all the recycling and composting they do.

When we lived in East Sooke, we had (I had) a great compost system. I had the black compost bin that I threw kitchen scraps into, and that was only if I didn't give them to the chickens first. (Having chickens around is awesome. They eat slugs). I also built a three-bin compost system for processing large batches which gave my garden lots of yummy nutrients for my plants.

Things were a bit different in Ucluelet. They do have garbage and recycling curbside pickup, but you couldn't put your stuff out before 8am on collection day because of the bears and raccoons. Very few people had compost bins for the same reason. And they did not accept glass for recycling. Water was plentiful, so there was no concern about water conservation (it is, after all, a rain forest).

Then I spent the summer in Alberta. On a farm. No such thing as curbside anything. No compost. Garbage went out to 'the pit' to be burned at some point in the year. Very few farmers recycle, but my sister does. In fact, she has quite an elaborate system of recycling whereby there is a place in the garage for everything that the recycling depot in Camrose will accept. Once a month or so, my sister will drive it all in. As for water, it's on a well. A stinky sulfurous brown water well, but there was plenty of water. Flush the toilet every time, please.

Back in Victoria, I have to overwrite and re-learn all the rules from before. Where does everything go? What are the rhythms of the house? What can and cannot be recycled? I'm confused, see, because I'm in a borrowed space trying not to upset the fine balance of the people who live here. They are very forgiving, thankfully, and not tyrannical in the slightest. It's an interesting thing to think about though.

got my run on

2011-10-11T13:13:00.000-07:00

Please forgive the bad grammar in the title. I just couldn't help it.

Last week Dan bought me new running shoes. I think they are the first pair of running shoes actually purchased in a running store, not from a shoe store. Today I broke them in.

I forgot when we were shoe shopping that I wear an orthotic in my running shoe. I don't wear the orthotics in the rest of my shoes, so never thought to bring it with me when we were at the store. I pulled them out of my old shoes and slipped them into the new ones today. The fit was slightly different but not in a bad way.

As luck would have it, I went out for my run before the torrential rains began today. I haven't run in two and a half weeks (between moving, travel, spending time with Dan, and resettling in a temporary location) but instead of doing an easier run, I continued on the plan with the Couch to 10k app on my iPhone.

I don't recall if I have mentioned this program before. I did it years ago (before there was such a thing as iPhones) when I was training for my first 10k race in 1999 or 2000. I'm up to week 6 day 1 today, which after the 5-minute warm-up has me running 3min walking 2min 13 times. I was working my way through this program when I was at my sister's house, on the treadmill. What a difference to be outside!
\
I ran through the Ross Bay Cemetery, then turned around and headed back south on Dallas Road. Near Ogden point I turned in to the streets, ran through James Bay and Beacon Hill Park before heading back. I logged 5.47 miles with my Runmeter app.

I'm seeing Victoria through new eyes. When we left the area (living in East Sooke) a year and a half ago, we were desperate to leave. After living in two quite different rural and remote locations since then, I have a new appreciate for the city. Everything is within walking distance. I can ride my bike. There are still flowers in October. Gourmet and Asian food.

As I ran by the peacock in Beacon Hill Park, I resisted the urge to say hello "haawOOOw!" (I can do a mean peacock impersonation) and it reminded me of Spilly Jane. (Why? I think she mentioned something about peacock coloured nail polish on Twitter sometime this summer).

In slightly unrelated news, yesterday I was invited to and attended a Thanksgiving dinner at a friend's family's home. I keep forgetting how different I looked when we moved away. I was 30 pounds heaver and had brown hair. I sure don't get tired of the compliments. :-) However, I have remained at the same weight for about three months now. I've gone up and down a pound or two, but I haven't really been logging with my LoseIt! app (what got my whole weight loss started in the first place). So in one sense, it's good that I haven't gained any weight back. But I still have 20-30 pounds to go until I'm where I want to be.

So I'm training for a marathon. Victoria is a great place to get going on that because there is TONS of support. I have people here I can run with. Kinston, when I get there someday, is also full of runners. I don't know which marathon I'll end up running but I am determined to do it before I turn 39.

Flattr me

2011-10-09T18:42:00.000-07:00

Hi friends,

Have you heard of Flattr? It's this way of making small contributions to people who produce content you like. I listen to a lot of podcasts and read a few blogs, and even though we all do this because we love producing the content, it would be nice to have a bit of income from it. Podcasts sometimes help defray their production costs by sponsors or Donate buttons on their websites, blogs have the option of having advertising on their pages. I'm tossing around the idea of doing this also as I'm about to ramp up my blogging schedule (I'm not working, see, so why not bust my ass to create content?). I first heard about Flattr a few months ago and have been thinking about it for a while. Check it out. If you like my content and have a few cents to spare, why not join Flattr and help me out a bit?

Thanks!

what a week it has been

2011-10-07T21:29:00.000-07:00

It's hard to believe that a week ago I was on the way back to the Island with Dan. That two weeks ago, I figured by now I will be settling into my new life in North Carolina.

Well, if there is one virtue that Dan and I share, it is our adaptability. We seem to be able to cope well in a crisis and to support each other in times of need. Yes getting rejected at the border sucks. So did having the cat try to wriggle her way out of her harness at a roadside stop, forcing me to clamp down on her hard lest she run away and climb up a tree in the forest. This left me with deep gashes, bleeding, with a torn (favourite) shirt, and a wicked bruise on my knee. But I was not going to risk losing my cat. I'm mostly recovered from my lacerations, and the bruise is getting smaller.

As I'm getting used to the idea of being here at least until Christmas, I am actually excited about the things I can do while I'm here. On the top of my list is visit all my friends. That alone could take until Christmas! (I am so lucky). I'll spend all of next week looking for jobs and I expect to have at least one offer by the end of the week - there are tons of jobs in Victoria right now. While it would be great to get a job in health informatics research or at least something to do with writing, I can do just about anything I set my mind do. Mountain Equipment Co-op (Canada's REI) is hiring.

Dan and I were walking around in downtown Victoria today. Oddly enough, that's something we haven't spent much time doing. When we lived in Victoria and East Sooke, our downtown Victoria experience was largely just parking somewhere and going to a restaurant. We love food, after all. Today we decided to go down to Munro's Books, a long-standing institution of Victoria. Again! We made off not having spent any money but I have decided on the slow cooker book I want - the one by America's Test Kitchen. When half of the house's current inhabitants clear out in the next few days, I will set to my cooking experiments.

I don't know what it is, but I can't stop thinking about food. As in cooking, technique, and gourmet flavours. Dan has been experimenting with food and watching all those cooking programs for years and I was the happy guinea pig for all his experiments. This last week since we've been together in a food lover's paradise, I too am taking a ravenous interest in honing my skills. I'm already thinking about what the family might have for Christmas dinner (our Pizza Christmas was a hit in 2009). I guess Dan and I have been able to distill what is really important to us in our life, which is each other, and food. Would the family be okay with okonomiyaki for Christmas dinner? What about a line-up of slow cooker dishes? Thinking, thinking...

Oh, Munro's. It's such a great book store. I love Bolen, for it's massive selection and proximity to bathrooms (it's in a mall), but Munro's has a more focused selection, not chosen for mass appeal but for the discerning reader. There were easily five books in the cooking section I could have walked away with. I also had a chance to see Melissa Morgan-Oakes' newest book about knitting socks toe-up 2-at-a-time. I learned how to knit socks with her first book, so I'm a big MMO fan.

But I can't buy stuff right now. Can't. Need an income first. Victoria has so much to offer to people who have money. I'm not even allowing any yarn shop indulgences until I can confidently pay my bills. But when I do have a bit of extra cash for my knitting habit, I will need things like a shawl pin, some buttons, some Trekking and Wollmeise yarn. It would be nice to someday be able to afford enough nice yarn for a sweater - I've never knit a sweater for myself before.

Which brings me to Christmas again. It's terrible. I usually start thinking about Christmas in July - as in what I will knit for everyone. I don't need to knit for everyone (and in truth, this year, if I do have money, I have some fabulous gift ideas for everyone. It's very helpful to live under the same roof as someone to know what they would appreciate as gifts). I just like knitting. For everyone. And that might mean the projects for myself get set aside until Selfish Knitting Season (in January).

While we were in Mountain Equipment Co-op, Dan encouraged me to look at winter coats. I don't have one. Not any more. Got rid of all my cold weather stuff in anticipation of moving to a hot climate. I found one I like, and as it happens, it is only $145.

I fit into a size Medium! I didn't want a black one, but I wasn't fond of the plum colour, so black will have to do. I will have to wait until November to buy it (money) because today we bought me new running shoes.

We went to Frontrunners and I must have tried on 14 pairs. I have had bunion surgery on both feet, one of which is coming back, and my feet are wide. They are also pronating slightly so I need a bit of arch support. I tried on every suitable women's runner that came in a wide size, and they were all too tight. Tried a few men's and voila! A perfect fit of asics. Turns out they were the cheapest pair. Not only that, but with the Victoria Marathon happening this weekend, I got an extra 20% off. I will keep a log of how many miles I put on these shoes, because marathon runners advise that after 300-500 miles, shoes need replacing. I have never suffered any real running injury, and would like to keep it that way, so I follow all the advice of the marathon runners that have come before. I am determined to run a marathon before I turn 39 in 2013. Join me?

game face

2011-10-05T14:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a hard day.

So since being slapped in the face by the US border last week, Dan and I have been trying to figure things out, what our next step is. We have a rough plan, but mostly it is on hold until he goes back to North Carolina and I have some time & space to clear my head here.

Meanwhile, yesterday we unloaded the truck. I was pretty organized with packing, so most of my stuff is in Rubbermaid bins with plenty of labels. I thought I would only have to have my stuff packed for a week before I could unpack in my new home. I thought I would not need to find my only sweater, my rubber boots, all my knit hats. I don't have any mittens!

My (step-) father-in-law had cleared some space in the basement for my bins, and we moved it all in. I cannot tell you how terribly sad and emotional it was. I didn't get the best sleep the night before last and I have been highly volatile since the great rejection. The littlest thing would set me off. I spent way too much time crying yesterday, and I'm not even really sure why. I'm not someone who cries a lot so this is a big deal (and so is telling you all about it).

As nice as it is to be surrounded by loving family, it is hard to be in this house. It is small and there are currently six people and two anti-social cats in it. There is not much space for me or my stuff so I'm feeling a bit squished. Sam and Yuki have met now, and with Sam being female and half of Yuki's (male) size, none of us are excited about just how these two felines will sort out this awkward living arrangement. The room I'm staying in is on the way to one of the two bathrooms in the house, the only one with the shower, which makes it difficult for the rest of the people who live in this house who would like to use the shower. Luckily, everyone here is easy-going, but I would still like to be less in the way. When Dan's mom & stepdad head to Montana in a few days, I'll move downstairs into their room.

Dan has been making me breakfast every morning. That first morning, on Saturday, when he placed my plate in front of me, I cried. You have no idea how starved I was for food with flavour, nutrition and a passion for cooking.

This is what Dan and I have realized. Number one of importance in our life is that we be together. Number two is that we have good food. I am finally accepting the label of 'foodie', as we both entirely analyzed our dining experience the other night at glo on the Selkirk waterway. (Our appetizer arrived after the entree; the beer was off from unclean taps; the coffee was terrible). The crème brulee was good, but why ruin it with crappy coffee? A common oversight for high end restaurants is that they don't have their serving staff trained up as baristas.

So yesterday to cheer ourselves up we went to Bolen Books. We spent most of our time in the cookbook section. I made a list of books I would like (and I'll see if the library has them to test drive them first) and a list of books that Dan, my amateur gourmet chef, should probably have. Of course I popped over to the knitting section to see what was there. They didn't have Little Red in the City, the latest book by Ysolda Teague. Nothing else interested me. In fact, we left Bolen empty-handed. Can you believe it?

This speaks to our new philosophy. We have spent the last six months paring down and getting rid of stuff to the point that we are ultra-conservative in our new acquisitions. Dan is planning to get a Kindle, so that's part of it. But still. Books. There is something sumptuously visceral about a book. A new book. I saw that Michael Ondaatje has a new book. (You may recall that I read Anil's Ghost every November. I don't know why, I just always have, ever since it came out).

And for me, I think I have mentioned this before, I have few clothes. Not much appropriate to this climate. I'll spend some time combing the second-hand clothing stores (and there are dozens in the greater Victoria area) while assembling a new wardrobe. I have a new fashion sense now, as well as a new body to dress (I spent so many years being heavy and frumpy, it's like starting from scratch), so this will actually be a fun thing I can do while I'm waiting for a job.

So yes, things are looking up. Something good will come of this, I keep telling myself. I went to one of the four local yarn shops in town and bought a new pair of double pointed needles I have never tried before, and now that I have worked in the yarn industry, I have a different set of standards of what I look for in a yarn shop. So much fodder for future blog posts.

realizations

2011-10-02T17:49:00.000-07:00

I've been with Dan for four days now. What a roller coaster it has been!

We arrived in Victoria late on Friday night to a house of smiling faces. Welcome! Your bed is made! Do you need help bringing stuff in? We have plans for Thanksgiving! After about an hour of talking, we made our way to bed.

Yuki the house cat has been here a long time. He has some vision issues which makes him seem like a not to bright kitty, but really he just wants to be loved. Apparently he has issues with other cats, and there are many in the neighbourhood. We brought Sam upstairs and although we've been here for two days now, I don't think they have met yet.

What a marked difference. It took about two weeks for Sam to feel comfortable at the farm, what with the other cat, the puppy, and the two small (read: noisy) children. Sam has been pretty good here. The house is pretty quiet, Yuki is the opposite of aggressive and thus far absent, and we have spent most of our time in the privacy of a closed room & bathroom.

I worry about Sam a lot. She has travelled more than most my family. She is from Korea, flew to Alberta, flew to Victoria, flew to Edmonton, drove to Victoria, drove to Ucluelet, drove to Alberta, drove to the US border (sadface), and now back to Victoria. She has never liked travelling but this leg from Alberta was especially good with her cute kitty loft. At any rate, Sam is pretty happy in this house and I'm not worried about her.

Dan and I have arrived at a conclusion. The most important thing in our life is to be together. This may sound simple and obvious, but before we had this big continental separation, years ago, we talked about lots of places we'd be willing or unwilling to live. We know now for certain that as long as we are together, we can overcome any hardship, make a go of it no matter where we are.

We just have to be together.

Dan will take the Clipper to Seattle on Saturday, then fly back to Raleigh that night. That means I have just under a week to relearn what it is like to be with my husband, for us to etch some new memories, go to our favourite restaurants (Carlo's Cantina, here we come!), and to settle me in with my in-laws. We're trying not to think about our impending separation, just to enjoy the time we have together.

We've both lost weight and changed shape. We discovered the other night that we fit differently. We have less padding. With Dan getting his brewing muscles back and me training for a marathon, by the time we next see each other, there will need to be further readjustment when cuddling. Who knew?

I have been pretty low-key on Twitter over the last few days as Dan and I have been hanging out. I haven't been interacting with my Internet friends very much at all over these last few days and I am extremely behind on listening to podcasts. I might not get back to them until after Dan leaves. I am fairly certain I will be available for the upcoming #knitchat (6:30pm PST, the "fastest hour on Twitter").

Food. O. My. Goodness. Victoria has food. As in food culture. I didn't realize what a food desert I had been mired in until I realized that I could get good Japanese food, I have a whole wealth of excellent restaurants to go to, and I don't have to worry about the tastes of picky eaters. (I love my sister and her family, but they are certainly not very adventurous foodwise). I will get to do some cooking of my own too. Dan's mom & stepdad will head south for a month or so, and when Dan leaves, I'll be sharing the house with two of Dan's siblings. As they are both students and we are approaching winter, I'm sure they will be happy to come home to soups & stews in the slow cooker, some sweet & savory snacks, and my cooking experiments. I want to learn how to do Japanese cooking, for when I'm in a place that has no good Japanese food I know how to make it. There are several Asian markets in Victoria that I can get groceries at. It's good.

The other thing I will need to work on is clothing. I have very little clothing left that fits me and that is appropriate for winter on the Island. I made due with little all summer, as Dan told me to wait until I got to North Carolina to buy clothes. What do I do? My style is changing so I'll have to go hunting for some clothing. How long will I be here? Long enough to want to invest in some good pieces? I don't want to be frumpy any more. There are dozens of used clothing stores in town and I'll have time to haunt them. I'll need some shoes. Some of the pieces I acquire will depend on the job I end up getting. It will certainly be interesting.

So yes, I'm making lemonade of the situation. When I have some more time and feel a bit more settled, I'll have a bunch of other stories to share with you as I am planning to blog way more regularly.

the aftershock

2011-09-30T09:47:00.000-07:00

Am writing again from the Quality Inn in Castlegar.

We barely made it through our dinner last night - in fact Dan didn't eat at all. We had our baths, contacted all our people via text, Twitter, email, blog, etc, and then crashed. It was nice to lay down and be clean and just relax for a bit.

Dan and I have changed a bit, since being apart. I didn't think I'd lost any more weight since he left but he thinks I have. Or at least the weight has been redistributed. He has changed shape considerably too. With all the heavy lifting at the brewery, he's really getting his brewing muscles back and we are both seeing muscle definition in each other that we've never seen before. It's good. :-)

Sam has been a very good kitty on this trip. She is no stranger to hotel rooms and as she gets older, she is easier to manage. I'm so relieved, because she is a big source of stress for me usually.

So, the plan from here. Dan figures it will take about six hours to get to the ferry in Vancouver (Tsawassen, really), we will reach Victoria this evening sometime. (Ferry is 1 hour 35 minutes, Victoria is 35 minute drive from Swartz Bay terminal). Dan was supposed to be back to work on Wednesday, but he was given permission to take a few extra days if necessary. Dan's return will depend, in part, on when he can get a reasonably priced flight back to Raleigh. Flights out of the US are a third of what they cost out of Canada.

So we'll have a few days together to visit with family, make some plans, and set me up in the house so that we don't have to worry. My first plan is to apply for jobs in VIHA (Vancouver Island Health Authority). With my work at the Tofino General Hospital, I'm sure any HR person would see my file and hire me in an instant. I just looked at there are at least a handful of jobs I'm qualified to do. I am happy with casual employment. The Royal Jubilee Hospital is only a 10 - minute bike ride away from my in-laws' house.

I don't know how long I'll be in Victoria. Since my post yesterday, I have received dozens of messages in the comments and on Twitter. O my dear readers, you have no idea how much your support means to me! One Twitter friend, Georgianna, told me about an organization that helps people with immigration by offering free legal support. Jeni offered to bake me a pumpkin pie. Susie invited me to a zombie walk (I'll have to decline - I'll want to spend as much time with Dan as possible but after that, I'll be totally free to socialize!).

I think this will be a good thing. Our Susan Miller horoscopes did say that the two weeks following September 25th would be extremely difficult. I don't think it will be easy, still being apart from Dan, but I will have reliable Internet access which means we can communicate with Skype. I'll be in a place that I always (seem to) return to, Victoria is more home to me than any place I have ever lived. It contains a high concentration of people I love! I will be alright. Fingers crossed we won't have to wait another four months. One way or another, I will see Dan at Christmas, if not sooner.

Dan has to figure out what his next steps will be too, and I can't really speak to that because I just don't know. We are back to a certain level of uncertainty, which is really hard, but not insurmountable. This ordeal has distilled for us what is really important in our life together: each other. (Crap. I'm going to start crying again.) We will figure it out, we always do!

devastated

2011-09-29T19:33:00.000-07:00

They didn't let me in.

Dan stopped the process for my petition for immigration a couple of weeks ago, since it was going nowhere, and he was advised to do a certain set of steps, which he did, and which turned out to be wrong advice.

We pulled up to the border at Coutts, Alberta at about 7:30am. Dan arrived yesterday at the Edmonton International Airport around 3pm. We had a few stops to make for building supplies - we had to rig something up for the bed of the truck and a place for the litter box. What we ended up with was brilliant, and I will take photos of it and posted for another day. Basically Sam has her own cute kitty room behind the cab of the truck.

We finished building the thing and packing around 10pm last night. We had a very late supper with my sister and her husband. We pulled out of their driveway at 10:30pm. Dan hadn't slept in more than a day, and I had been up since early, so we were both really tired to begin with, but we really wanted to get moving.

I think it was around midnight when we hit Drumheller, about 155km from Edberg. Dan was sleeping, I was driving. I pulled over, because I was starting to nod off. Not sure if I actually slept at all, being we only have a standard cab pickup and there isn't much room for stretching out. An hour later, we were back on the road.

I think it was in Stettler that I stopped for coffee. Husky had Seattle's Best, which was actually pretty good. I was willing to accept drek as fuel, but it was a pleasant surprise.

We were about 30km away from the border when I pulled over a second time, nodding off again. The temperature was three degrees above freezing, so without the heat on in the truck and despite the blankets, it was cold. Again, not sure if I slept (probably not), but we woke up to a gorgeous prairie sunrise. Onward ho.

We pulled into the border crossing at 7:30am. The guy didn't like that we didn't have all the paperwork to import our vehicle. Didn't like that we didn't have any paperwork for my immigration. Especially didn't like that their sensors picked up radioactivity in my truck. Pull around to the back of the building, please.

Questions questions. Lots of answers. Filling out forms. Waiting for scans & sensors. It was around 8:30am that the most kind & compassionate border guard I have ever encountered broke the bad news. They can't just let someone in with the intention of immigrating without any paperwork. There are some options, including petitioning the border guard judge, but to wait a hearing would mean they would have to escort me to the nearest detention center for two to eight months. Um, no.

I was sick to my stomach. I had to excuse myself because I really thought I was going to throw up. Dan was livid with the person from the State Department in Charlotte, North Carolina who gave him this bad advice. (I didn't throw up, but things were sure churning). I couldn't keep it together, I fell apart in tears in the waiting area. Dan was on the phone with his mom making plans for our next step, a quickly devised Plan B. We will drive back to Victoria where I will stay with his parents.

The nice guard told me that it would be useless to apply for jobs because, with the Customs & Immigration people now knowing that I intend to immigrate with my husband, I would not be allowed a visa. In fact, I had my photo taken and I was fingerprinted, I had to sign a document saying that I would not attempt to enter the US until I have paperwork for immigration, on the understanding that I could be rejected permanently or even put in jail.

I was able to have some semblance of a sense of humor with the border guard. Why didn't you tell me you wanted to take my picture before I started crying? If I was put in detention, would I be able to knit? (I mean really, think of how much I would get done!)(Then again, after that story in the news about the person making an escape ladder out of knitting needles, knitting is probably forbidden in prisons. Better take up crochet.) He appreciated that I had a sense of humor, he said this doesn't happen often but it happens often enough to know he hates being the bearer of bad news. I empathized, I know he just has a job to do and rules to follow. We were misinformed and are now suffering the consequences.

They never did figure out what was radioactive in the truck. We were escorted back to the Canadian side, where the Canadian border guard was cheerful yet empathetic. I told her I was just rejected from crossing into the States. Among the usual list of questions is "do you have any firearms, knives, etc.?" to which I pulled out my key chain, which has a 1 3/4" jackknife (purchased for the express purpose of cutting yarn - seriously). She told me not to open it, or she'd have to pull out her gun. Dan chimed in "yes that could be seen as a threat." I told her "don't worry, I'd let you win." I can't help it. In times of deep stress or heavy emotion, I resort to humor.

We found a place to pull over back on the Canadian side and had ourselves a cry. What the hell are we going to do now? Neither one of us had slept more than a couple hours in the last few days. We were exhausted, overwrought, and had just been smacked in the face by the US government. Well, having evacuated my bowel at the border (not TMI - really, this tells you how stressed I was while we were there), I was hungry. We decided to drive to Lethbridge for breakfast (about 130km I think) and decide what to do from there.

Because we were both tired, we were thinking about getting a room nearby and taking a day to rest and think. But when Dan and I have been faced with big crappy situations, it is our nature to press on. So we did. We drove to Castlegar, where I am writing from this very moment. Caffeine and sugar have been our friends today. Sam kitty has been great through this whole thing. She loves her little room up back and she is now able to settle into sleep on the bench between us. SO nice not to have her MEOWing the whole time.

We will head back to Vancouver Island tomorrow. Dan will only be able to stay for a few days, then he will have fly back to North Carolina for work.

I hope Sam gets along with Yuki, the house cat.
I know I will be well taken care of by my in-laws.
I will get to see all my Vancouver & Vancouver Island friends again.
I will have a reliable Internet connection.
(I will have access to four yarn stores)
I will be able to run, ride my bike, catch up on BBC programs (in-laws have DVDs of everything).
But I will also have to bust my ass to find work. I haven't worked now for three months and I need an income. I don't know how long this next step will take, how much longer we will have to wait.

The nice border guard did slip us some information that seemed like something that is not shared with everyone. He said that we can apply to the Passenger Chief at the port I plan to enter through for a Port Parole - this means that once my application for immigration has been submitted, I can be, if the Passenger Chief allows, temporarily admitted into the United States to be with my spouse. Cost? $71. Totally worth it.

So now Dan and I are going to bathe, eat our Subway, and probably crash. We're pretty knackered. We have both cried rather a lot today and will probably cry some more. But Dan just pointed out that there was something in the horoscope that suggested this. And I truly believe that something good will come of this - clearly the Universe or the powers that be think I have unfinished business in Victoria. Like trying all the new restaurants or something. We are sad, devastated, but not defeated. We know we can get through hardship because we have done it before. And it makes for interesting blog post reading.

Where is my head?

2011-09-22T11:44:00.000-07:00

For the past few weeks, my head has been in a book A heady book. A very famous book.

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand.

In advance of moving to the United States, I made it a project of mine to read (or at least listen via audiobook) those novels considered great American fiction. And while I know Ayn Rand was not American (she was a Russian nationalist that emigrated to the United States), her books are set in the US. Atlas is the first of her books that I have encountered, but I'm told they all have a similar flavour.

I understood, after having watched a documentary of her some years ago, that her ideas were extremely fascist. She had come from the worst clutches of Stalin's communism and thrown into the big flag-waving American capitalism when capitalism (as an ideology) was lauded and relatively new. This book is a dystopic view of what happens when the two ideologies clash with each other.

It's interesting talking to people who have read this book, who have read Rand's other works. Fountainhead is often read in high school classrooms. Dan told me last night that Atlas Shrugged was her magnum opus. Dan has read everything she wrote. Kirsten has read much of Rand's work too. Our conversations about this book and her ideas have been so interesting.

See I'm ramping up to leave next week(!) and I pretty much have everything done. So I have been listening to this book, this epic 63-hour tome (but I'm listening to it at 1.5 speed, so it is going more quickly), while loading the dishwasher, doing laundry, repacking my things, (playing Pocket Frogs on my iPhone), and knitting. I'm about eight hours from finishing. I can't stop thinking about the story.

It has me interested in reading other tales of dystopia. The only one I have read is Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and that was back in 1995 when I was a new college student. Other recommendations have been Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty Four, Lord of the Flies, and Anthem. Do you have any suggestions? Please leave them in the comments below.

For a long time I have been thinking about writing a novel. I know I have at least one in me, but I never had an idea for a story before. I have tons of ideas, I'm discovering, for what my version of a dystopia would be. I am very interested in this genre of fiction. Having a literature background, I would be sure to employ the use of many literary devices. Where does one begin when writing such a story? With the plot? Setting? Character? What is the message I want to convey? Which philosophers do I need to read? (I'm going to start with Plato). This is where my head is. As I was running on the treadmill yesterday (did I tell you I'm training for a marathon?), I was thinking about what social movements would need to happen in a fictional setting in order for my version of a dystopia would exist. It's a great head space to be in. Not quite reality but inspired and informed by it.

So I'm not committing to writing a novel, but I am at least in the head space of considering it. I'm making notes, thinking about how to go about researching this. I'll keep you posted if I have any further developments.

time for some knitting

2011-09-19T11:56:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted any knitting in a long time, and I have had a lot of time to knit. So here's what's been happening:

Darcy Shawlette: test knit for knitpurlgurl

My first finished object from Victorian Lace Today. Blocking on children's alphabet foam.

Eunice socks from Cookie A's Sock Innovation. Used Gaia's Colours yarn.

I really liked knitting these. They are a shorter sock so they knit up quickly. I *love* this colour and had so many compliments on it whenever I knit in public.

(Sorry for inconsistency with text & photos here, not having much luck with this). This is Wedge from Cookie A's Knit. Sock. Love. I used Yummy yarn. O boy this was crazy. This was my third or fourth Cookie A sock, and after having found that they were all knitting up on the large side, I decided to go down a needle size when I knit the first one. Months went by before I knit the second one, and I didn't consult my notes, so I knit them on the recommended needle. What resulted was one snug sock and one slightly big sock. But after 20-25 hours per sock, I am not reknitting. The yarn bled when blocked, so I needed to re-set the dye.

Sigh. This is a sock I started in August 2010. Did I get frustrated with the pattern? Did I just lose my sock mojo? Or was I irritated at knitting socks on dpns for the first time? I don't know, but I finally got back to it. I have to. It's Malabrigo. And I really want to wear these socks. So in the past week I have knit the same heel twice because the pattern is stupid. (Brother Amos Hellfire Lace) I remember not liking the unusual toe construction, and I am less happy with the heel. I just finished turning this heel last night, will hopefully have smooth sailing to the end. And then I have to do the second sock. But I am turning all my UFOs into FOs, so this is good! I will wear these socks soon.

My collection of hand-knit socks! And more have been added since this photo was taken.

Sunshine from Cookie A's Sock Innovation. Gaia's Colour's yarn. None of the photographs I have taken of these socks seem to do it justice, the yarn is such a pretty colour in real life. Socks on the big side. Dye had to be re-set when blocking. But now I have purple socks!

Not pictured (only because I haven't taken pictures): a dog sweater for Roxy, Spiral Tweed Cloche (my second one), and a bun basket for my niece, who just started ballet last week and needs containment for her wild hair. The bun basket (bun holder? bun net?) is of my own design, and it was an experiment that worked out pretty well. I will try to replicate it & then write down the pattern, for those who are interested. It was fun & quick.

now what?

2011-09-14T13:18:00.000-07:00

It's been a week or so since my last post. This is all due to my not using the mesozoic Internet at the farm. Sorry, sorry, very sorry.

So since Dan and I made the decision about just getting me to North Carolina, we'll sort out immigration and employment details later, I have been a much happier camper. And indeed, I am a camper. As my 'desk' in my sister's basement, I have been using my camping chair and a folding card table. My bed is the mattress I hauled from Vancouver Island, on the floor, on a tarp. Most of my worldly possessions are upstairs by the back door, waiting another day of repacking into Rubbermaid bins. One more day should do it, I think, but as the sun room has been an oven during this past week and a half, it's hard to breathe in that room, let alone sort, wrap, and pack one's possessions.

Tomorrow I will get the tires on my truck rotated. On Monday I will get my first salon hair cut in two and a half years (I have been going at it myself but I realize that 'trimming' it every day is maybe not the best use of my time). Today, I bought a funeral outfit.

Well, I don't know if I'll be going to a funeral. We all seem to think so but I wanted to be proactive.

See, if you know me or have been reading me for a while, you might recall that it was this very week a year ago that I flew to Kelowna from Vancouver Island to attend the funeral of my mother's uncle, Unc. He left behind his wife, Mid, to whom he had been married for 63 years. Sixty. Three. Years.

Mid was the person in the family who kept tabs on everyone, sent birthday cards to everyone, knew what was happening and was the collector and bringer of news. After Unc died last September at the end of a rough battle with diabetes-inflicted-gangrene, Mid was never the same. She did not remember birthdays. She did not send out Christmas cards. She kept on referring to Unc as if he was still there, with her (and who knows? Maybe he was). "He's just in the other room" or "he's just out for a walk" or "he'll be here in minute". This is a clear example of dementia, not uncommon for people in her circumstance.

Apparently my dad has been calling Mid every week or two (which is way more often than he calls either of his daughters!) (and not that Mid was at all pleased to receive these belaboring phonecalls) ever since my parents were divorced twenty years ago. In a conversation with my dad last week, he mentioned he hadn't been able to get a hold of Mid for a few weeks now. The family knows Mid has call display and perhaps she just chose not to take his call. But just the same, she is 85 and living alone, so I told Mum, Mum called her cousin, more phone calls to cousins were made.

Turns out Mid had a fall in her home. She fell in her bedroom, and was probably there for 24 hours before she was found. The cousin of my mother's who has been the primary caregiver to Mid for this last year and a bit had a key to the house but could not open the locked screen door. Another cousin was calling to Mid, when the police were called in to break down the door and retrieve her, and Mid made no indication that she was in any distress. She was just angry at Unc for not answering the door!

Mid has been in the hospital for two weeks. She has a staph infection in her legs. I don't know much about staph infections, but one form it takes is osteomyelitis. The word osteomyelitis doesn't normally roll off one's tongue as easy as it does mine, but when my sister broke her leg just before she started kindergarten (I was eight), I committed the name of her affliction to my memory. Osteomyelitis. An infection of the bone. I am assuming this is what Mid has. When my sister had this -itis, the doctor we had back then, in the early 80s, was greatly worried he might have to amputate my sister's leg.

A year ago, when Unc was in his final stages before dying, he had gangrene in one of his legs. There was apparently no discussion of amputation, because it was very clear he was too close to dying to make the effort help at all. I don't know Mid's situation. My family is not as familiar with medical jargon as I am and therefore don't know what details to collect, what kinds of questions to ask. I will probably never know.

Thus, I expect that if Mid passes away in the next two weeks, I will be taking a trip to Kelowna with my mum & sister (about a 10-hour drive). I no longer have the outfit I wore to Unc's funeral; I have lost 33 pounds and have shrunk right out of it. So I bought something to wear today, justifying the cost since I will also likely be having interviews for employment and subsequent work in offices.

I am oddly at peace with the whole thing. Really, for me, the end of this era happened a year ago, since Mid hasn't been herself. I have been through the deaths of many other people in my life, and I don't feel the same sense of sadness I used to. I don't intend to wax philosophical about my feelings about death here, just now (but might in the future, you never know). And it is this reason that, if there is a funeral that lands in the week of my scheduled departure for the United States, I won't be changing my travel plans. I will still go to North Carolina as planned.

Meanwhile, today Auntie Stacey has to pick her nephew up from preschool. This morning Auntie spent half an hour with the curling iron preparing her niece for Grade one picture day. Tonight, I'll make my pizza for the family, as requested by my sister. Days go by, stuff gets done. I actually had a phone conversation with Dan last night, as it was our three year wedding anniversary (though we still declare "we were married when we met"). It's so good to hear his voice. I haven't seen a photo of him since he has dropped two pant sizes. Gosh, we will be totally different people by the time we see each other in two weeks! TWO WEEKS!

O, one more thing. My former supervisor at my last place of employment was in the company of some VIPs from a very important organization in the industry I went to school for, and passed along a name for me to contact about employment. I have since done so, fingers crossed it will bear fruit. Then I can give more detail!

Go Date: September 28

2011-09-07T11:29:00.000-07:00

This has been a stressful time for me.

There have been many times in my life where I have been in what I call a liminal stage. Not one for choosing a conventional route (not sure I would even recognize one if I saw it), the path of my life has taken me in all sorts of interesting directions.

Right now I am sitting in the Starbucks in Safeway in Camrose. My sister delivered to me some bad news the other night: the Internet for the first month I was here cost $156.57. !!!! This is what happens when someone who is used to having a wireless Internet connection and to which said person is addicted to said Internet connection is subjected to a less than ideal condition. As a result, I have determined that I will no longer connect my computer to Internet at her house. So I come into Camrose, buy a cup of over-roasted coffee, and do all my Interneting for free.

Something else I have been barely managing without: Microsoft Office. Say what you will about Microsoft, but it is the standard for a number of institutions in which I have developed my computer skills in. I had it on my last two computers. In the spring when Kirsten's father presented us with this super fancy high-tech laptop that I am typing on now, it never occurred to me that it didn't have this piece of software on which I rely so heavily.

Public libraries are useless for my word processing needs. As funding for public libraries has diminished, libraries are no longer able to afford the expensive licensing fees that Microsoft demands. As a result, public libraries opt for Open Office, which is free.

I have used Open Office, and I would like to say that it has just as much functionality as Microsoft Office (here I disclose it has been five years since I have used Open Office), but when you are used to one thing and then try to use another thing with different settings, it is a bit disconcerting. All of my office documents are in Microsoft and I do not want to convert them to Open Office because no matter what, the formatting never transitions smoothly.

So I found myself then, unable to open up the most recent version of my resume. I have a printed copy of it, but who wants to type it out again? I might just have to do that. Sigh.

I also haven't had access to a printer. So when I relocate to North Carolina next month, there will be a few things that become priorities: Internet connection, Microsoft Office suite, printer. In that order.

Oh, did I tell you? I'll be leaving soon.

So here's what happened. Dan had applied for my green card several months ago. He was told in early June that it would take an average of 75 days to process the application. That means approval should have come around this week we're in. A week or two later (in early July), they asked for a passport-sized photo from me, so we figured there was progress.

But then two months went by and they (the State Department or whoever processes these things) never cashed the cheque Dan sent along with the application. He was growing very concerned and was going to go to Charlotte, where this processing was supposedly happening, to find out what was going on.

Then hurricane Irene hit. No traveling for a while.

Dan spent three hours on the phone yesterday and made the decision to cancel my processing. I nearly lost it. WHY? He decided it would be more expedient if he just flew here and drove back to North Carolina with me. It will mean I can't work legally in the United States right away, but at least we will be together.

So there was some excitement and confusion. I think I spent the better part of yesterday in a state of shock, actually. See, originally the plan was that my mum was going to be making this trip with me, that it would take us 5-7 days to drive across the continent. But there are other issues. We are going to formally import the Ford I've been driving, we have the cat, and I won't have the green card. So Dan has to be with me. I haven't yet told my mum she won't be making this trip and I know she'll be crushed; she's been looking forward to this for months. It was the trepidation over telling her that prevented me (somewhat) from getting excited about my impending journey.

I get to see my husband! Dan will arrive at YEG (Edmonton International) on Wednesday September 28th. I will pick him up at the airport. We will drive to Home Depot and get the supplies we need to rig up the truck so that it will fit all my stuff and have a tunnel for the litter box (don't worry, I'll blog about that later). We will have supper (soon I can revert to saying "dinner" when referring to the evening meal!) with my sister's family and my mother, then we will load up and depart that night. It should take about six hours to get to the border.

Not sure how long we will be at the border, but it will likely be in the wee hours of the morning so hopefully not too long. Sam will hate it. Another six hours should get us to Missoula.

We will stay the night in Missoula at the family condo. Then we will depart and drive pretty much straight to Kinston, stopping for food, bathroom & fuel. Dan is suggesting we stop at a major center near home, find the closest IKEA, and get our queen-sized bed.

I've been without Dan for three and a half months. I have been in a state of uncertainty and instability for a bit more than that. I get to see my husband in three weeks! We will have a whole week to ourselves to catch up and get reacquainted. Then I can start my new life. My own kitchen. My own laundry. My own space. And then I can finally, finally start putting down roots. The relief about this has washed over me and even though I could hardly sleep last night from being excited, I feel like a new person. I still dread telling my mother, but soon she'll come to understand that this is the best way and really, the most important thing for me and Dan is that we are together, no matter what.

Dan and Hurricane Irene

2011-08-30T10:19:00.000-07:00

Dan and I have iPhones. Between Twitter and our WhatsApp text messaging app, I was able to keep in touch with him and know that he stayed safe.

Over the weekend, I was checking Twitter and the hurricane status every hour. Kinston lost power. What does that mean? Was Dan prepared? What did he do? Turns out, he spent much of his time at the brewery.

See when you make beer, part of the brewing process is that it needs to be chilled. And chilling requires power. So it was extremely important that the beer remain chilled, or lots of beer (read: money) would be lost. Dan made sure everything kept cool.

Lots of trees, large trees, came down during the hurricane. Dan had just bought a new #floundertruck on Friday, and on Saturday he put it in the ditch. He did so because he was avoiding the HUGE tree that fell in front of him. He was able to pull it of the mud the following day with his other #floundertruck Remember he drove to North Carolina in a 1986 Nissan 720 pickup with 4WD, and now has a 1962 Dodge pickup truck. Guess what? They're both blue. (I think that is fodder for another story).

Last night there was a tornado 35 miles north of Kinston. Great. But Dan said he was not worried. We are still keeping in touch. It's so funny to think that we went from an earthquake/tsunami zone to a hurricane/tornado area.

finally saw a doctor

2011-08-30T10:05:00.000-07:00

I've been sick for just over three weeks now. It started as a nasty head & sinus cold that hung on for dear life. It used to be that a cold in me lasted about five days and then I was back to normal. In the past few years, I've noticed that they are lingering (or malingering, as it were) for a lot longer.

After about two weeks, my head cleared up, and then the coughing began. At first it was relieved by throat lozenges, but it wasn't getting better. In fact, it was getting worse. Then two nights in a row of not sleeping due to coughing all through the night, I finally took Dan's advice and went to see a doctor.

I have spent rather a lot of time in health care settings, almost as much time as a patient as I have as staff or a student. Not by choice, I am acutely aware of the challenges of health care - so I try not to burden the system unless absolutely necessary. In this case, I was desperate for sleep, my insides hurt from the constant coughing and I was absolutely wretched.

So the doctor prescribed azithromycin, an antibiotic. Take two on the first day, one on the four days that follow. Really? I'm used to the ten-day course with three or four pills a day. This is way better. He also prescribed salbutamol, an inhaler. I was very reluctant to take the inhaler, since I feel they are overprescribed (it seems all respiratory problems are asthma around here) and worried that they would be expensive. Not so! In fact it was way cheaper than the azithromycin. He also suggested Benalyn to dry me up so I can sleep.

On top of this, I sustained a minor injury after some fun times on a boat the weekend before last. See, I was swimming in a lake (!), and when I went to get back on the boat, I was all "I don't need a ladder!" and hoisted myself up on the back platform. Um, and then I miscalculated the force it would take or which direction the water would push me, and I ended up - well, I don't know exactly what happened. I seem to have landed on a bottom rib that bent in and bruised an oblique muscle. That's the consensus, anyway. And oblique muscles take a l o n g time to heal. The pain from that only stopped feeling intense a couple of days ago. So sleeping on my left side has been out. And with an old shoulder problem, I can't really sleep on my right shoulder. And when you have a productive cough, sleeping on your back is really the last place you want to be...

I'm trying really hard not to whine (poor me!) here but really, my health has pretty much been the only thing on my mind these last few days. And O yeah - the hurricane that swept through my future home and where Dan is now...

Well, I'm hoping that my cough will go away in the next day or two, my head will clear, and I will feel up to doing some physical activity again. Lori has more things for me to do, see, there is the other half of the TV room that needs painting...

Hurricane Irene

2011-08-26T10:08:00.000-07:00

Hi friends,

Just in case you were worried about Dan, and that he is presently living in one of the states that has declared a State of Emergency, I just wanted to let you know that he assures me his alright. Where he lives in Kinston is about 50 miles from the ocean and the house is on high ground. If he feels under any threat, he says he can stay at the brewery which is quite a solid building.

We went from living in an earthquake/tsunami zone to a hurricane zone. Every place has its threats!

Google maps' suggested route

2011-08-24T11:31:00.000-07:00

So... I have applied for a job in Greenville, North Carolina. It's hard to know how good my chances are. I think if I was actually there, my chances would be pretty good. But I'm not and I need a work visa (if my green card doesn't magically appear in the next week or so) so I just don't know. But on the off chance I do get it, I'll need to leave in a hurry. I have been poring over my road atlas for weeks now, thinking about how long it would take and what route to go by. Then I looked at what Google maps would suggest. It is way different, no big surprise. I what thinking of a more southern route but this is more direct. Here is a link to the map and route:

Stacey's Grand Road Trip Adventure

All told it will be about 50 driving hours. That doesn't include stops at all, and with my mother in tow, there will be several stops, plus we will be staying in a hotel every night. So it should take us six to seven days. If we weren't going through Missoula, it would probably take us five, and we would cross the border in Saskatchewan to North Dakota.

Waiting...

RIP: Jack Layton

2011-08-22T09:16:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year, Jack Layton and the federal New Democratic Party shocked the nation and won enough seats in the election to become the federal opposition party. I haven't been interested in politics of any kind for a long time, not really, even though I used to be a card-carrying member of the BC NDP. No one knew what the outcome of this most recent federal election was going to be, given the Conservatives' previous minority government. And then due to the intelligence, charisma, and momentum of this man, Jack Layton, the NDP basically took the province of Quebec, which was enough to tip them over into official opposition. It's the first time in Canadian history that the opposition was not held by one of the bit two - Conservative or Liberal. It was indeed an historical event.

I don't pretend to know much about Jack Layton, but I was definitely surprised to see when I looked at my Twitter feed this morning that he had in fact passed away from cancer at the age of 61. But I sure have a lot of respect for what he did for Canadian politics, for the federal NDP party, and for Canadian history. So, for what it's worth, rest in peace Jack Layton.

Sam the crochety old cat

2011-08-21T10:59:00.000-07:00

O my kitty.

She is only 9 years old. She is the only pet I have owned in my adult life and didn't really have a sense of what normal cats are like.

Sam landed on my doorstep when I was living in Korea, in 2002. She was a kitten, probably 4-5 months old at that point. She was an apartment cat for several years and was never socialized with other cats. As a result, when she finally ventured outside and encountered other animals, she was a mean, vicious, tough cat. When we moved into the suite in East Sooke, where our landlords had three big dogs, at first the two younger dogs chased Sam up a tree. A few times. Dan had to rescue her every time. Eventually she figured out that she was tougher than the dogs and after a few penetrating swats, showed the dogs who was in charge. Sam also established her self as Top Cat while we were there, and one day we found our suite full of white fluff and a scared white Lily cowering in fear underneath our bed.

In Ucluelet, Sam learned to be more friendly with people and was even okay with the occasional kid. There were quite a few feral cats around and the only one Sam couldn't scare away was Ginger Tom, who clearly owned the neighbourhood. One day when there were feral kittens in the yard, Sam even attacked them, which mortified Dan.

Since we've been here, Sam has had a few altercations with the house animals. There is Roxy the dog, who is a Yorkie/Shihtzu puppy, and Piper the kitty. Sam has mostly stayed downstairs, but if the other animals are outside, Sam will venture upstairs. She is interested in going outside, especially since the magpies look so fun & delicious. One day, when I was letting Roxy out, Sam just about followed the dog until she saw Tianna and her six kittens sitting directly outside the door. You could almost see the look of "holy CRAP that's a lot of cats!" on her face, and then she ran away.

So Sam is not very sociable. All the farm cats get along. There are four adults, one juvenile from Yoga's previous litter, Tianna's current litter (born in June), and then Yoga just had eight more kittens last week. I would love to let Sam outside to play and hunt and just roll around, but really she would just get her ass kicked by the kitties.

Last night when Sam was sitting up in the window downstairs, one of the June kittens (who we call Coconut) came to the same window, outside. Sam was yeowling and mad, and Coconut who is half Sam's size, yeowled back and stood her ground. All the other animals here are so lovey which the kids and Lori are all accustomed to. But Sam, no, she really is just a grumpy bitch sometimes, just doesn't take the affection like all other normal cats. O well. I love my kitty anyway, and in those snippets during the day when she is lovey, I take it as it comes.

Almost ready

2011-08-16T17:16:00.000-07:00

I forgot to tell you! I discussed the mattress issue with Dan and he said ditch it. That got me thinking about what else I can ditch, and further paring down happens.

There were a number of things I needed to get done while I was here, and a few things I was waiting for. I have submitted all the address changes. I have received all the cheques I was waiting for. I have replaced the windshield wipers on my truck. I have done almost all the projects Lori has asked me to do (though her list grows, I am referring to her original list). The last thing for Lori is to help her with their new king sized bed which will be coming this week.

I still have to get the tires on the truck rotated and have the oil changed. I still need to air out & repack all my stuff. I also need a sleeper cap for the truck, but Dan is working on it via a previous employer so he may just get it all taken care of for me and all I have to do is be here when they deliver it and oversee the installation.

Changes are afoot here at Casa del Lori. There are changes for her work as well as her husband's, grade one for my niece and preschool for my nephew are starting soon, and the weather has started to turn cool. I have been *loving* the heat here this summer, and I got rid of most of my warmer layers before leaving the Island because a) they were too big for me and b) I'm moving to a warmer climate. At any rate, change is in the air and I hope that means I will be casting off soon as well. I hope I hope I hope.

Speaking of casting off, I think I'm due soon for an Off the Needles post, as I have completed a number of projects lately and am galloping through a number of Works in Progress. Remember all those Cookie A socks I started in the early spring? I'm just about finished pair #3 out of 5, and I would like to have ALL my sock WIPs turn into FOs (finished objects) before I take my big road trip. I have been catching up on lots of podcasts, as the slow downloading speed of this Internet connection will allow. There are a few I listen to and keep up with as soon as they come out, and a few that I'm weeks or months behind on. I sure wish I could listen to podcasts while I cut the grass, because three hours on a lawn mower is prime time for listening pleasure. Alas, with the noise of the engine, I am left to my thoughts.

I save you from me

2011-08-15T11:42:00.000-07:00

Hoo-boy last week was rough.

Mercury is retrograde from August 2 - 26. That means anything to do with transportation and communication will be problematic. It is also a good time for tying up loose ends. I finally got my damage deposit back! The United States Immigration Service now has all they need to process me! But the retrograde period can be a frustrating time.

The full moon was the other night, and the days leading up a full moon are often fraught with challenges.

I came down with a cold on Monday, a week ago, and it's only just now leaving me.

I was experiencing the physical and emotional symptoms of PMS.

I hadn't slept well in weeks, and being sick sure didn't help.

And I miss My Sweety.

Friday was the crappiest day of the crappy week. Lori had a big trip to Edmonton planned so we could go to IKEA, so I put my game face on and away we went, me, Lori, and the kids.

I love IKEA. It's one of my favourite stores. I love the clean lines and solid colours, the storage solutions, the interesting combinations of form & function. Not everything they have is awesome, I'm not a fan of anything made with pressboard, but there is a lot there I do like.

I really like imagining my house with different colours and furniture and accessories, which is part of what makes IKEA so much fun. Only... I don't have a sense of what the house I'll be moving into looks like. And I can't make these decisions without Dan. My head was full of fuzz and yuck as the cold medicine I took wasn't working, and I felt somewhat numb as we floated along the store.

It was around the pillows where I broke down. I really need a new pillow. A firm-ish pillow, preferably a contour pillow, but nothing they had was suitable. And then I thought of Dan and how much I miss him and how it's been 11 1/2 weeks since I'd seen him and DAMMIT I wish I knew when I was going to see him again because this "being strong on my own" crap is killing me. So there I was in IKEA, in front of the pillows, crying. My niece comes along. "What's wrong Auntie?" "I miss Uncle Dan." She never knows how to respond to that, but she offers a compassionate look (which in itself impresses me, coming from a six-year-old) and that is enough.

I was finally able to talk to Dan on the phone that night, we hadn't been able to connect in nearly a week. It was the first time we'd had a phone conversation where I was crying during our talk, and it was pretty hard to get words out with my sinuses full from being sick and crying.

But I got it out, this big emotional dump, and I felt better the next day. Another conversation with Dan the day after made me feel even better.

It has been really difficult being away from Dan for this long. We didn't meet until I was 33, so I have spent a lot of my adult life as a single woman, but when I finally found the Love of my Life, I sure as heck wasn't going to let him go. At first I kept reminding myself about Toni and the Skipper, how when she was starting her Ph.D. she went to school in Edmonton while he held down the fort on Vancouver Island. They had spent entire semesters apart, as I recall. I thought "If they could do it, then so can I". But the difference is they knew when the end point was. They had a date of her return. I don't have that. I have no idea when I'll be leaving, no clue when I will be reunited with my Love. I hope it's soon.

Lori has started asking me about the fall. Can I take her son to preschool on Wednesdays? Can I put her daughter on the bus in the mornings? Maybe I'll be here for Halloween... NO! I mean, I love spending my time with my sister and being a good influence on the kids but I really hope I'll be long gone by then. I desperately want to get on with my life. I ask the Universe, the Ancestors, the powers that be - every day, please let me be reunited with My Sweety soon.

Drumheller: The Royal Tyrell Museum of Paleontology also starring Reptile World

2011-08-08T09:03:00.000-07:00

I haven't been to the dinosaur museum in Drumheller since I was 12. I didn't realize then that it had only been open for a year, but my 12-year-old mind always wanted to go back. My dream came true, 25 years later, last week! Lori & I packed up the kids and made the drive south, pretty much directly south, for two hours. On the way there,Chase needed to pee.

For some of the displays I have the information of their name and species, but I'm not going to post all that here. Not unless you're really interested. And even then, you'll have to ask me nicely, as I took about 200 photos that day...

Now this was cool. A local school had a contest where elementary students drew pictures that included dinosaurs. I believe this is a grade 1 drawing.

We stopped for a snack halfway through the exhibit. They have a beautiful patio and as it was just before lunch, we beat the rush!

After lunch we went to Reptile World. The building was ugly and the displays were bare bones, but they did have a LOT of interesting critters from around the world. I learned that reptiles can be beautiful!

World's largest dinosaur at the Drumheller tourist information centre. For $3 you can climb up inside! We did, of course, it took us all of 90 seconds to climb up the iron and fiberglass structure. The kids loved it!

This part of Alberta is called the Badlands. It is very desert like and, as some of you may know, I *love* the desert. Drumheller has a thriving arts community. This community has really figured out the whole tourist thing - the dinosaur museum only charges $11 for admission. On Vancouver Island, you'd be lucky to pay anything less than $25 for any attraction. It was really a pleasant day on the whole. At the gift shop at the museum, we found dinosaur chopsticks - cheater chopsticks for kids. This was fortuitous, since I had gone to Chinatown in Edmonton a few weeks ago looking for cheater chopsticks but my search bore no fruit.

I may post a more detailed story of our day, but with my shaky Internet connection, I am lucky to get these 21 photos up.

gardening in the praries

2011-08-08T08:24:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning, early, around something like 4am is my guess, and my thoughts just started running around and crashing into each other in my head. I haven't been sleeping well this past week in particular, not sure why (maybe my body knows something I don't, like maybe I'll get to be with My Sweety soon and is excited).

I mentioned before my sister's garden. It could be massive, there could be way more food produced there than she has planted. With two small children, there was no way my sister was going to plant up and maintain a huge garden. So she planted a half dozen things in May, and then forgot about it.

When I was living on south Vancouver Island and had a small vegetable garden, I started planning my garden months ahead. I started seeds indoors. I mapped out what seeds & seedlings would go in each raised bed, ensuring that I didn't put the same crops in as the year before because crop rotation was important. There was a fence around the small garden to keep the deer & rabbits out. I had cooper wire netting around each bed to keep the slugs out. I went through my garden every day to pull weeds, thin seedlings, remove pests. My garden was my baby. About six weeks after some things were planted, such as salad greens & peas, I started harvesting. As the dill came out and the chives started to flower, we ate those too.

In my first year of gardening, I learned and absorbed as much information about how to grow a successful garden as I could. Gardeners on the west coast have a rolling harvest. My friend Toni harvests from her garden every day.

Around here, people plant their garden in May, harvest some time in August or September. Harvest the corn when the corn is ready, the potatoes when the potatoes are ready, the onions when the onions are ready. The lettuce, I observe, has been ready for weeks, and I'm the only one harvesting it. Not only that, it is a variety that could probably serve as cut & come again.

Something else: because my sister had not been able to attend to her garden, the weed population had grown to almost fill in the rows with green. Weeds here are combated with the rototiller.

The raspberries in the back are now full-on ready. If only I had time to get to them, get them in the house without eating them first, and make jam. Not that I can take jam across the border, but still. Lori has a hundred or so empty mason jars downstairs, ready for jam. The Saskatoon berry bushes have, I kid you not, probably about a hundred pounds of fruit on them right now. Ready. Think of all the pie and preserves!

No time, no time. Today it has been a month since I arrived here on the farm. Tomorrow it will have been eleven weeks since I have seen my husband. Yesterday was 75 days since he filed the original petition for my immigration to the United States. We talk and we text, but we are both having a hard time without each other. I at least have the kitty with me, and the comfort & familiarity of family. Dan is in a new place in a new empty home without me, without furniture. I can't wait to get there so we can start rebuilding our nest together. Lori keeps me busy with all kinds of things, next she wants me to renovate a bathroom...

no time for the computer; mattress dilemma

2011-08-05T10:32:00.000-07:00

*pant*

My sister and her children have kept me quite busy. Lori has been off work this week so we are doing all kinds of things, including mowing the lawn, weeding around some trees, cutting down an in-the-way tree, etc. This morning Lori helped me replace the windshield wipers on my truck. I need to get the tires rotated and change the oil, that will probably happen next week.

When I drove from Vancouver Island to Alberta, I packed up all my stuff in the bed of my truck (well, really Kirsten packed up the truck but it amounts to the same thing), put a tarp over it and tied it down with a bungee net and ratcheting ties.

This will work for a short distance, but I need something more solid for making the trip across the border. If mum & I drive through storms, we need the back to be waterproof. I need to be able to lock my stuff in the back of the truck, I will not go to all the trouble of carefully selecting the things to bring only to have them stolen. Last, and I think I have mentioned this before, we will be traveling with my cat and she needs to have access to her litter box. On the drive here, the litter box was in the foot well of the passenger seat. Mum probably wouldn't like to have to rest her feet on a litter box, so my idea was to have the litter box in the bed but next to the cab of the truck. If I had a canopy with a sliding window, I could build a little tunnel for Sam to go back & forth from the cab of the truck to her litter box in the back. That was the original plan.

And then yesterday, I found mold on my mattress.

(sigh)

I bought this mattress at IKEA after having landed at the airport in Edmonton when I came back from Japan in 2004. I've never had a frame for it, I've always had this mattress just on the floor. I know, I know, not the best idea for air circulation. Now, it's possible that on the drive from BC to Alberta, the mattress got wet. When I brought it into Lori's house, knowing that she had had some flooding in the basement, I put my mattress on a clean tarp on the carpet where I'm staying. The dehumidifier has been going nonstop since I arrived here four weeks ago, and the 10L bucket is full of water every day.

I had been meaning to flip the mattress or at least tip it up to air it out for a while. I should have been doing it once a week, knowing the dampness problems in the basement. Finally I did it yesterday and found a spot, right smack in the middle of the bottom of the mattress, about 18" in diameter. Crap. This mattress was going to come to North Carolina and be our guest bed. Now I am fairly certain that I do not want to take a moldy mattress across the continent.

So...

I have sprayed the affected area with a bleach solution. I have a fan and the dehumidifier pointed at the area. I seriously doubt the mold can be eradicated.

What does this mean?

Finding a canopy for my truck is quite challenging. For some reason, the Ford F150 longbox from 1997-2003 is a very unusual length and hard to find second hand canopies for. They are either too long or too short by something like an inch and a half. I looked at a canopy a few weeks ago but it didn't have a window to meet the cab, the lock needed replacing, and all the side seals were peeling off. Even if it was free, it would have cost me hundreds of dollars to make it usable. No thanks.

So now, with the possibility of not taking this mattress, suddenly there is a lot more space in the back or much less stuff that needs to be covered. Almost all my stuff is in Rubbermaid bins. I'm wondering if maybe with some plywood, sealant and some clever design, I can create my own cover for the truck that would include a place for the litter box and would be something I can lock down. See, this is exactly the kind of thing Dan would do. I haven't yet had a chance to talk to him about my crazy plan, but it just might work.

I would possibly continue to sleep on this mattress until I leave, though there is a hide-a-bed downstairs that I could sleep on. It would also mean that Dan would have to buy us a mattress before I get there (he has been sleeping on a foamy all this time), and that Mum would need to stay in a local motel for the few days before her flight back to Canada. We'll see what happens...

The Rhythm of Life on the Farm

2011-07-31T12:48:00.000-07:00

I've been here just over three weeks and I'm starting to settle into life here. My sister has always been one for uber house organization, having worked for Tupperware at one point. In fact, a big joke one Christmas was when I gave her a label-making machine. It was a half-joke because Lori was organized, and this would help her compulsion. She totally got the joke and started to label everything. Then she realized how much she loved the thing and it has been a valued household item ever since.

There was a time when everything in Lori's house was ordered to the extreme. It used to be that all the movies had to be arranged in alphabetical order. Even now the clothes hanging in the closet are arranged in a rainbow of colour.

Lori has her routines around the laundry, dishwasher, and other systems of organization. It is really quite impressive. Having kids forced her to relax her compulsions somewhat, but as the kids are getting older and can now clean up their own messes, the old Lori is ekeing her way back.

Lori is now working full time (which is four days a week), and has child care set up for the kids in town. She is up at 5:45 and is out the door by 7:15, to be at work for 8:00. She is home between 5:00-5:30, depending on any errands she has to do in town before coming home. On the weekends, they have gone camping a few times (as her husband has been working away, comes home with the holiday trailer so they can camp in it). In the ebb & flow of their lives, I have been finding a way to fit myself in so as not to be a disruptive house guest, but a helpful one.

While I'm here, I have taken on the task of preparing dinner for Lori & the kids for when she gets home from work. As some of you know, I do enjoy cooking but since I've been with Dan, I have become quite a slacker in the kitchen because Dan is just so darn amazing. I have gone through most of my single-gal cooking reportoire since being here, being mindful that I am also cooking for children who are probably picky eaters. Oldest child doesn't like tomatoes, for example. Youngest child doesn't like anything green. I am trying to make sure they get a healthy, well-balanced meal out of me, but I admit it is not easy.

Noodles were a big hit. I bought some Asian noodles from Chinatown in Edmonton a few weeks ago: mung bean, rice, buckwheat. As long as I don't put any "sauce" on the noodles, we're good to go. I only wish I could have found some cheater chopsticks for kids, to teach them how to use them properly.

The deal with me cooking dinner (or as they say around here, 'supper') is that Lori cleans up the kitchen afterwards. It's a good arrangement.

What else am I doing with my time? Lori had a big list of things for me to do when I got here. She wanted me to prune her trees, which I have done. We started painting the ceiling in the TV room - I do the rolling.

Lori does the cutting in. Cutting in? I had never heard that term before now, had always heard to it referred to as 'edging'. I have been going out and weeding the garden here and there.

Lori is not a gardener. They have a huge plot of land devoted to being a garden but only a small fraction of it is used. Lori got out and planted some seeds in May, and hasn't touched the garden since. It was quite overrun with weeds when I got here, so on sunny days I have been donning my rubber boots (for the mud) and getting out there with a hand rake. The plants that have been weeded around have certainly benefited from my ministrations. By the time I make my way through all the rows once, I'll need to get back to the first rows again but the task will be way easier. Here is waht Lori has planted:
onions

lettuce

carrots

dill/cucumber?

pumpkin

corn

Alas, no potatoes. The seed potatoes are languishing in the cellar.

I dug up Lori's bread machine and have decided to start filling their mostly empty deep freeze with bread. I will bake a loaf of bread every day while I'm here, until I wear the machine out (as happened to our first bread machine) or it's time for me to go.

I've been waiting for my own stuff too. My former employer got my forwarding address wrong, so my final cheque should have been to me by now (it was mailed on July 14), but due to rerouting I expect it will be here next week. Still don't have my damage deposit cheque from my former landlord either. Once these cheques come in, I can buy a canopy for the truck.

The plan: I want to buy a canopy for the truck so I can lock it when my mum & I travel to North Carolina. It also needs to be waterproof. I would like to get a canopy that has a sliding window that meets the cab of the truck, so that Sam can come & go from the litter box in the back to the cab in the front. But I can't do any of that until I have some money coming in.

Something else I have been doing: spending a lot of time with the kitties. So many kitties! I step outside and they come running toward me. Some of them in particular approach me first.
I can always count on the smallest grey cat (Runt) and the middle grey cat (my boyfriend) to arrive first at my feet. Their mom, Tiana, is a good hunter. She'll bring home mice and moles, and
the occasional dead chicken from the chicken barn. I've seen her devour a chicken leg in under a minute. It's gross and fascinating at the same time.

I am also spending some time on Lori's treadmill. It's handy that it is in my space (I'd call it my room but I am staying in the basement which is mostly just one big room). I started out with 40 minutes, am increasing my time on it by 5 minutes every time I use it, and am alternating my way through the programs. I do this and listen to a new-to-me podcast called Marathon Training Academy. It's a fantastic podcast and I am inspired to consider training for at least a half marathon once I arrive in North Carolina, see what kinds of races are around Kinston/Greenville. I'd prefer to run outside but there isn't really much running space on the farm (gumboots in cow pasture not with standing) and with the way I've seen the gravel trucks screaming past, I'd rather not risk my life on the highway. Treadmill it is. It's good, actually, simple, easy to use, and just what I need. See, Lori's brother-in-law came by the other day and said "Holy crap have you ever lost a lot of weight". And while I have lost 31 pounds, I still have 18 more to go. It's getting harder, so I have to seriously increase my exercise intensity.

I am happy to report that I have also been able to get a fair amount of knitting done. This morning I finished the Darcy Shawlette, a pattern I was test knitting for my Twitter pal @knitpurlgirl, in Indigo
Moon sock yarn. I was given this sock yarn as a gift and while I love the colour, when I went to block it the colour started leaking out of the water in the sink. Out came the vinegar, so I could set the dye.
I'm so glad I know that trick.

I am about 30 rows away from finishing the Victorian Ruby lace scarf from Victorian Lace Today, which I started sometime in June. It was easy travel knitting when I was doing the middle section, but the ends are charted which has meant I had to be anti-social while knitting them. I'm hoping to get that done & blocked today.

The day after I arrived, my sister had her Yorkie-Shihtzu groomed, Roxy had most of her fur shaved off. Then the weather turned cold and poor Roxy Dog was shivering. Roxy had a few sweaters from
her previous owner, but they weren't up to Lori's esthetic. Lori had never really considered dog clothing and then I told her about Ellie and her dog Juliet, and how Juliet has her own wardrobe complete with summer party dress and Santa costume. And then I offered to knit Roxy a sweater. It's kind of crazy, really, having never knit one before and without a pattern. I knew it had to be machine washible (enter acryilic yarn - shudder) and she wanted it to be black. Black! I hate knitting black! Well, it knit up quickly and now I have only to weave in the ends and decorate it with flowers or 'Roxy' or something. That too will probably get done today.

And then what? What will I knit? I have three Cookie A socks to finish and the long-ago begun Brother Amos (a la Brenda Dayne) socks to finish. Maybe after I finish those UFOs I just might treat myself to some Auricania Multy from Liv With Yarn in Camrose.

Kittycatting around

2011-07-28T09:17:00.000-07:00

Sam and I have been here almost three weeks now. We have been hanging out downstairs for the most part, and when the dog is not in the house, I open the gate at the top of the stairs to encourage Sam to come up and explore. She's quite a scaredy cat but she is also rather vicious, not being socialized at all with other animals. The gate at the top of the stairs is to keep Roxy the dog from going down, rather than keeping kitty cats away.

I have been encouraging Sam to jump over the gate when she wants to come up. If she's downstairs and can hear me upstairs, she meows nonstop. It's really quite annoying. I know she can beat the snot out of dogs five times her size, Roxy should be a breeze if the dog causes any problems (Roxy is quite a chicken though too, and as a puppy, is learning very quickly). Piper, the sometimes housecat that actually lives here, jumps over the gate to get away from the dog & kids when she's home (but she is away for days at a time when the weather is fine).

Last night Sam took it upon herself to figure out how to get over the gate, as she could smell chicken in the kitchen. I had put the leftover butter chicken in Tupperware containers, cooling with lids ajar, on the counter next to the fridge. Lori and I were in the TV room and heard something coming from the kitchen. O! Sam is eating some chicken. I couldn't remember leaving a piece of chicken on the floor for her, for surely the dog would have scarfed it first. Turns out Sam found the Tupperware and helped herself. The sound Lori & I heard was of a lid falling to the floor. Sam had made it over the gate.

I knew then that it would mean Sam would be spending much of the night exploring this new found freedom. She was, as Dan would say 'kittycatting around'. I told Lori this before we went to bed - and to be prepared for Sam to wake Roxy up, as Roxy would surely start barking.

Sure enough, it happened, but I somehow managed to sleep through it. No harm done, Lori woke up, saw Sam with puffy tail, all was put to right and Lori went back to bed.

Just now I saw Sam make her way over:

those chickens can be eaten

2011-07-26T11:32:00.000-07:00

Ah, life on the farm.

So I landed here two and a half weeks ago now. The family farm produces crops (currently canola, I think), chickens, and cattle. Chickens are raised in 80x200 feet barns which are temperature controlled and all the feed & watering is automatic. Every day, my sister's father-in-law walks through each barn and "picks out the deads". These chickens are all the same breed and same age, so have no way to establish a natural pecking order. As such, they have unnatural behaviours and sometimes stampede each other when startled, especially in an artificial environment. Some die. With livestock, you must remove the dead ones right away, especially in the summer, because of the smell and to prevent disease.

I had never given any thought to what happens to the dead ones when he removes them from the barn. I guess I imagined that he put them somewhere.

One day, early in my visit this time around, I saw a few of the farm cats, some magpies, and the three-legged coyote eating chicks just outside the barn. I was alarmed! I walked over to investigate (not at all threatened by the three-legged coyote). Coyote took off as soon as he saw me coming. Some of the chicks were dead, some were lame and some deformed. Gasp! What should we do?

My six-year-old niece came up behind me. "Oh, those chickens can be eaten." Right. These chicks would not make the grade of the commercial processor that buys these birds when they are mature.

I think it was the next day that my sister & the kids came back from town to see her father-in-law waiting in his truck in the driveway, rifle sticking out the window. He was waiting for the skunk to come out of hiding so he could shoot it.

At any given moment, there are about a dozen cats around the farm. Lately this usually includes at least one litter of kittens. One kitten from each litter usually survives, as they often get killed or eaten by the farm's dogs, coyotes, or by getting stuck in vehicles.

Farm dogs get run over if they get in the way of a moving vehicle. Seldom do they see a vet to get repaired.

If an animal is unable to recover from an injury, the solution is usually just to shoot it.

It is a hard thing to come here as an animal lover and see how this happens, this casual way of dealing with animals as expendable. My niece has seen an awful lot of death in her few years and she misses every animal that dies or goes missing. My sister doesn't like it either but she has also gotten used to the idea, having lived on this farm for something like ten years now. She said the could feed all the kitties and easily spend $300 a month on cat food, but these cats would all end up dead anyway. One cat lasted 10 years (she was a house cat), and that was an extremely long life for a farm cat; most that survive past age one usually only make it to two or three years.

There is a batch of kittens here now that are six or seven weeks old. Several times a day we all do a kitten count. Six. Three grey, three calico. Where is Runt? Runt has blue eyes. She's my favourite.

The other day I borrowed father-in-law's recip saw to go and prune trees. When I was doing the apple trees, the cows became interested. The three main apple trees line the fence that borders the pasture. I threw the branches with apples on them (not ripe yet, but cows don't care, apparently) over to the cows and they munched happily for hours. There was also a lot of mooing. I wondered what all that mooing was about. Were they saying "O thank you kind human for giving us all these delicious unripe crab apples that will give each of us nine stomachaches later"?