From A to B via X-Y-ZED

There never seems to be an easy way to get anything done in my life. Well, maybe there is, but somehow I never seem to travel down that road.

The latest has been a furniture purchase. A dear friend of mine has moved into senior's housing, and I bought her 85-year-old mahogany dining room suite at an amazing price. Table, chairs, buffet with mirror, and china cabinet. I measured my available space, and have decided it WILL fit. And be gorgeous.

The hitch? I live on the 2nd floor of my very old house. Narrow staircase plus old furniture that is solid and does not include disassembling and reassembling options make for a bit of a challenge.

Okay, so on to step 2 in this process: have someone in to give me an estimate for a patio door in the living room. Do I have a patio? Well, no. That would come some time later. The door is just to move the furniture through. A friend of mine has one of these doors that leads to empty space, and she calls it her "mother-in-law" door. Use your imagination to figure that one out.

While we're at it, I think, why not replace all of the drafty leady windows on the 2nd floor? I could save some money on installation. Ha ha. Add another chunk of money for windows and installation. Good thing there are low-interest loans available.

Next step is organizing the move. I don't even want to think about the price tag on this one, because it will mean renting a small crane or a scissor lift to bring the furniture up to my new door and slide it in the back way.

I just hope my intuition is right and I live here until I can no longer crawl up the stairs.

Going about life the complicated way.

First Impressions

Working in the far north has a charm all its own. I have the privilege of travelling to a tiny community in Nunavut every 6 to 8 weeks to deliver physiotherapy services at the health center and school there. I had my eye on this job for a few years, and phoned the hiring office every few months to see if it was available. My lucky break happened almost 2 years ago, and I have been loving it ever since.

We fly up in a small 8-seater single engine plane. The journey takes anywhere from 2 1/2 to 4 1/2 hours, depending on the prevailing winds. Of course, sometimes the journey is much longer, especially if we have to wait a day or two for howling blizzards to stop. One thing you can count on here is the wind. Living on a treeless island in the middle of Hudson's Bay means there is not much shelter from the elements.

We stay at "the" hotel. Clean, comfortable, friendly people. $200.00 per night plus $60.00 a day for food. The food is excellent, and the lunch-time cook now knows that we like salad. No more deep-fried everything offerings from him.

The staff at the health center consists of 3 nurses and a social worker. The rest of us (physio, occupational therapy, physicians, dentists, etc) pop in and out. It makes for an interesting job - you never know who is going to be there, but you can pretty much count on meeting a lot of fascinating people. Fascinating in every sense of the word.

This last week was no exception. On the plane with us was a social worker, going in for 2 weeks to provide services while the regular social worker is on vacation. In the first 3 hours, we received the following information from him:

1. His only motivation for working in the north is the money.
2. His assumption is that all of us share the same motivation. (I actually make the same amount of money in my other jobs.)
3. He is 41 years old, a Sagitarious, and not married.
4. He needs to lose weight.
5. He likes to eat his meals in front of the television.
6. Television and food make him happy.
7. His specialty is mental health.
8. The hotel is much too far away from the health center (an 8-minute walk.)

Well, you can guess what kind of first impression he made on most of us. The hours of raised voices I had to listen to in the health center as he dealt with community issues didn't do much to change his image.

First impressions.

Thinking outside the box

I'm up in the Arctic right now, in a little town on a tiny island in the middle of the Hudson's Bay. When I checked the weather on Monday (preparing to come here) I saw that the temperatures were quite mild - between minus 2 and minus 5.

Wow, that's pretty warm for April, thought I.

Well yes, and so was 23 degrees in my own fair city. I was running around in shorts and T-shirt, thinking about air conditioning. Well, not for long. On principal, I refuse to use air conditioning in April. Opening the windows works just fine.

But packing for the Arctic when you are sweating from unseasonably warm weather - I just couldn't imagine being cold.

So a couple of fleeces and a rain jacket would be fine, right?!

I have been here many many times - how did I forget about the wind? My hands and ears were cold as soon as I stepped off the plane and walked over to the airport.

One of the nurses was kind enough to lend me some mitts, and a hat, but my big German head would render her little hat quite shapeless in no time. Fortunately there were some hand-crocheted hats for sale at the hotel, and one was just my size. Sold!

Thinking (and packing) outside the box. Easier said than done. Right now it's hard to imagine running around in shorts and T-shirt.

Things not finished

It hit me around 5:00 this afternoon - it's Sunday, which means tomorrow is Monday. The form of this transition varies from week to week. The consistent thing is that it always is a transition.

At 5:00 I was sitting on a comfortable couch in my parent's house, chatting with my sister and my neices. We'd had a wonderful home-cooked Easter lunch, helium balloons for the kids (though the evil auntie who supplied the helium would not allow kids to inhale it and talk with funny voices,) good conversation, and to top it all off, another glorious spring day that beckoned us all out to enjoy and savour.

Then the thought of Monday....... I love my job (does that sound defensive?!) BUT - I feel like I run from one set of unfinished tasks to the next. Tomorrow is a day mostly made up of meetings with parents, where we talk about accomplishments over the past school year, and talk about where we are heading. The "you haven't done enough" voice in my head reminds me that I haven't spent enough time with these kids, that I have not been at that particular school for about 10 days now, and wonders what I will find to say when it's my turn.

The "time is limited and you do your best" voice is logical and tries hard to put a positive spin on things.

The "these kids deserve more" voice alternates between being passionate and resigned.

The reality is that I will speak honestly, and I know that we will have things to celebrate.

As I sit here at my computer, there are holes in the wall to my left. The window frame is missing a board at the top. There are no baseboards on the outside walls. The computer table is in the middle of the room, waiting for my friend the plaster person to come and render my walls whole again. He is another who runs from one unfinished task to the next.

I am not alone.

Things not finished.

Very Bad Ideas

Yesterday was a gorgeous spring day - one of those days that makes everything seem wonderful, new, and entirely possible. I decided to go for a long long bike ride (just to REALLY break in those sitting bones!)

Found the cycling shorts, found the shorts to go overtop, then down to the basement to retrieve the cycling shoes. Hmm..... Basement has been rearranged 2 or 3 times over the last year, with varying stages of renovation requiring various bits of it to be accessible. All belongings are currently piled in the middle of the basement.

It was absolutely impossible to find the shoes. On to the obvious task - clean the basement. (All done in cycling gear and Birkenstocks.) The student staying at my house was more than happy to abandon his reading and help make multiple trips to the back yard. Things were organized as follows:

1. Garbage in bags to put with the regular garbage
2. Garbage (like mouldy bits of drywall) to throw on the pile that will eventually get picked up by somebody with a big truck.
3. "Help Yourself Garbage" This goes in the back lane, tastefully displayed for dumpster divers to peruse and take home to put in their own basements. Gyeung Ho wanted to know if "Help yourself Garbage" was a real word. Only in my house.
4. Thrift shop - much of this has been sitting in boxes for years, waiting to be delivered. This got deposited behind my car so I can't go anywhere until it's done.
5. Useful items - a surprisingly small category. Stashed neatly in basement.

I found the shoes.

I also found 3 boxes of childhood memorabilia - grade 3 art projects, journals detailing years and years of existence, books I had received as gifts. All stored in cardboard boxes near the basement drain. All covered in black mould and unopenable (I don't think that's a word either.) I managed to rescue 2 pencilcases made by my mom, a small plaque that brings me back 35 years, and a paper plate colored by a nephew 15 years ago.

Then out to the garbage heap, with a sad and heavy heart. Those things really did mean a lot to me. I would never choose to throw them out.

Storing papers in cardboard boxes on a basement floor - Very Bad Idea.