Ontario Referendum – Yes or No on Oct 10?

Dutiful citizen that I am, I carefully read the material that came in the mail about the upcoming referendum. Thoroughly confused, I read it again–more slowly this time. I still didn’t get it. And if I–with a university degree, darned good brain and English fluency–didn’t get it, I imagine most people looked over the flier, shook their heads in disbelief, and put the pamphlet in the recycling.

There was a special program on AM 800 the other morning that might have elucidated matters for me, but I missed it due to another obligation. All was not lost, however, because there was a debate on TV Ontario that night at 8:00. By then Ma was done watching her nightly game shows and I was able to settle in and listen carefully to the explanation of our upcoming choice on electoral reform along with pros and cons of the system as presented by panel members on both sides of the issue.

Now I get it, and I know how I am going to vote.

If you would like a better understanding of the referendum, I highly recommend you watch an animated illustration of the concepts by going here and clicking the aquamarine button on the left that says Watch the Electoral Reform Animation. If you still have questions, you may find answers to them here or at Your Big Decision, which also has a video you can watch.

I hope if you are in Ontario, you will educate yourself and not abstain from this important choice on October 10.

Ça Sent Bon

“Ça commence à sentir bon,” Ma just said to me. Every time I cook, she compliments me this way.

Today is my cooking day and–like Violet–I am enjoying the convenience of the crock pot. Ma has one of everything and two of many things. Yesterday I took advantage of her two pressure cookers and today I am making good use of her slow cooker. She also has a deep fryer and one of those big stand mixers like Martha Stewart uses on television. Being surrounded by fun tools is not something to complain about. I just have to be very careful when Sylvain and I are out shopping and see something we might like to have. He has to make a quick phone call just to make sure we don’t already have one of those.  Or two.

This is my second time to use the slow cooker. It’s GREAT. Sylvain has a book full of slow cooker recipes. They are all so darned easy, it’s just not funny. My first crock pot recipe involved a blade roast, some root veggies and a 1/2 can of gingerale. All I had to do was plunk things in the cooker in the morning, turn it on and come back at around 4:30 to put the basmati into the rice cooker.

Today’s recipe called for a bottom layer of sauerkraut, layers of sliced potatoes and onions over that and sausages on top. With this I will serve a salad of baby spinach, apples and pine nuts.

Violet’s post has me thinking about the bread machine, too. Maybe I can talk a certain someone into baking me some gluten free bread.

Apples and Squash

The root cellar is full of apples and squash.

Sunday we all went to Abbruzzese’s orchard to walk among the rows of trees and fill bushel baskets with crisp, ripe apples.  We got Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Empire and Ida Red for eating, Mutsu for baking and cooking.  Our next door neighbour Mark has a garden out in the county and has been ringing the doorbell lately bearing armloads of buttercup and acorn squash.

Six of Pa’s siblings or in-laws from Quebec are going to descend on this house in a few days.  We’ve all been pitching in to help Ma get the sleeping spaces ready, the house cleaned and tidied up a bit and some food prepared for the onslaught.  When Ma was fretting over how to feed eleven people for two days, I offered to make up a big pot of soup.

Ma is hard to read sometimes.  She doesn’t like to ask for things and she doesn’t like to risk hurting my feelings.   So when she hesitated and didn’t definitively accept my offer to help cook, I wasn’t sure if she was just too shy to ask for help or was thinking, “no, not one of your crazy experimental dishes that may or may not turn out edible.”  Only later during our wind-down-from-the-day-lying-in-bed talk did Sylvain clue me in.  Ma, he revealed, is relieved that I’m pitching in on the cooking.  She is much less stressed out since I offered to help, he says.

Most of today was spent on this project: to cut up as much squash as would fit in two large pressure cookers, peel and cut up three huge honkin’ Mutsu apples, chop the onion, sautee the onion, wake up the spices, go down to the basement to fetch the huge soup pot, blend the soup in batches, and so forth.  Whew!  I was steadily working on that soup for a good three or four hours of the day.  Now it is divided into freezer bags in the big freezer downstairs.

Oh, how I love tuning into the seasons and using the fruits of local harvests.

Peregrine Falcon Pair over Ganatchio Trail?

Many evenings after dinner Sylvain and I go for a stroll on the Ganatchio Trail.  The other evening we spotted a pair of small raptors sallying forth from atop a tall apartment building.  One had caught something big. I wished I’d brought my binoculars; I would like to have been able to see if dinner was a squirrel or bird or snake or just what.  As we were standing there pointing up–discussing the habits of Coopers and Sharp-shinned Hawks–a gentleman passing by with his Shitzu on a leash told us the birds we were looking at were Peregrine Falcons.

Yeah, right, I thought.  I’ve only seen that once endangered (now threatened) species twice in my life: once on the coast of California and once in Florida.   But the friendly gentleman said that there was a project in Detroit to put nest boxes on city buildings and that this pair had come across the river.  His story was just plausible enough for me to get excited about bringing my binoculars along the next evening.

We hit the marina before heading home and saw what was probably a Great Egret fishing along the shores of Peche Island.  Rats, I wish I’d brought my scope!
The next night the hawks were hunting from the same building. Indeed, they did resemble Peregrines.

So tonight we returned with the scope and were rewarded by finding the pair sitting on an antenna on top of one of the apartment buildings. We opened the tripod and settled down for a good look.  Indeed, the birds sitting there preening their pretty feathers do look an awful lot like Peregrine Falcons.  We were able to give one curious passersby a look before the pair took off on their evening hunt.  While she had a birder by the elbow, the woman who looked through my scope asked me if I’d seen the 40 or so white duck-like birds with black heads on Peche Island yesterday.  Why, no, I hadn’t.  I told her I would try to figure out what they were and tell her the next time we meet on the trail. (The same people walk the trail every night.)

I am so excited about tonight’s turn of events.  It wasn’t the birds I am so worked up over, but the fact that something (anything) got me in conversation with some neighbours who also take an interest in them.  I mean I was TALKING to someone other than Sylvain, Ma, Pa or his sister M.  I can’t wait to take the scope down to the marina and see what we can see over on Peche Island next time.  Oh, and next time maybe we’ll exchange names with the trail walkers who are also into birds!

Eastern Promises (and Fall 2007 Promises)

Cronenberg’s new film was very sastifying. The acting was flawless; I won’t be surprised if some Academy Award nominations for best actor and best supporting come out of it.

And the violence? Cronenberg wasn’t as over the top as Tarantino, who always has a few decapitations for us, complete with squirting jugular. In Promises, there were just a couple of throats slit where the camera does not cut away. Oh, and the bath house fight scene. According to reviews, I missed what will go down as a classic fight scene in film history. Yeah, when the drop-dead gorgeous main character Nikolai was slipping around in his own blood on the tile floor of the steamy bath house, fighting for his life against two hulking hit men–with family jewels vulnerable and in full view– I kept my eyes closed and ears covered until the sound of crunching bones stopped.

The rest of the film was solid plot and character development. I’m glad we saw it.

The even better news for me was the fall line-up. Good movies galore this fall! Yippeeee! The Darjeeling Limited with Jason Schwartzman, whom I LOVED in Shopgirl and I (heart) Huckabees is coming this fall. Ed Harris (Pollock) is coming back to the screen with Morgan Freeman in Gone Baby Gone. That might be good. Then there are Michael Clayton starring George Clooney and Elizabeth: the Golden Age with Cate Blanchett. Did you see her in Notes on a Scandal opposite Dame Judi Dench? Wow.

So, yeah, this filmophile is geeked.

Date with Cronenberg

Sylvain and I make a point of going out either to dinner or to a movie (or both) once a week.  It helps us stay sane in this co-housing arrangement with his parents, for one thing.  It’s not a bad idea for all marriages and relationships, if you ask me.

Tonight is date night and I’m sooo looking forward to seeing David Cronenberg’s new film Eastern Promises.   I really enjoyed A History of Violence and Crash (not Paul Haggis’ Crash).  I don’t generally like violence on the screen, but I will tolerate it for a director who goes outside the box creatively.  In that sense, Cronenberg has always delivered.  According to the reviews Sylvain read to me last night, I might have to cover my eyes through some parts, but I think it will be worth it.  I’ll let you know.

Message in a Carnation

My friend G1 sent me a link to the website of that fellow who wrote What Color is Your Parachute, reminding me it is the classic job search reference and guide.  Just so happens Sylvain has a copy sitting on his book shelf, so when some of the info on the website tweaked my interest, I decided to give the book another read.  It’s been many years since I last looked at it.

Bolles has some amazing advice for those of us between jobs, including jewels of insight on how to keep from getting quite so depressed while unemployed.  By nightfall, I’d read a third of the book and felt inspired to take some initiative today.  Mind you, the job-seeking method he claims to be successful more often than any other is a method best suited to extroverts.  There is no way I am knocking on doors and asking to see the person who has the power to hire, shaking hands, handing over resumes.  I might be able to do that after three beers, but not sober. No way.

I emailed a couple of friends and both suggested I do what I’m comfortable doing.  I think the closest I can come to Bolles’ creative job search method is to put on my work duds and visit a few places where I think would be cool to work.  I will print off a few copies of my resume and have them with me JUST IN CASE.  You know… what if I do get to chatting with the owner or manager and start to feel enough at ease to mention the fact that I’m available.  Then it would be good to be able to hand over my resume.  Yeah, I think that’s a plan that doesn’t intimidate me into paralyzing procrastination.

This morning I identified two things standing in the way of my moving forward:  shaggy hair and no resume bond paper.  So I got dressed up and went first to the salon and next to the office supply store.  I walked the two miles (3.2 km) to the mall.  It was hot. I was hungry and thirsty and trying very hard to silence what Anne Lamott calls Radio KFKD.  The tape.  The Inner Critic.  My Blue Meanies.

I was talking to whatever God/dess there might be out there or inside myself.  I was asking for help.  I’ve been praying hard day and night to be graced with a good attitude day.  I’ve been working really hard, trying to combat Radio KFKD with my own litany of hope and faith.  Today I was teetering on the edge.   Sometimes Anne Lamott asks God/dess for a sign.  And she gets one.  I wondered if God was too busy to give me one, too.

The mall and every store I went into seemed to be peopled with very sad creatures.  There was a woman in a big, baggy sweater pushing a baby carriage whose whole face and body drooped with exhaustion.  There was the woman who could have been ravishingly beautiful but for the inexplicably horrendous way someone had tortured her hair with dye and a curling iron.  All around me I saw loneliness and desperation, dirt and depression.

When I get stuck behind lenses that view the world in gritty grey, it’s hard for me to shake it off.

I bought a ream of curriculum vitae paper.  I passed the health food store and remembered to get more iron supplement.

Then.

There he was.  My angel.

Looming larger and larger in my peripheral vision was a man.  A tall, heavy-set man was lumbering down the middle of the mall.  He stopped to hand something to someone passing him in the opposite direction.

Can it be? I thought.

I could not keep walking with my eyes down.  I had to glance up,  find out what he was holding to his breast.

As soon as I glanced his way, he mumbled softly to me, “would you like a flower?”

It was all I could do not to start crying right there and hug him on the spot.

“YES! Yes, I would LOVE a flower,” I said, taking a long-stemmed carnation from him. “Thank you.”

Flashback. 

My Sacred Life, Day 30

I am going “home” to Arkansas soon to visit my Mama. This is a blank card that was made from one of her watercolours. My mom is living her life in a way that makes me envious, I must admit. She is retired and recently bought a cottage on Harris Brake, a quiet cove just down the road from Heifer Project International. She goes up there on weekends with one or another of her girlfriends. There they paint or do printmaking or make lampwork beads that they later string into necklaces.

When she needed help putting together the beds in all the guest rooms in her new lake house, it was easy to find strapping young people at Heifer Project to come over for a few hours and do the grunt work for her. When she asked them how much they wanted per hour to help her with such odd jobs, they said, “whatever you want to pay us.” She confided that she paid them well, hoping they’ll come back the next time she needs them.

A while back I made a comment about Americans versus Canadians that could easily be misconstrued. I do believe America is full to the brim with amazingly wonderful people. America produces some of the biggest philanthropist, kindest helpers and volunteers, and well…you name it. Then there is the rude minority. Unfortunately, that minority becomes very visible by virtue of their behaviour. Here in Canada, there must be some sort of huge peer pressure at work. I don’t know, as I wasn’t raised here. I just know that in eight years I have not encountered a single rude Canadian. There are jokes about how polite Canadians are. If you run over someone’s foot with your grocery cart, the other person is going to say, “Oh, sorry!”

Rick threatened to write something about Canadians and people from a certain state in the US. Might that be Arkansas, where he is also from? I have to admit that when my mom first dragged me and my brother back to her home state from California after my dad died in 1969, I wasn’t too pleased to be there. But at some point between age 8 and adulthood, something must have changed. I realized this when I was returning from five months hitchhiking Europe. People Express airlines delivered me to Newark, and from there I had just enough money left for a bus ticket back to Little Rock. I remember feeling tired and frazzled from my months on the road, sleeping on beaches and sometimes having to get out in the middle of nowhere to walk to the next village if the lorry driver who’d given me a lift told me to put out or get out.

I was tired and I needed a long bath more than you can imagine. I needed real food, not greasy bus station food and vending machine fare. I didn’t even realize I was tense, my muscles in a constant state of contraction, until that bus crossed the border into Arkansas. I let out a deep breath. I relaxed. I now knew that no matter what happened…if someone started stalking me or if I ran out of money for food, I was okay. I was among Arkansans. This meant I could go up to any door and knock and a kind person would help me. I felt the truth of that all the way inside my bones.

And when I moved to Canada, I sometimes got homesick.  That’s why I taught myself to cook up greens and black-eyed peas, and to make cornbread just like my granny did.  Amazing what you’ll learn to value once you don’t have it anymore.

I am looking forward to seeing my Mama and brother and old friends again back in Arkansas.

My Sacred Life, Day 29

Today I feel as if I’m in limbo.  Neither here nor there.

I offer this photo of a birdhouse that hangs in the back yard.  A pair of house sparrows has a nest inside.

My Sacred Life, Day 28

I am two days behind in my commitment to blog every day for 30 days as part of the My Sacred Life project. I was getting caught up again, but didn’t have it in me to write anything yesterday.  Sylvain, however, found the energy to blog while I went to bed early.

My Sacred Life, Day 27

Sometimes you don’t know what a situation or person or event had to teach you until it’s over or gone.  Saturday was our first day back at the homestead, and we spent much of it reflecting on how we felt.  The vacation had recharged our batteries, left us rested and feeling good. We both noticed how much closer we felt as a couple during and after the trip.  We also started to realize how much the stressors of daily life grind us down.

Sylvain kept telling me, “I can’t remember when I’ve laughed this hard.”  I am happy to  be such a source of amusement.  I fall over backward into holes,  beg Sylvain not to make me laugh anymore because I forgot to avail myself of the washroom at our last rest stop… oops.  Too late.

Then there were the curtains in the hotel room.  See, the edge of the red plaid drapery panel was on the right near the centre of the patio door, but then under that there was a sheer curtain that ended way over to the left by the door latch.   Apparently the sight of the curtains moving as I tried to grope my way back through the maze of layers of fabric was funny.  I would finally emerge from the sea of curtains to find Sylvain gasping for breath between gales of laughter, tears streaming.

One night I commented, “I bet you can see a lot of stars out here when it’s not cloudy.”  And on our last night there,  the sky finally cleared up.  Even though we had to pack up the next day, Sylvain had a new mission.  He HAD to see the stars.  And so we drove and drove looking for a dark road with a place to pull off.  There were dark neighbourhoods, but we didn’t want to lower the ramp into some unsuspecting family’s driveway.  We drove and drove some more.  Finally we found an industrial lot with a wide gravel entry allowing us room to pull off and get out.  The problem was there were a couple of lights on nearby buildings.  I really didn’t want to have to keep driving around all night looking for a place with zero lights.  We might never find such a spot.

“Just do this,” I told Sylvain, demonstrating how he could cup his hands around his eyes to block out the lights.

Ah! It works!  But there were 3 lights and Sylvain only has two hands.  So I stood behind him and put my hands on either side of his eyes while he blocked out the third light.  Presto: a jillion stars.

“Kelly,” he said to me later.

“Yes?”

“Thank you for shading my eyes so I could see the stars,” he said.

What lessons can we glean from this experience?  That’s what I’m working on.

My Sacred Life, Day 26

Sylvain and I travel well together.  The trip home made me wonder two things about you.  How many times a week or day do you say to yourself or someone else, “I don’t know, let’s Google it.”  Sylvain and I are doing that constantly.  I am a good Googler, since Boolean search terms and best keyword search methods are necessary if you work in a library helping people find information.

My other question for you is this. What is your favourite game to play on the road to keep everyone in the car from getting bored? Sylvain and I played two games.  One is the game where you try to find something starting with each letter of the alphabet in turn. You have to establish whether you’ll allow items inside the car or only outside.  As soon as anyone finds an A object, it’s on to B.

The other game we played is the compound word game.  I name a compound word, such as blackboard, and now you have to come up with another compound word that starts with board.  Boardwalk!  Excellent. Now I have to come up with one starting with walk, and so on.  If someone gets totally stumped, the other person gets a point and you start again.

Sheer silliness surely speaks to Spirit.

My Sacred Life, Day 25

One of the goals of the trip–in Sylvain’s mind at least–was for me to hear a loon for the first time.  We saw many, but only one night did we hear them by chance when, around 8 pm, Syvlain suggested we open the patio door for some fresh air.

The trip held many firsts for me.  I saw my first ever Danger Moose Crossing sign.  I fed chipmunks and a red squirrel for the first time.  I saw my first Whiskeyjack. And I became interested in knowing the names of the mosses, ferns and lichens around me for the first time.  This is juniper moss, reindeer lichen and rock tripe.

We both felt blessed to be able to take these six days away from the noise of the city and spend as long as we wanted simply staring in awe at our surroundings.

Click to enlarge.

My Sacred Life, Day 24

On Wednesday Sylvain asked me if I would be upset if he checked into whether we could extend our stay by another day.  Instead of coming home on Thursday, we would stay till Friday.  The room was available for another day, so we booked it.

We made a friend during our stay, and she became my reason for peeling myself out from under the cushy duvet each morning.   When she became a regular visitor to our patio door, we took to calling her Rusty.  She is a North American Red Squirrel, about the size of a chipmunk.  She got in the habit of visiting us every morning and evening, plus any other time she heard us open the sliding glass door.

Rusty would come right into the room and take unsalted nuts from our fingers.   We spent a lot of time Googling red squirrel info to learn about her habits.  We discovered she caches food for the winter and can find those caches again using both memory and a keen sense of smell. She will be able to find her stashes of nuts even if they are under four feet of snow.

How do I know Rusty is female?  When we closed the bag of nuts and slid the screen door closed, she would climb the screen–giving us a view of her white belly.  Isn’t Google great?  You can learn everything from divining water to sexing squirrels.

Our time getting to know Rusty made me realize that communing with wild (or in this case half-wild) animals is one of the activities that brings me instantly into the Now.  All my so-called problems melt away from my awareness.  If I have a headache, it goes away.  If I’m feeling blue, my spirit jumps up.

In only three days, we had grown so fond of our little friend, we were dreading having to bid her goodbye on the last day.  One day she started a cache within view of our patio door.   We watched rapt as she dug a tunnel in the earth with enough room at the end for her to turn around and come back out.  Then she made trip after trip to beg us for peanuts in the shell and raw almonds.  Each time we handed her a nut, she would turn and turn it in her little paws until she could get the best grip on it with her teeth.  Then she would scamper to the hole she’d dug–but not directly! She took a circuitous route lest a poacher or predator should be spying.  She took it into the tunnel and then came back to ask for another nut.

We went to dinner and when we came back, Rusty had covered over that hole and was busy scratching around in the earth over the top of the cache.  She was trying to make the earth look undisturbed.  Nothing to see here, folks!  Keep going, keep going!

I can’t tell you how many times since we came home Sylvain has said to me, or I to him, “I miss Rusty.”

Click to enlarge.

Midnight

Thanks, Claire, for inviting us to do this test.

You Are Midnight

You are more than a little eccentric, and you’re apt to keep very unusual habits.Whether you’re a night owl, living in a commune, or taking a vow of silence – you like to experiment with your lifestyle. Expressing your individuality is important to you, and you often lie awake in bed thinking about the world and your place in it. You enjoy staying home, but that doesn’t mean you’re a hermit. You also appreciate quality time with family and close friends.

What Time Of Day Are You?

My Sacred Life, Day 23

Tuesday we returned to Algonquin Park to do the Spruce Bog Boardwalk, one of two trails in the park officially designated as wheelchair accessible. The day before, in the nature centre, we’d learned how a bog comes to be. Now we had a whole day to see the process up close. A fellow birder pointed out a group of Palm Warblers passing through the woods here. I got a glimpse of the Grey Jay, a species I could never have seen without venturing quite far north in Ontario. We heard but never got a good look at the Boreal Chickadee. In the low brush around the water, I pished up a Lincoln’s Sparrow, which dove right back into the bushes and refused to come back out so I could get a better look.

Sylvain and I were happy to take the trail at a very slow pace, pointing out interesting lichens, mosses, ferns and fungi to one another, and stopping often to take photos. Sometimes we stopped at a bench and breathed in the clean air. There is a deeper level of relaxation you can reach when far away from the bustle and noise of the city. No television. No radio. Cell phone off.

Listen to the silence.

  Click to enlarge.

My Sacred Life, Day 22

We spent Monday exploring Algonquin Park. I do believe I am happiest when I am learning and exploring this amazing earth in all the miraculous manifestations of design and beauty.

During brief rest times back at the lodge, Sylvain and I are reading aloud from What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty. After the first three essays regarding the possibility of life in other parts of the universe, I began to skip those. The chapters on String Theory interest me. The debates between theists and atheists bore and frustrate or sometimes just amuse me. I do not see more than a semantic difference between the arguments for Intelligent Design and arguments such as the following:

It is an established fact that all of life on this planet is shaped by Darwinian natural selection, which also endows it with an overwhelming illusion of “design.” I believe, but cannot prove, that the same is true all over the universe, wherever life may exist. I believe that all intelligence, all creativity, and all design, anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of a cumulative process equivalent to what we here call Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe. — Richard Dawkins

Does that position make you want to say, “aaarrrghhh” as much as it does me? First of all, I see a huge flaw in Dawkins’ logic in that his view of creation or evolution is linear. Quantum mechanics is teaching us that the world is non-linear. What is the difference between “God said let there be light and there was light,” and “at some point light came to exist.” Either way, it’s a wonder. There is order and there is beauty. In my mind, you can never settle the chicken and egg debate because you are nailing yourself inside the boxes of linear time, causality and “creation.” It just IS. (Be still and know that I Am.)

Sylvain and I wandered through the interpretive centre pushing the “English” versus the “French” button to hear one after another recorded explanation of the exhibit in front of us. We learned how a lake becomes a bog. We saw taxidermied specimens representing all the birds and mammals to be found in the area. We got to peek beneath the surface of the waters of a bog at: the weak and wavy stems of the white water lily; a diving loon; schools of fish; the beaver bringing food up through the submerged entrance to its warm cozy den; the trout about to be picked up by the talons of an osprey.

In the nature centre’s bookstore and gift shop, Sylvain bought me a Canadian Fern Checklist tee shirt. Then we went from one trail to another, pishing up birds, studying ferns, learning the names of the flora, reading in the guide booklets about the ecology around us. We learned how each species fits into the cycle, how many years it takes for a bog to form and how the life forms survive in such a mineral-poor environment. This is the sort of thing that I could do all day long.

Richard Dawkins can tell me how ferns evolved. That is fine. I believe him. Or you can say God created all those ferns. That is fine. I believe you, too. I don’t see those two statements as mutually exclusive truths. Neither set of metaphors takes anything away from the beauty and miracle of the fern. Does it?

My Sacred Life, Day 21

We were on the road for eight hours on Sunday.  We could have taken the fast route, but both prefer idling along the back roads, through small towns, enjoying the pastoral scenery.  We also both like stopping frequently to take pictures.  Later I’ll put our trip photos on Flickr or someplace like that for all to see.  For now here is my favourite shot from the journey from Windsor to Muskoka, an old church in Mono, Ontario.  The sun had begun to set.  Pigeons were settling on the rooftop.
Click to enlarge.

In the Meantime…

Until I have a chance to post my report, feel free to visit Sylvain’s blog to see what we’ve been up to.  Cheers!

My Sacred Life, Day 20

Today I am thankful for so many things. I am thankful for all the things now in my life that are forcing me to stretch and grow. It’s not comfortable. I won’t try to tell you it’s a fun ride. But I’m starting to see the beneficial side to being pushed outside my comfort zone.

I am thankful for being in a position in this household that is forcing me to learn to receive.

I am thankful for Nita’s comment, which is forcing me to re-examine my attitudes and simplistic black-and-white view of my former and current homelands. There are beautiful people and ugly people everywhere. My putting Canadians on a pedestal doesn’t do anything to further cross-cultural harmony and understanding.

I am thankful for Sylvain and for the energy he puts into making our relationship fun, exciting and balanced.

I am thankful for a couple of hours spent setting up and using my sewing machine today. It soothes me to see the spools of thread lined up by colour.

My bag is packed for our five-day stay near Algonquin Park. I have never been that far north. If I’m really lucky, I could see one or two new bird species.

Oh, and if you don’t hear from me for five days, you’ll know there wasn’t internet access where we’re staying.

packing