From Canada to Austria to…?
After 24 days of daily posting, I don’t seem to have much to say today. Plus I’ve already had a healthy serving of Bailey’s, which doesn’t help the creativity.
I think I’ll just hand in one of my “this post sucks” cards (how many of those do I get??) and go to the office and work away on Christmas cards.
Cheers.
I almost forgot to post today and then sitting here I was thinking, “I got nothin’.” So I started going through what I had done today, and one of my favourite parts was listing to the CBC. I’m sure I’ve gone on (and on) about this before, but it’s my blog so I’ll rave if I want to.
I love the CBC. Love it! I can’t imagine that there is a better radio station anywhere. At least not in English. I’ve listened to BBC and NPR, and the CBC kicks their butts. Or at least I think so. Perhaps being Canadian sways me, as I get the jokes and savour the nuances. But really, I just love the incredible variety of things talked about.
Most days I’ll fire up Q, the podcast, and listen to Jian Ghomeshi, who is perhaps the best interviewer of our time. Because of the time change, I also occasionally listen to the Maritime radio live (the first Canadian broadcast of the day, of course.) Makes me wish I had made it that far east. Someday.
I’ll listen to any program if the topic at all interests me: Quirks and Quarks, DNTO, Canada Reads, the Massey Lectures.
Today I was listening to Tapestry, which is another favourite. I’m a spiritual person with undefined religious affiliations, and I enjoy pondering what I personally believe about the spiritual topics being discussed.
The podcast I played was a listener-request for the interview with Rabbi Harold Kushner, who wrote the book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” a story written in large part to address his experience with his son’s death. Rabbi Kushner was funny in a sweet way, obviously wise, very humble and imperfectly human. His conversation this time with Mary Hynes was about his new books, “Conquering Fear: Living Boldly in an Uncertain World.”
Being someone how actually has the opposite problem, in that I too-often dive head-first into life without checking out how deep the water is, I was interested in how this would apply to me.
There were many things that struck me about the discussion, particularly about the fear of failure or the fear of success. Perhaps the point that stuck with me most was that Kuschner believes there is not success or failure, there is success or forgiveness. He has seen time and time again people who believe they have failed being forgiven by the people who love them. Of course, this isn’t always true, especially for individuals who don’t achieve what they were hoping to in a very public way. However, I think this philosophy is very true in my life. The people around me for the most part don’t judge me or hold it against me when something falls apart. They value that I tried and moved on. And I tend to provide the same support with the family and friends in my life. What I’m really bad at is forgiving myself when I “fail”. This program today was a great reminder to do less judging and more forgiving, both to those people in my life but mostly myself. It is a tough lesson to learn.
*On that personal note, it probably is a good time to mention that I’m pulling this blog off the search engines for a while. I’m going to make more of an effort to find work, and first interviews are like first dates…you don’t want to give your whole life story during the initial meeting. So if you are one of those folks who types website addresses into the Google search box instead of the top URL address bar, you might have to change your ways for a few weeks. Email me if you are having trouble and I’ll walk you through it.
*Update: So yeah, that didn’t happen. When we got to the concert our contact was frantically on the phone, looking very worried. Apparently the tickets weren’t at the box office and, to make a longish story shortish, we didn’t end up going. Markus and I caught a movie instead. But Annie gets to spend an overnight with Opa, which is pretty super in her books. She actually was literally pushing us out the door “go, go, go”. She grabbed my coat, pulled me into the hall, and then shut the door on us. Love you too sweetie. Separation anxiety is certainly not an issue in this family.
A regular at the cafe gave us free tickets to a concert tonight. A Simply Red concert. Simply Red? I can’t believe they are still performing.
Here they are, for your ’80’s viewing pleasure. (Love the hair!!)
First day of winter skating! It was lots of fun with Annie and friends Chloe and 2-year-old Julian. So sweet.
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Hopefully coming soon…tobogganing!
I was watching Grey’s Anatomy last night (ya, ya, keep your judgements to yourself) and for some reason it reminded me that for a brief period in my life I thought I wanted to be a doctor.
There are many reasons why this would have never worked, but probably the most basic is that I have absolutely no memory for proper nouns. I never have. Even as a child it took me forever to remember someone’s name. Names, places, dates (hahahahahah dates!) all are mostly inaccessible from my brain. (My amazing grandmother could tell you every date in our family history…births, deaths, major events. I guess as far as that lineage goes, I am, as Scar would say, at the shallow end of the gene pool.)
I’m fine with common nouns I use every day, but anything out of the ordinary takes ages to remember, if at all. Can you just imagine me in a medical situation?
The patient is coding, the nurse turns to me and says “Doctor, what should we do?” I look at him and say, “Inject his central line with…, um, yeah, you know, that thing that will keep him from dying.”
I managed to make it through school as I have quite a good “extended” short-term memory. For a day or two I can carry facts around like a water pitcher filled to the brim. Carefully I would make my way to school, only spilling a few nouns on the way, and then sit down to the exam. I would open the exam book with gusto and pour the knowledge all over the page. And then it was pretty much gone. Oh, I’d soak up a few drops of information from the saturated paper, and these facts would even occasionally jump on the synapse train to make it into my long-term memory (mixed metaphor!). But mostly, the information was completely gone.
I do have a fantastic memory for concepts, and am also talented at taking two concepts and finding a connection between them that is interesting and useful, so things like English Literature and business management are fine. But anything where I’m responsible for a schwack of proper nouns? Forget it.
But I guess we all have our strengths and weaknesses. Even you. Yes you, over there. Whatever your name is.
I’m in a foul mood. And I have absolutely no good reason, except perhaps that I’m on antibiotics which tend to sap my energy and make me feel slightly nauseous.
But other than that, it was a great day. Annie and I played before school, my German class went well, I picked Annie up from school early and then Ana (from Montenegro Ana) made us a fantastic lunch. After a nice long visit Annie and I went into town and caught the last bit of the opening of one of outdoor skating rinks. Even though the rink is really just this dinky thing, everything becomes an event here with fire dancers, live musicians, a singer suspended from a wire, and sweet girls skating around.
I have absolutely no reason to be cranky. And yet here I am. I’m just going to blame the moon (in whatever cycle it is) and go watch a movie. Blech.
This weekend the Christmas Market opens. I love, love, love the Christmas Market. Happier posts to come soon. Promise.
The few nights ago when I was reading Annie a story, I switched up some of the words. Like “If you give a pig some ketchup…” instead of “pancake.” She would laugh and tell me the right answer.
Tonight she asked if I could read her a “teasing book”. It took me a few seconds, but I realized this game of substituting words was what she wanted. We read and she corrected my “teasing” and had a good laugh. I have a feeling that we’ll be reading books like this for quite some time to come.
I’m under the weather today, so dipped into Twitter to get an idea for a post. It totally made me laugh, as today’s suggestion is “How did you end up where you’re living right now? What factors will help you choose the next place you live?” Besides being a virtual shrine to Annie, this blog is pretty much all about where I live, how I ended up here, and where I might be going next. Or at least, where I might be going next plays large in my mind, even though I may not write about it as often.
Followers and friends have as much information from this blog about how I ended up in beautiful Innsbruck as I do, so I won’t go into that. So what factors will determine where next we live?
To start, somewhere that I feel comfortable. I think I’ve had enough adventure and life growth experiences for a bit. Also somewhere both Markus and I can easily work. I’m sure I could find some job here, but when I think of looking for a great career, it gets confusing fast with work visas, language issues, and childcare choices. This part of Innsbruck sometimes feels like it is back in the 1950’s, as I can’t think of a single family with young children where both parents work full-time. It just isn’t really done here, so the system is not well set-up for full-day care.
Obviously I’m not moving anywhere where English or German is not the main language. At 41 my brain is tired and slow and clearly not up to this foreign-language thing.
Markus would need to be able to find a great opportunity, and Annie would need a solid school system for this next phase of her life. (I’m pretty sure home schooling would kill us both!)
Overall, I really think most likely we will either stay here or move back to the West Coast of Canada. I just don’t see us starting totally from scratch with friends and community at this point. Never say never, of course, but that is what my sense is at the moment. In any case, we are here for at least 2 more years until Markus can give the cafe a real chance. After that, well, you’ll know as soon as I do!
Ryan, in typical Ryan fashion, sent me a rather interesting blog post idea. He forwarded me a link to this image:
He went on to say: “Likely, as a woman, this sight is quite unfamiliar to you. Using round numbers, NA guys see this 2-3 mins. day. I’ve been an adult 20 years so I’ve been awkwardly staring at the fact that 1 gallon = 3.8 liters for easily 200-300 hours. In fact, a member of the first cohort of the Canadian ‘metrification’, gallons to litres remains the *only* imperial to metric measure I have clearly memorized.”
You seriously crack me up Ryan!
His other point is that apparently American Standard monopolizes NA urinals, while there are a wide variety on offer in Europe. I, obviously, wouldn’t know. What I do know is that when I first toured our new apartment, I was shocked to see this in the main floor guest bathroom:
I’m not exactly sure why, but urinals make me think of hockey arenas and beer-swilling drunk men. (Must be some scarring experience in childhood I’ve repressed.) They totally gross me out. Markus tries to tell me that they are actually more hygenic than normal toilets. Whatever…if he wants to use it, he can clean it, that’s all I’m saying.
What I do find absolutely confounding, though, is that the regular toilets here have flat bottoms instead of having a bowl-shape like in NA. I’m not going to go into too much detail, but just think about the implications of that for a second. Let’s just say that the toilet brush gets a lot more use here than in NA.
An even more oddly, our newly renovated apartment has three toilets, two of which have a flat bottom and one which is a regular bowl shape. They all look new as far as I can tell. Why would the owners mix it up like that? You would think someone would have a preference for one type or the other and stick with it.
Oh, I could go on…but I can hear the Internet pleas to stop already. I’ll sum up then by saying that this illustrates one of the many, many differences that I never imagined having to deal with. Sometimes the world isn’t as “global” as we would like to think.
Good friend Stacey requested some photos of our new home. I thought that would be a great blog post idea, until I realized that this would require the house to be in a state worthy of having pictures taken that I was willing to post to the Internet. Let’s just say that this level of tidiness happens, um, not every day.
So instead Markus, Annie and I headed out for a short walk behind our house and took some photos. I just love the views from our neighbourhood, Arzl.
Much of our view from our yard is blocked by an old house, but you can see a couple of mountains if you stand in just the right place.
A short walk up the lane begins a path that first snakes through the cow pastures and then merges with the larger mountain system of trails.
This last picture turned out to be a bit boring. I was trying to capture the awesome hill that I think will be perfect for Annie to slide down on her plastic Rutschblatt. (What do you call it is English? Magic carpet?) I’m hoping the path leading through the pasture is kept up, as I can see many afternoons of Annie and I climbing up and sliding down, and climbing up and sliding down. Repeat until one of us loses the feeling in our toes or bum.
I do miss the views of the ocean, but the mountains are a close substitute in terms of beauty. For all of our personal trials, it is hard not to feel blessed to live in this part of the world. Maybe not forever, but I’m enjoying it while we are here.