ten minutes to myself

it's the little things

This morning when Madeline pressed "0" on the elevator panel (it's the kind where a person has to select the floor they want to go to instead of pressing the arrows for up and down), instead of telling us to wait by elevators A, B, C, or D, the output screen showed the much-feared "XX". It meant that the system was down. Again. 

We live on the fifteenth floor, so taking the stairs to the ground floor is a reasonable undertaking and preferable to missing the bus to school, so the three of us headed to the stairwell to begin our descent. Madeline's fast on the stairs, and as I watched her figure round the flights well ahead of me and her little sister, it occurred to me that she was also carrying a backpack full of twenty pounds of stuff with her. 

The schools on the Dharma compound are running out of classroom space (just as the compound has run out of housing for families like mine), so fifth grade has been moved to the middle school and currently housed in an office building that was vacant and available. The students have to carry their backpacks everywhere with them. Madeline's has her lunch, water bottle, a large binder, a crazy amount of school supplies, and anywhere between 4 - 8 notebooks of various sizes. 

A few weeks back, I asked her what she was looking forward to about sixth grade. Her response came fast: "A locker!"

armchair realtors

For two people who've been living in rental accommodations for most of the last decade and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, Chris and I spend a lot of time looking at real estate listings. It used to be something we'd do to keep in touch with the home prices in our neighbourhood of Acadia in southeast Calgary, but now we're looking for a place to unload all of the furniture and artwork that we couldn't bring with us to Saudi Arabia. It's not necessarily logical, but it hurt me to leave those things behind; the Vietnamese lacquer painting of the little boy and a water buffalo, the pink dollhouse bookcase, and oh my goodness, all those books.

The solution that Chris came up with sometime last summer, when I was pretty heartbroken about having to leave things behind and live in furnished accommodation, was something along the lines of, "We'll buy a condo in Edmonton and you can spend the entire summer every year surrounded by our familiar stuff!" and it sounded fantastic. Edmonton's my hometown, it's where my mom still lives, and my head began to fill with images of spending July and August in a condo by the University of Alberta. My kids would ride their scooters along the pathways on campus on their way to STEM-centric girl-empowerment summer camps, and on Saturdays we could saunter down to Old Strathcona to buy veggies at the farmer's market. This scenario kept me going for many, many weeks. I figured that I could manage to live in an isolated apartment in a country where I don't have freedom of movement for ten months if I could pop back into my Canada Life for the other two. 

This bubble burst just after Halloween, if I remember correctly. Canadian Non-Residents technically can own property in Canada, confirmed our non-resident tax advisor, but we'd have to be able to convince the Revenue Canada folks that Edmonton is actually a vacation hot-spot akin to  Ontario cottage country or Whistler or else be potentially subject to tax penalties. So ... scratch that idea.  If we step foot in Edmonton during the school summer holidays, it will once again involve exceeding the recommended occupancy limit of my mom's house. 

Thus, Chris and I have to look elsewhere for our home-away-from-home-away-from-home, and he was interested in hearing what spot outside of Canada's borders I'd be content to spend pretty much every summer and winter holiday. It wasn't hard at all to suggest London. We've spend a lot of time there, I can speak the language, and the public transportation is awesome. I had to stop championing the London vacation home concept when it became clear from my real estate searches that flat prices weren't dropping at the same speed as the kilometres outside of the city centre were increasing. Sigh.

The second-most popular location for Chris's real estate searches is Edmonton. The very same Edmonton mentioned and dismissed a couple of paragraphs ago. His reasoning is that the company he works for here has gone a bit overboard hiring ex-pats and just might decide to send them all home, so we might as well continue checking out what kinds of homes are on the market. (He found a cute one with a mudroom (!) last night).

The MLS listings that Chris peruses the most are for Austin, Texas. He spent a week there last fall, and became quite infatuated with the place. We're now thinking of spending our winter holidays there to see if maybe the kids and I can also fall a little in love with Austin. It's funny - Texas is one of those places I've said that I'm not really interested seeing. I said that about Asia. I said that about the Middle East. It's a good thing that I don't really mind being proven wrong. 

little miss cheerful

It's been brought to my attention by a handful of the very lovely ladies who live in my building that for a newcomer to Saudi Arabia, I seem way too upbeat about living here. I have to admit that I'm not sure how to react to that accusation, so I usually shrug and say, "Well, this isn't the hardest place that I've lived." 

I am guilty of declaring that my abaya is awesome after realizing that I don't have to dress up at all to go out (sidenote: you might have to come here to understand why; I'm not slovenly, I promise). I think that it's cool that my kids can choose any fancy beverage from a restaurant menu to have with their lunch instead of having to hunt for the non-alcoholic offerings. I am quite happy to read a book while in rush hour traffic rather than navigate through it. 

My family is in a minority here because this isn't our first overseas assignment. We are also unique because we've repatriated once and then moved across the ocean again (albeit a different ocean). I know to expect that many of my frustrations about KSA won't go away, but that I'm going to find that many of the things that I love are going to outweigh them. And I know not to idealize life in my home country (thank you very much, repatriation reality-check). That last point is probably the hardest thing to let go of. 

When we first left Canada and moved to Thailand, I know that it took me months - at least nine - before I emerged from my deep funk enough to even realize that I had been in one. Maybe this is why I don't know what to say when my friends and acquaintances tell me that I seem bizarrely happy with life here; I could be fooling everyone right now without the self-awareness to realize it!

i think we all learned something

Shortly after we arrived in the kingdom, we noticed that one of the swimming pools on the compound appeared to have a pair of colourful water slides, and Chris took Sadie there yesterday to test them out.

 

Their afternoon at the pool got off to a bit of a rough start. You see, one of the main themes here in the kingdom is gender segregation. On the compound, people have more degrees of  freedom to mingle according to their comfort level, but apparently there is no lee-way for the change rooms at the pool - even for small children. If Sadie wanted to swim, she had go in the main entrance to the female change room by herself, shimmy into her swim clothes, pick up her street clothes, and find the door that led to the pool area. All this on her own, and she can't read signs yet. 

 

She gave it a great try. Sadie did change and carry all of her street clothes. Chris didn't find her waiting beside the pool after he'd gotten ready; instead, he backtracked through the recreation building and found his very upset child outside of the main entrance to the female change room. I joined them awhile later and found both of my favourite people floating in the pool, so Sadie must have been persuaded to go back into the female change room and try again to find the exit to the pool area, and it turned out that the second time was the charm. 

 

In retrospect, we should have thought to have her wear her swim apparel under her dress :)

every canadian needs an emergency bottle of maple syrup, right?

So, yesterday we had just walked into our apartment after school when Madeline announced, "So, that international luncheon at school that I mentioned a few weeks ago? It's actually tomorrow and they only told us today. Can you make some of those yummy things?"

The "yummy things" that she was referring to were tarte au sucre bars, which I'd attempted for the first time ever a couple of weeks ago for a cultural event put on by our building's residents' association. (They didn't entirely turn out - my crust was too thin and my butter was probably cubed too coarsely). 

I had none of the ingredients on hand. Cue disappointed expression on my ten year-old. 

What Canadian-esque consumable did I have in our kitchen cupboards? "I have a bottle of maple syrup!" I told Madeline. 

Today, my kid hopped on the school bus with a bottle of maple syrup in her backpack, and plate of pancakes in her arms. 

how to weekend

When we first arrived in KSA, weekends were my least favourite days of the week. Our family had to choose between these three not-necessarily-appealing options: long bus ride into the compound followed by a long walk in the heat, bus ride to a shopping mall where we spend more time locating shops and restaurants than we spend actually visiting shops, or staying in our small apartment where it is likely that the tv and radio will be on in the same room simultaneously and the three people that I live with will be getting on each other's nerves by doing largely age-appropriate things. This still happens sometimes, but it's getting better. 

We have a bit of a routine now. This past Friday, as usual, we went to one of the large grocery stores. We've been to Danube twice and I am still a bit confused by the layout (it's a large retail space and suffers from sprawl, alas).  I am happy to stop off at the small grocery store on the compound during the week to pick up small items to bring back on the bus, but it's nicer to go on Fridays in a car to bring home large and bulky items like cases of drinking water. Sidenote: Danube has an incredible number of varieties of Cheerios, but none of them happen to be the plain old ones in the yellow box. Weird.

For the second time ever, we went out to dinner. And by "out to dinner", I mean eating someplace that is neither our apartment (obviously) or one of the dining options on the Dharma compound. We went to the Steak House in Al Khobar, and had a lovely time sitting in a real restaurant eating nachos (that looked nothing like the picture in the menu), burgers, and sandwiches. 

Both the grocery store and the restaurant are public spaces, so I wore my abaya while we were out, and it occurred me that it was kind of awesome because I spent the entire weekend wearing yoga pants and a tee instead of having to change when we went out. 

We've headed out to the malls for the past two Saturdays. This past Saturday was good because Chris found what he was looking for, I found what I was looking for (stationary supplies!), we took the kids to the amusement park that is the top level of Rashid Mall, and we managed to order our lunch shawarmas before the food court restaurants closed for mid-day prayers. Same thing last week, except that our shopping mission was to check out the newly-opened Old Navy at the Mall of Dhahran to score some warmer-weather clothes for M. 

It always feels good to feel like you've finally figured something out. 

two monthiversary

Of course it feels like we've lived in sandy Al Khobar longer, but it's only officially two months. Amount that I miss living in Calgary? About zero percent.

Things that I like about living here:

• Mint lemonade and shawarma
• My kindergartener is in class for more than 12 hours/week!
• Unlocked contract-less less expensive mobile phone!
• There's a library. I think that it's a little smaller than the Fish Creek branch that we borrowed from in Calgary, but they have a fantastic selection of magazines and I've made a lot of good finds there!
• I can get on a plane and fly for six hours and land in one of several foreign countries (instead of just the United States - or frankly, I could still be in Canada)
• I get to wear my favourite combination of jeans, hoodies, and sweaters all year long because here, modesty trumps dressing sensibly for the weather :)
• This store that we went into to buy a few small gifts at, and walked out having bought a cute little corner desk. I miss having the lovely carpets and decor items that we bought in Bangkok and Saigon with us here, but I think that I could happily decorate my entire apartment from Desert Designs.

 Things that could use improvement

• Transportation! A couple of my friends here keep small cars parked in the compound (where it's not actually illegal for women in Saudi Arabia to use their foreign driver's licenses) , and I am quite envious because they can pick their kids up from the elementary school and then drive to the middle school and pick up the other kids and then cruise onwards to the big park after school. If I tried to do that, I'd end up arriving at the elementary school thirty minutes early, and then after I'd collected Sadie from kindergarten, I'd have to wait two hours for a bus to come to take us to the middle school to pick up Madeline, and we wouldn't get home in time to do homework, let alone visit a park! Nothing about that is practical.
• Similarly, location. Life here would probbably be more varied for my family if we lived on the compound and our kids could participate in after-school activities and schedule playdates with their friends.
• Our apartment is one bedroom smaller than promised, and the kitchen is a window-less ugly brown rectangle with a poor layout. Also, my stove is not level! Weird.
• The weather is already approaching intolerable levels of hot (for me), and it's only the beginning of April.
• The women's gyms here have exactly zero squat racks, zero kettle bells, and bar at the bench press station is frequently AWOL. 
• The ban on changing rooms in clothing stores keeps me from supporting that particular part of the retail sector.
• Sandstorms aren't fun. Sand somehow gets onto all the surfaces in my apartment, and now I'm kind of panicky that my kids will get stranded at school or on the school buses during one. 
• No chai lattes at Starbucks. This is criminal ...
• My apartment building does not have enough elevators to deal with the school rush-hour that happens twice every weekday, and dealing with the school rush isn't particularly great for my nerves. 
• To be filed under School, Transportation, and Location: My kids have to be up int he morning by 6 am to catch their bus at 6:35. They don't get home until between 3:30 - 3:45 in the afternoon. Madeline has said that she "doesn't have time to have fun anymore" because the hours in-between that and bedtime are taken up completely with homework and dinner. I feel really sad about that. 

Things that have surprised me:

• The weather was quite mild when we arrived in February; it was chilly enough to actually need to wear a sweater and long pants
• Don't really miss eating bacon, ham, or any sort of dish with pork, actually, though sometimes I wish that I had a meat to add to the dinner rotation besides beef and chicken.
• Most of the things that I believed about life in Saudi Arabia - as reported by the western media - have to be taken with a grain of salt. Just a few days ago I read an article from the UK that stated something to the nature of, "of course, women in Saudi Arabia can't leave their homes without their male guardian" and I had to close my browser immediately. There'd be a lot of unemployed taxi drivers here if that was actually true.

What's upcoming for Month Three and beyond? We're supposed to be moving into our permanent housing (which won't be on the compound, ugh). Our sea shipment from Calgary should arrive and clear customs, so there will hopefully be a happy reunion with our bedroom and living room furniture. And figuring out where we'll travel for a long weekend in June - Chris's latest suggestion is a resort outside of Abu Dhabi to check out the sand dunes, and I'm already imagining the photos that I'd be able to take.

how to do it all wrong

Today, we bought a desk. This is a good thing (albeit an impulse purchase) because our air shipment from Calgary is supposed to be delivered on Tuesday, and there's a dearly-missed computer and printer in it. There is nothing in recent memory that I've looked forward to more than the arrival of the air shipment. It's about 6-7 weeks late, which is far too long to be living out of suitcase. I really would like to be reunited with my clothes. And my kids would like their books and toys. And that computer is anticipated by all. 

Moving here, if I'm quite honest, has been an awful experience, at least in terms of actual logistics.

1. Our relocation advisor neglected to request the moving company that they use in Calgary to get in touch with us to schedule the pack-out, until about two weeks before our scheduled December 29th departure. There was no way to make this happen on time - over the Christmas/New Years break, so the flights were rescheduled for me and the kids, Chris went off to KSA alone, and I was left to deal with the moving company alone. 
2. The moving company. When we moved to SE Asia, the company that packed and shipped our household goods was the MI Group, and they were fantastic. This company, not so much. A few days prior to pack-out, I sent our assigned moving coordinator an email just to check that they had silica gel packets ready amongst the packing material because our belongings would be in long-term storage for a long time due to relatively new policy by the Dharma Initiative company the Chris works for. The guy first wrote back that he's never heard of moving companies using them (despite my personal experience with two), and "they actually cause damage". But he'd look into it for me, and check on the storage conditions here in KSA, but he never actually did do that. Also, this company didn't give us some paperwork that would become crucial later in the story.
3. So, Chris landed at the Dammam airport at the end of December, was met by a company representative as expected, and discovered that no actual arrangements for our housing had been made, which is not how the situation was advertised. This was straightened out a day later, but it absolutely shouldn't have happened, and we're thankful that our children didn't have to experience the big hunt for a place to spend the night in the wee hours of the morning right after they would have walked off of a transatlantic flight.
4. A "welcome package" containing pantry basics, dishes, cutlery, and pots and pans was supposed to be delivered ASAP to new arrivals. I think that it actually took about ten days, so Chris ate a lot of take-out with no proper utensils for a good while. 
5. Meanwhile, back in Calgary, I had to reduce the amount of stuff that we shipped by about half, so that meant putting a lot of furniture into storage and donating away an insane amount of books, and clothes. I was shocked to realized that I'd reduced my wardrobe by half, but it's the books that I will miss the most. Though, we put all of our bookcases into storage, so I wouldn't have had anywhere to put them here, anyways. But it's not really missing stuff that I'm still frustrated about - it was the sheer amount of work this was. I was solo-parenting, and didn't really spend any time with my kids for a whole month because I had to organize every single thing that we owned into the toss/donate/keep categories, and it was a giant undertaking. I felt awful. I should have been helping my six year old practice her articulation stuff, her literacy stuff, and such. Instead I let her watch My Little Pony on Netflix because I had to pack my car with goods to take to the hazardous waste depot. 
6. We did arrive in KSA at the beginning of February. About a week past when we thought that our air shipment should have arrived (within fourteen days per company policy), we discover that it and the sea shipment are still hanging out in Calgary, because there were a few forms that we needed to submit that we were not given before departing Calgary. I think that Chris was actually more livid than I was, but I still spent the better part of a day and night filling out the longest one. It honestly took that long. 
7. More form fun: "Please provide receipts and authenticity certificates for artwork valued over $2500, for insurance purposes." We did this. New memo to us. "We no longer insure artwork." Head desk.

But the air shipment is in the kingdom now, and I assume that the sea shipment is floating along somewhere. New desk arrives in the next day or two, and I am really looking forward to our lives here feeling less temporary :)

 

route talk

This is my sixth week living in Saudi Arabia (and it's actually raining here today, in the desert, which amuses me greatly), and one of the things that I've been doing a lot of is riding on buses. Obviously. 

For the most part, I like this aspect of life here. I get to sit and knit or read or chat with the other ladies while someone else deals with the predictably unpredictable traffic. The buses are unfailingly clean. They play music I like over the speaker. Some even have wi-fi (and it's much faster than in our apartment, so a wi-fi bus is the best place to download podcasts).

This is my sixth week here, and two problems with the buses have become apparent.

1 - The buses aren't quite frequent enough. My kids go to school on a private compound, and I had a meeting with Sadie's teacher after school last Tuesday to discuss how she's been doing and what to expect for the rest of her year in kindergarten. To get to her school by the appointment time of 3:15 pm, I had to leave my apartment at 1:50 pm, and then wait around the school office for about 45 minutes, because there no later bus that would work. Then, my kid and I had to wait around her deserted school for about an hour, so that we could catch the 5 pm bus back to our home. We walked in our door at about 5:50 pm. One bus every half-hour would go a long way to make life off-compound a lot smoother. A meeting with a teacher shouldn't be a four-hour undertaking, you know? 

2 - The buses don't follow the route they're supposed to. It's maddening! I've taken it to the compound (which is oddly like the Dharma Initiative from Lost, but that's a story for another day) in the evening, and it's skipped going past the middle school because no one was getting off there, but what if there were people needing to be picked up? This past weekend, the four of us were taking the bus to get lunch at the Mexican restaurant by the golf course, and from prior trips, I knew that the golf course should appear out the left window. Except it didn't. We got off the bus at a completely unfamiliar place which turned out to be on the wrong side of the golf course, and 5 km away from the restaurant. So,  we all got our cardio in that day, and I also got a pretty bad sunburn on my lower neck! Last night, I pulled out the "official" map of the bus route, and discovered that on Saturday, it drove up the completely wrong road! Yes, the golf course should have been on the left after all ...

well, we all have to eat

So, for the last month, I've been living in one of those places where I find myself stepping into the grocery store on a daily basis. While I'll admit that I was compelled to do this in Bangkok due the fear of a twenty-four hour power outage and a fridge of spoiled food, in Saigon and here, I'm mainly doing it to keep on top of the restocking. For example, today I discovered that there was a shipment of chocolate chips in flavours other than semi-sweet: peanut butter, cinnamon, dark, toffee chunk, and dark. None of this was on the shelf yesterday. I happily bought two packages of the dark chocolate chips, even if they were about eight dollar each. Might as well eat the healthier version, you know? 

This discovery was unexpected. I was on a mission to find something bacon-like - because I live in a place where there is exactly no actual bacon allowed - for a potato hash I'm planning for tonight's dinner. But alas, there was no cured beef, or even that turkey bacon stuff at the grocery store. I'm actually contemplating stealing some of the corn nuts that Chris brought home last night to be the salty component of the dish. It's not the first time that I've had to be creative with ingredient substitutions, and probably not the last time that I'm going to end of regretting my choices :) 

(Btw, this is what I use as a guideline for making potato hash - some cool info there!)

so, we're still in calgary

Not supposed to be.

We had tickets to fly out on December 29th, but the company who is moving us failed to notify the actual moving company until it was too late to actually schedule our pack-out. So now we're out of here during the first week of February.

Moving prep is really frustrating. I am not sure why this company bothers to offer a household goods shipping allowance when we've had to donate, dispose of, or put into long-term storage over half of our belongings. On Wednesday the local movers are back to pick up our sofa, computer desk, bookshelves, patio furniture, and our kitchen table and chairs. They'll go into storage and we'll get to enjoy two weeks of indoor picnics for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 

One of my nightmares is that the international mover will finish loading our remaining belongings and then tell us, "Your container is only half-full!" 

I know that that our stuff is only ... well, stuff, but I am kind of attached to it and can't help but think that settling into a new foreign country would be a little smoother when surrounded by the things that have made our home our home for many years now. 

Speaking of our home (and since this is a ranty post), it's not quite as described at Chris's job interview and subsequent offer letter. The three-bedroom house on a secure housing compound with a school, library, movie theatre, and grocery store has been swapped out in favour of a two-bedroom apartment in town.  At this point in the game, the only response is ... of course. 

 

 

 

and one project's done ...

This ... is actually not bad at all. I wish I'd done nicer job on the binding on the hem, and I used a completely different tutorial (this one) for the neck binding instead of the official Riley's Nightgown instructions, but Madeline really likes it.

i'm sewing again! twice in one year!

One item that I added to my pre-move lists today was sending my sewing machine in for a tune-up. I am not sure that it's had one since I inherited it from my mom! It's more a preventative thing; my very basic 1977 Bernina 707 Minimatic is running fine (except that the on/off switch no longer works; thankfully it defaults to "on"). 

My sewing project is an experimental nightgown for Madeline. We used to be able to find very soft all-cotton ones in Bangkok at Lottie & Max, but we haven't lived there since 2010! Here in Canada, my kids have a choice of often-scratchy synthetic pajamas, no matter where we shop. So, I found this really cute raglan-sleeve pattern online and am using it with some of the cotton knit that I bought at the Than Dinh (if I remember the name correctly) market in Saigon.

So, I've mentioned above that my sewing machine is getting vintage, and that I'm actually in the midst of a sewing project. What else should I find when I check out my feed reader this morning and see a post titled "Is it worth it to buy an expensive sewing machine?" over at one my favourite sewing blogs? It was like the universe was telling me that I need to upgrade and make many more raglan-sleeve nightgowns filled with machine appliques and automatic buttonholes!

The post did make me doubt my loyalty to the little Bernina that has been in my life forever for a moment, but even if I do buy a new machine someday, I'll probably hang on to the Bernina. It's the machine that most of my clothes were made on until I was probably eight years old. It's the machine that made all of the outfits for my Cabbage Patch dolls. And it's small and portable, so I can plunk it down on a table to get to work right away, no matter where in the world I am!

life in point form

I've come down with a case of list-itis again, undoubtedly brought on by having our passports out for visa approval. It's the final contingency to clear before our one-way flights are booked and our pack-out is scheduled. We won't get much warning; maybe six weeks after our visas are granted if we're lucky, though I feel like we need to prepare for only three or four. 

Hence, the to-do list (in progress):

• figure out our tax issues around non-residency
• sell our house
• sell our car (maybe)
• notify the schools, home security company, my gym, my mobile phone provider
• buy suitcases or boxes for the stuff we'll take on the plane
• close-out our safety deposit boxes at the bank
• find a storage facility for the stuff we're leaving in Canada
• paint the basement 
• take the e-waste and hazardous waste items to their proper disposal facilities
• schedule tuberculosis tests for the kids
• give away a bunch of stuff???
• set up bank account at HSBC

The to-buy list:

• back-to-school clothes for a summery climate (this mainly affects our oldest kid)
• everyday dishes
• back-to-school supplies for the next school
• new mattress for us

The packing lists (details to follow)

• suitcase stuff 
• air shipment stuff
• sea shipment stuff
• store-in-Canada stuff

There's a lot of stuff that we won't know for sure until we're in the company housing. Our new home may be wired for 110V electricity but it might be 220V. We'll take our 110V stuff and our heavy transformers, and I won't dwell on the fact that I gave away an awesome 220V food processor/blender only eighteen short months ago. We might be in a place with temporary furniture, or we may have permanent stuff and then most of our shipment will go into storage until we are able to move into different company housing. 

I'm supporting this overseas move because the big picture is that we'll have a better quality of life than we do here in Calgary, but the short term is looking pretty crazy.

interview with sadie - six years, thirteen days

 

What's your favourite colour? - "I got lots of favourite colours. I only don't like brown. Brown is my worst colour ever."

What is your favourite book to read?  - Nancy Drew & the Clue Crew

Do you gave a favourite tv program? - My Little Pony

What do you want to be when you grow-up? -  "I don't really know yet."

What is your favourite thing to eat? - Hot dogs

What is your favourite thing to do at school? - Go to gym or go to the playground.

things i have to say about knitting

1. My kids are interested in knitting themselves, but more so on whatever project that I'm working on rather than a project of their own. I've lost more than a few stitches due to passing my WIP to Madeline, so I'm not keen on having her work on whatever lacey pattern I currently have on my needles. She knit a fair amount of the crazy-long garter-stitch scarf that I made for Chris, and she's made a cute little cozy for her eReader, and that was a good project for introducing her to some increase and decrease stitches. Now that the scarf is finished, she's working on a mobius capelet with some very soft bulky-weight yarn.  My six year-old is just not allowed to touch my knitting stuff, period - I just don't have a plan for teaching her yet. When Sadie talks about what she wants to knit, it's always stuff like three-dimensional stuffed animals and I am so not there myself! I'm not sure that she's going to be hooked on knitting by knitting swatches, you know? 

2. Ravelry has been around for awhile now, and I am still not sure whether it's a blessing or a curse. I am definitely the type of person who will use whatever tools that I have access to research anything that I'm interested in to death. This means that when I decided that it was time to knit myself a new winter hat, I looked at over a hundred pages of patterns before finally giving up and just picking one. Too much choice is a bad thing - at least, for me. On the other hand, it's great to be able to look up a yarn that I'm clueless how to best use, and see what other knitters have successfully used it for. And to see what a scarf that I am smitten with is usually knit out of. 

3. I've spent far too many hours since last Saturday comparing photos of finished scarfs in three different shades of grey yarn. The worst part is that one of these yarns is totally discontinued, which makes my crush on it even more ridiculous. None of them are stocked at my local LYS, and are out-of-stock at the Canadian online retailers that I've been able to find. My fingers are crossed that I'll find something else in a similarly lovely shade of silver-grey so that I'm not tempted to order from the USA  ... 

what i did in kindergarten

One of the new nightly traditions around here for my six year-old is the "let me tell you what I did at kindergarten today". Sadie snuggles down into her bed with a stuffed animal (usually a bunny, more recently a pony) and Boo, and usually leads off with, "You know what we do all the time so I don't need to tell you!" to cover the part of her morning that includes hanging up her coat and backpack, changing into her inside sneakers, and finding a spot on the rug in her classroom. And then I hear about what her class might have played in the gym, what letter of the alphabet they're working on, who logged some minutes in the "time-out chair" and whether or not it was a day that they met with the fabulous music teacher. 

And sometimes Sadie asks me what I did when I was in kindergarten.

I think that my kindergarten teacher was pretty fresh out of university, and that sometimes her boyfriend would join our class to play guitar while we sang.

I don't remember much about what I learned about numeracy in kindergarten, but I do recall going through worksheets to practice uppercase and lowercase letters. Neat penmanship earned a sticker, and one of my goals was to end the year with more of these stickers than my friend Eric (I don't think that I did).

There was a sticker chart on the wall, and I know that I had a gold star stuck on it when I learned how to tie my own sneakers (velcro wasn't yet an option!). I'm pretty sure that only reason why I was mastering shoelace tying was to get that gold start and keep up with my classmates. 

My classroom had a sand table, a water table, a nicely-sized "house" with the usual kitchen stuff, table, and doll cradle inside it. There was book nook with a carpet, and the tiny little tables and chairs, of course.

I wanted to wear dresses everyday (obviously, I hadn't yet had the experience about walking across the massive school field in -25C weather!), but I think that I only had two dresses (one yellow with tiny white dots, the other a rose-coloured floral with ruffles), so my mom made me alternate those with pairs of polyester pants in red, blue, and possibly green. When it was cold outside, I wore tights with a small diamond pattern underneath them. I'm not sure how much of my kindergarten waredrobe was bought at a store beyond those polyester pants - I do know that my mom made my dresses and a lot of blouses. My school shoes were brown t-straps like these, which I didn't even consider fashionable in 1980.

I wore a homemade princess costume for Halloween. I think that my crown was cardboard covered with aluminum foil, and my cape was a lovely organza printed with flowers! We also sang a song about yellow pumpkins, and my teacher had hid little tissue ghosts all around the classroom. I was especially good at finding them!

I don't recall how many field trips my class went on, but I know that there was one that was to see a performance, possibly a play or opera version of Cinderella, and we got to go backstage at the theatre and see a dressing room. And there was one that was to a warehouse or factory full of stuffed animals, which kind of blows my mind now, because what were all of those stuffed animals doing in Edmonton? Was it possible that all toys weren't made in China in the 1980's???

 

if you're bored and need something to read ....

 

3 Things Little Girls Need from their Fathers - this article reads very much "of the time" to me right now, but also timeless. This things have always been true.  To summarise

1. Respect her body and its capacities
2. She needs to feel close to you throughout your lives together
3. She needs you as a role model for how she should be treated by boys and men

Being Left Out Hurts - the title gives the topic of the article away, but it also includes one of things that infurates me the most (adult women acting like their still in junior high school) and something that I am really supportive of (advocasy for children). 

Learning to Love Criticism - my husband saw this open in a tab in my web browser, and hassled me some over the title, but this article caught my attention because the first paragraph stated that 74% of negative feedback given to women contains a personal attack, while only 2% does for men. This gender imbalance is truly abhorrant.

update on that moving thing

I'll admit that over the summer, I got a little bit wrapped up in the small details of our prospective overseas move. We received some less-than-positive information about a housing shortage, and I became rather obsessed with it.

Some of my concerns are still on-going . Like, the housing that we may be assigned to isn't very family friendly - no outdoor space for the kids to ride their scooters, create murals with sidewalk chalk, work on their frisbee skills. Not enough bedrooms. Too far away from the compound for after-school playdates to be do-able. I've learned that others concerns are going to actually work out fine, like how the kids will stay for lunch instead of coming home, which makes more sense considering their one-hour lunch break and the 50-minute round-trip travel-time. 

I went to an orientation session with the company last week, and it was all about the big picture, and it was a good reminder. More family time, because there's no overtime. Chris will get on the bus to come home at 4 pm every workday. Timely and quality healthcare (did I mention that one of my kids is waiting nine months to see a dermatologist here in Calgary?). A school that is rich in resources and extracurricular activities, small classes, and modest dress codes. Life in a small community. Excellent access to travel. My list of destinations is long: Turkey, Egypt, Oman, Jordan, South Africa ... 

As I sat listening to my orientation leader and keeping an eye on the slides, it occured to me what this opportunity has to offer intersects pretty nicely with the things that I came to appreciate about living overseas before. And I strangely miss it. 

let them eat cake (and plastic and artificial dye and excessive sugar and …)

Despite the fact that I am regularly reminded that I haven't baked a loaf of banana bread in forever*, I really do like baking. That's well-documented in my blogging, too.

I look forward to birthday baking in particular, but I think that for Sadie's sixth birthday, the right thing to do is leave my cake pans in the cupboard. You see, she loves accompanying me on grocery-shopping trips to the Co-op. Her singular purpose is to run to the bakery section and gaze longingly at all of the decorated cakes in their display window. There are princess cakes, of course. There's a cake with cars. A cake with Dora the Explorer.

I remember the attraction of bakery display cases. I loved it when I was staying with my grandparents when I was little and we'd walk over to the B&A Bakery in Edmonton. The bakery smelled like sugar and yeast, and they'd always have a gigantic sheet cake with piped icing in the case to celebration one occasion or other, and multi-tiered wedding cake or two, usually with a fabulous (and now, heteronormative) topper. If you had asked six-year-old-me, I am sure that I would have said those cakes were more special than anything homemade. 

So Sadie's been picking out prospective birthday cakes for the last nine months, and I guess that her birthday is the day to make one of her wishes to come true.

I will admit that I have thought of baking and frosting a cake from scratch and popping a bunch of little figurines on top, it's not the right thing to do Firstly, the little sets of Frozen figurines are going for $40 in these parts, and secondly, I spent many a birthday celebrating with my mom's favourite kind of cake (World Class Chocolate ice cream cake from Baskin Robins) instead of my favourite kind of cake (I think that it was flan when I was a dairy-sensitive adolescent), and I still think that wasn't very cool.  Having the birthday person pick their cake is the way to go in the twenty-first century, yes?

* My husband ought to be thanking me for that five pounds of banana bread-weight that he isn't sporting, right?

random summer stuff

1.  Back-to-school clothes shopping is much better now that my kid has been out of school uniforms for a year. Last year is brutal (and we have a pile of unworn skinny coloured denim to show for it) and this year it's all "Let's look for a jean jacket!" and "This is the kind of sweater that I like!"
2. Gardening. I'm not sure exactly how worthwhile a pursuit this actually is. Calgary's growing season is short, and it's been a warm summer and my astrilbes and hostas will probably shrivel up and die if I go away on a holiday and diverge from my pattern of daily watering.
3. I will die quite happy if I never have to make another service call. I tend to pick businesses who do not return calls or even show up for appointments. It's been frustrating to arrange for an HVAC check-up and a window replacement. 
4. My child is starting at a middle school in September, and it's now August and I haven't exactly received any sort of documentation to let me know that her registration successfully transfered there from her elementary school. I'd love a school supply list and some sort of guidence about what the first day procedure is.

dumb reasons indeed

A heavy package from FedEx arrived a few days ago. Sadly, it didn't contain the early birthday presents that my five year-old was hoping for. The contents inside were from the company that Chris has a job offer with; there's probably a dozen forms due back at different times. There are several more boxes that Chris needs to have checked before we're moving for sure, and thankfully, I've been minimally involved with the paperwork. 

Last week, I posted that I only had a dumb reason for not moving overseas with this opportunity. This week, I kind of feel that I only have an dumb reason for actually going: family vacations in cool places. 

Yeah. That's it. The only thing left that seems positive (from my point of view, of course) is traveling to places like Turkey and Jordan and Cape Town with Chris and our kids. I'm not sure what else there is to look forward to?

Initially, we thought that all company housing was in compounds, which sounded good (and maybe more than good - these ones are like small towns with grocery stores, bowling alleys, movie theatres ...). I've lived in a large compound before and it was awesometo have a safe place for the kids to play outside and ride their bikes, live near the school, and it was easy to make new friends in that sort of environment, too. I met other people just by being out and about. It sounds like the community atmosphere that Chris was told about during his interview. We've now learned that compound housing is incredibly scarce and we're more likely to be placed in another town in a furnished apartment, and that just seems a lot more ... isolating (this housing situation would have been isolating in the other places I've lived, too). So, this is something that I have to remove from my "postives about moving" list for the time being while "apartment in another town" goes onto the negative side, and it makes me feel rather blue to see that "awesome family vacations" is all alone. 

There should be more here, shouldn't there?

for the young foodie in your life

The first time that we lived in Calgary was in 2000, and one of our big discoveries was the Cookbook Company Cooks. Chris and I surely bought a lot of exotic salsas and jars of colourful salts there, but most of my memories of the Cookbook Co. are of taking cooking classes in the basement. It was a lot of fun when I started out (I remember volunteering to peel all the potatoes over the six week series if my cooking partner Raj would chop all the onions), but after four or so years, the foodie culture in Calgary had changed the demographics of the class and I wasn't enjoying them as much. We'd had a good run, though.

 Now we're here for Calgary: The Sequel, and we've enrolled Madeline in a week-long day camp at the Cookbook Co. Despite having to drive across the city twice a day, Chris and I kind of wish that we were thirty years younger because it's a pretty awesome day camp and we're totally missing out.

Madeline's made soups and salads and Mexican dishes and pasta dough for ravioli, and she's even eaten carmelized onions and stuffed mushrooms, but the really cool thing about her camp is the field trips. The campers have gone to Modern Jelly Doughnuts, Cibo, Janice Beaton Fine Cheese, the Brulee Patisserie, and Village Ice Cream. Madeline day is always better than ours!

 

isn't summer supposed to be lazy?

On paper, this week looks pretty good in terms of free time for me, because both of my kids are in day camps. In practice, it's kind of crazy, because one kid gets dropped off at nine, one kid gets dropped off at ten, and then I do pick-ups at noon and three. Working in travel time, the net result is that I'm home for a period no longer than two hours. This isn't exactly the best week for me to undertake a big project like un-wallpapering the tv room in the basement or deep clean the closets. 

The camps, however, are being thoroughly enjoyed by the kids. 

I do have enough time between chauffeur stints to contemplate our big decision for the month - whether to move again later this year or stay here in Calgary for another 12-24 months. I have reasons for not wanting to move again right now - we just moved into our current home about six months ago. I'm very fond of it - we renovated much of this place and the gorgeous and functional lockers and cupboards in the mudroom? They weren't there before; we put them in for us. The double sinks and separate shower in the main floor bath? Again, we put that in especially for our family. I might even cry a little when I think of abandoning the kitchen because I love the tile and the dishwasher and the big apron front sink. 

It doesn't make much sense to be that attached to material objects, and in the big scheme of things, this house doesn't rank that highly, anyways. I think that it's just affecting me so because we just moved in a few months ago and our personal investment still feels high. 

There are some compelling arguments for moving overseas again. The school that me kids would attend does not have the sort of budgetary issues that the schools in Calgary have, so more specials, full-day kindergarten, smaller class sizes. International schools take cool field trips to places like China, instead of less-cool field trips to the Spyhill Landfill (as Madeline did with her fourth grade class). The location is rather ideal for future family vacations in Europe, Africa, and Asia, which is probably the most exciting element for me. And based on our previous time overseas, our lives were a little less rushed, and it would be lovely to have more downtime together again.

It's weird, but this decision feels like has more variables to consider than it did when we voted affirmative for Thailand back in 2007. 

Whatever we decide, that ugly wallpaper in the basement still needs to be taken down, so we'll be rather busy no matter what we decide to do :)

another status update

And the costume is very nearly done.

The tulle skirt was finished up first - I followed the instructions from this tutorial and this tutorial and the biggest ordeal of the project was actually working with the tulle. Sadie's skirt has six layers, and I cut them out separately so that the sizing would be truer. This was fine, but then lining up all the layers of tulle to baste them together was a tricky matter because the fabric was both a little bit slippery and a little bit static-y. But they sewed together fine (plus a cotton layer for lining) and attaching the wide elastic went exactly to plan. I copied the circle skirt tutorial and downloaded the circle skirt pattern template from the Scientific Seamstress and it was extremely helpful. I needed to the entire pattern to make a tea-length skirt for my average-height five year-old.

The next part I worked on was the sparkly bodice overlay. I'd changed my plan for this part at least four times. I've actually sewn two. The first one was a simple tube that I'd drafted using one of Sadie's tees; it looked really good but when I thought about it, it was kind of a pain for her to shimmy into. I thought about sewing a panel of the bodice fabric directly onto the leotard, but the obvious problem with that scenario was that my fabric wasn't stretchy and the leotard obviously was. I googled and Pinterested and found a new tutorial that had a good solution. It's basically sewing a rectangle and thus, really easy. I have never seen this Wonder Under product, so I used Steam-a-Seam 2 for fusing the cotton lining.  I added a  bit of length to Sadie's in order to ensure the elastic on the tulle skirt was fully covered, and only put elastic part-way down the back to accomodate her bottom. 

 

In the meantime, her leotard arrived in the mail, and I was happy that I'd gone with the Capezio version because the colour is a lighter blue than the ones I'd seen in real life at the dance supply store. I've started to sew some beads and sequins around the scoop neck. 

The glitter organza was delivered yesterday, and when I pulled the fabric out of the plastic sleeve, it looked like a bag of pixie dust had exploded in the kitchen! It looks like a lot of the glitter came out in the wash! Anyway, I'm happy with the sparkle as a stand-in for ice crystals. Also, ordering from Joann's across the border was completely painless. Shipping cost and time was reasonable, and my order was a small enough value that I wasn't charged any duty. Now I just have to sew the thing ....

 

status update: the elsa dress

Status as of Today:

• sewing machine unpacked and ready - not at all!
• serger unpacked and ready - yes!
• skirt pattern ready
• bodice pattern - to do later
• tulle for the skirt purchased (and hurrah - it's 60" wide), will be cut later today
• skirt lining fabric purchased, cut, and seamed together 
• bodice fabric - purchased, awaiting pattern
• cape fabric - ordered today
• leotard - currently in transit
• elastic for skirt is purchased
• snowflake embellishments have been ordered

I'm somewhat disturbed by my experience shopping for some of the items that I need for this project.

The online store for Discount Dance Supply came highly recommended by a couple of my friends who have kids in tap and ballet, and they did have good pricing on long-sleeved light blue leotards. Except their shipping fees to Canada start around $30. Ugh. I found an online store in Canada that had fairly competitive pricing on leotards and I'd picked out one to order, but then I discovered that there's an actual dance supply shop about ten minutes away (who knew!), so I took Sadie over there in the hopes of seeing the colours in real life and getting a better fit. Only, the guy working the floor at The Masque kind of laughed at me when I asked for assistance with a light blue long-sleeved leotard. They only had short sleeved versions. The colour was a little darker than I was hoping for, as well. The only upside to the visit to the dance shop was that they had a very nearly perfect fabric for the bodice of the dress, so I bought a metre to work with in lieu of knitting the bodice (though I still think that mixing textures like that would have been really cool). Fourteen dollars a metre. Done. I ended up ordering a light blue long-sleeved Capezio leotard from Amazon.com, of all places. It was much less than the Canadian online shop - about fifteen dollars for the leotard and eight dollars for shipping.

I ended up ordering a glittery organza for the cape from the US, too. Joann Fabrics just had so many more options than I found at the local fabric stores and the online Canadian retailers, too. Maybe they were just out-of-stock, but the whole trying to shop domestically just left me discouraged again! 

 

project: the elsa dress

Yesterday, I spent a few minutes wondering if I was living in an alternative reality because I was watching the national news on CBC and they ran a feature on the lack of Frozen-related merchandise at Disney Stores. I didn't realize that this was a crisis of national importance on par with Senate reform and the temporary foreign worker program, but now that I think of it, this story was one that I can relate to a little. 

I have a five year old. She very much asserts that her dress-up costume collection is lacking something from the "Ice Movie" and when I start talking about the beautiful colours and embroidery on Princess Anna's outfit, she gets online and show me exactly what slinky and glittery gown she's talking about.

Additionally, this five year-old's dad is a supporter of the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, and they're hosting a father/daughter princess ball fundraising event in about a month. The five year-old needs something to wear. 

So, I'm going to try to make something. People do this everyday. Google "Elsa cosplay" or search on Pinterest. I haven't checked textile availability at Fabricland yet, but my basic plan is to make Sadie a tulle skirt (probably from this tutorial - it includes a lining), knit a bodice (because I like knitting more than sewing), and procure a long-sleeved bodysuit to attach it to. I'll let everyone know how it goes :)

seeing is believing

Once again, it was pointed out to me that I don't blog much anymore (reading this post might be helpful). I do probably have a dozen posts in my drafts folder that I either didn't finish up or else decided were too grumpy and negative to actually publish. Turns out that I'm one of those people for whom writing things down helps.

In lieu of a (probably cranky) post, here's some that I either did, researched, or liked recently:

• I made baked oatmeal again, after a hiatus of about five years. I've never been able to deal with the texture of hot cereal, but this is a way that I can stomach something for breakfast that isn't processed or requires a lot of cooking and prep work. My recipe is a lot plainer than the Google search results for baked oatmeal - it doesn't need to be loaded up with sugar and sugar-like things.
• I am secure enough that actual winter is over in Calgary, so I'm going to say that I achieved my goal to not ever complain about the cold weather, lest I be subjected to various "I-told-you-so" comments about my loathing of 365 days of brutal summer in SE Asia. I complained about having clean off our car and be the designated snow-shoveler in our house, but never specifically about the ridiculous sub-freezing temperaturs. I like wearing sweaters, anyways. 
• I watched a really compelling re-run of The Fifth Estate and proceeded to hope that my kids stay kids for as long as they can. 
• My favourite new blog is Disrupting Dinner Parties (spoiler warning - it's not about food). It's a recent discovery and this very smart post about modeling consent for children was what drew me in. I don't care if people hate dealing with assertive women. I care about being taken advantage of and hate that that behaviour is enabled. The notion of "nice" does a disservice to both women and men. 
• I was cheered to learn that some varieties of hydrangea (one of fave flowers) can grow successfully here in Calgary, and so embarked on a research spree. I think I know where I'm going to plant a couple of bushes. First I have to want for the ground to thaw and figure out where to buy them.

So, there we go. An actual post.

another day, another F minus for calgary

The level of skill in winter sidewalk maintenance exhibited by the people of Calgary leaves me no other option but to conclude that it never once snowed during the seven winters that we were living elsewhere.  

This winter, it's a well-documented fact that the City of Calgary is struggling to clear the major roads, let alone plow the snow from residential neighbourhood streets. So what do I see the majority of homeowners doing? Shoveling the snows from their sidewalks onto the street. So there is more snow that will never be cleared, narrower roads to drive on, and a great probability that your car (even ones with AWD - ask me how I know) will get stuck in two feet of snow when you're trying to park on the street. 

Some of that snow has melted now, and now the sidewalks are covered in slippery ice that the majority of homeowners are ignoring. My two kids have fallen three times  today alone, and one of them has a nasty bit of road rash on her face for show for her trouble. The sidewalks have been like this for well over twenty-four hours now and the grace period for homeowners to take responsibility  for taking care of their dangerous sidewalks is over. You don't have to drive for more than ten minutes in my neighbourhood to reach several retail establishments where one can purchase sand, gravel, de-icer, or even cat litter to alleviated the unsafe sidewalk conditions. I am beyond infuriated with the level of ignorance and apathy and lack of regard for others. 

another thing Calgary is lacking: full-day public K

So, I registered my youngest kid for kindergarten this morning. She'll go to the same elementary school that her sister currently does. It's full of very lovely staff members, they have a fabulous music teacher, and the library is well-appointed. Sadie also gives the playground equipment a big thumbs up. 

But as I warned in an earlier post, the only topics that I can motivate myself to write on these days are fueled by discontent. So ...

... I am enraged by kindergarten in Calgary, and on a larger scale, enraged by cuts to education funding in this province. Other provinces in Canada have increased the instructional hours for five year-olds - BC, Ontario, and PEI in 2010, New Brunswick in 1991, Nova Scotia from around 1995-ish, and full-day K is well-established in Quebec. My daughter, starting kindergarten in Alberta in 2014, will attend for four half-days a week, and every other Friday morning. This is fewer instructional hours than I received when I was in kindergarten in Alberta in 1981. Why this province and this city isn't ashamed of this, I don't know ... 

While other provinces in Canada have increased their recognition of the importance of early learning, the province we were sent to has actually decreased their support over the last few decades. It's embarrassing, and a huge reason why I wish that we'd gotten one more year in Vietnam (and thus, one year of quality full-day K for Sadie). 

the Christmas in London tradition

The Origin Story: About three months after we landed in Bangkok back in 2007, we realized that our new country of residence wasn't going to be very Christmas-y at Christmas. For one, it's a Buddhist country. Two, it's hot and very green every single day of year, so it would never "feel" right to us. We discovered that London was a mere 12-hr direct flight from BKK, and our first overseas Christmas tradition was born. 

It really was a tradition - we've spent four of the last six holiday seasons in London. It's a fabulous place at Christmas time - it's cool enough to wear lovely sweaters and warm jackets without being freezing, there are decorations and Christmas fairy lights everywhere, turkey dinners and mince pies are easily procured.

This year we get to participate in the "we're not traveling for Christmas" tradition, and while it will be fantastic for my kids not to wake up in a hotel or worry about if Santa left something under the tree in SE Asia for them to open later, there are a couple of things about our UK Christmases that I'll always be fond of:

The Christmas Grotto: So, Santa is called by the very dignified name of "Father Christmas" and Father Christmas lives in a grotto instead of a fenced-off area of a shopping mall. We somehow managed to visit the Grotto at Harrod's when Madeline was just three years old, and it was a totally magical experience. Father Christmas was the loveliest version of Father Christmas ever - I honestly do think that all of the grandfatherly actors in the UK who very narrowly beat out by Michael Gambon for the role of Albus Dumbledore went to work in the red suit instead. I'm totally not kidding.

Father Christmas chatted with our shy three year-old for more than ten minutes (during which we forgot all about the hour we probably spent waiting in line), leafed through a gigantic book housing the nice/naughty list to look up her name, asked her about her Christmas wishes. We were all charmed, and of course we bought the over-priced souvenir photo. It made visiting Harrod's during Christmas week worthwhile, which is saying a lot. A very big lot. 

Grottos are everywhere. We never returned to Harrod's because they've gone to an appointment-booking system that users access based on what tier their Harrod's loyal card is. Last year we took both of the girls to the Victorian Grotto at the Museum of the Docklands. It was a timed entrance, and the wait in line was still long, but the little reconstructed Dickensian front room where my kids met Father Christmas was charming in it's simplicity and the Man in Red was perfectly grandfatherly and their visit was not rushed at all. I hope that Madeline and Sadie haven't forgotten.

The Holiday Panto: So, pantomimes are musical stage productions that spring up all over during the holiday seasons  - they're very campy and family-friendly at the same time. Most of them seem to be based on familiar stories , like Cinderella or Aladdin or Snow White or even the Gruffalo (first one we saw!). Sadie was two years old the first time we took her - the production was Dick Whittington's Cat and she sure danced in the aisle when Dame Edna Everage lead the closing number of "Born This Way" (the whole thing was quite the spectacle).

We've managed to find a couple of pantos to check out this month that are near Calgary and it's feels kind of nice that we can continue one of our holiday traditions. 

The grottos and pantomimes aside, there were other things that made London an awesome place to go to for some Christmas cheer. Madeline's old enough to take to the West End theatres, so she and I went to see Wicked one year (her dad went to see Paul McCarntey). My kids got to practice their skills on outdoor -skating rinks, which would have been impossible in Saigon's climate.

I have no idea if we'll be sent to live overseas again, but my fingers are crossed and resuming our Christmas in London tradtion will feel like a lovely and familiar reunion.

 

 

another thing i've been reading

I can't remember who sent me this article to read, but it feels completely authentic to me: I am a triangle and other thoughts on repatriation.

i heart apartment living

1. There is snow on the sidewalk, but I am responsible for shoveling exactly zero percent of it. This is grand. 

2. My washer and dryer are on the (singular) main level. In fact, they're in a hall closet right by the bedrooms. This convenience is excellent. 

3. No stairs. This would have been fantastic when my foot was in a cast.

4. Maybe it's an illusion of security, but I love that only one door out of hundreds in this building leads to me. No one whom I'm not expecting knocks on the door. 

5. The view up here near the top is rather lovely. 

hardship assignment

Back in the spring, when I grudgingly posted on Facebook (and admitted to friends not on FB) that our next assignment was going to put us back in Calgary, the general response was "How exciting" and "Welcome back to civilization" and other similar things that made me cringe. 

I'd lived in Calgary for six years before, the same as I had in SE Asia, and I had a preference. It's not the one that people probably would have guessed if they'd been reading either of my blogs back in 2007 when we moved to Thailand. I'm getting a little tired of hearing that I should be thrilled to be back in North America from people who ... well, don't really have the same lived-there-for-many-years basis for comparison. 

I don't like the notion that life here must be so superior. I could easily argue that it isn't.

Sure, Calgary (and Canada or the USA) has some material things that I appreciate, like better quality food (even if our fruit and vegetables are shipped in from far away for part of the year). I like knowing that the milk isn't adulterated with hormones and that the plants outside having been doused in DDT. It's nice having our own car. It's nice being able to purchase children's medication at the drugstore and not have to wonder if it's counterfeit.  It's nice that my kids can take lessons in gymnastics and ice-skating. Internet is way faster. Netflix exists. 

But I miss the slower life that we had overseas. We had more down-time as a family - here, busy-ness is a terribly contagious disease. Our kids' friends in Asia lived nearby instead of commuting to our local school from the deep south, so after-school playdates were possible/easily planned. There were always people to befriend, and seeing how challenging that is here, that was a really lovely thing about living in an international community. It's not hard to find people with similar interests to mine in Calgary, but finding people who can spare five minutes to talk isn't always easy because they're busy, busy, busy.  

It's really an odd feeling to be back in the country that I grew up in, and feel like it's a strange place that I have to get used to living in. One of Chris's co-workers from Saigon emailed him a few days ago to report on how much downtown Saigon has changed in the months since we've been gone, and I'm surprisingly sad that we aren't there to marvel or curse about it. 

read the words of others, not mine

On average, my husband comments that I don't blog much anymore about two times a month. It's true. I blog more when I'm in a good headspace, and after a move isn't one of those "good headspace" situations. I also blogged more when my kids were younger; they are older and the internet is older and they are able to tell their own stories - if they choose to. Very often I'll get an idea for a piece to write, and then get completely caught up in analyzing the grey area around it. 

I do read a a lot online. Less blogs, more journals and the like. Less articles about being the parent of young children and more articles about being a girl (who will grow up to be an adult women) in the world, because my kids are girls. I hate the thought that girls have to fight for their education, fight for autonomy over their own bodies, and fight not to have their classmates ruin them over the internet. It's usually not positive or light-hearted reading, but it's absorbing. 

This week's find is On Labeling Women 'Crazy' by Harris O'Malley, posted in the HuffPo. The best section is the one explaining how men use the phrase "you're over-reacting" to shut down females because discussion isn't convienent to their goals. 

Sometimes it's good to find evidence that the thoughts in my head aren't, well, crazy.

table for four

A few weeks ago, the kids and I picked Chris up at his office and headed out to for his early-birthday dinner. Our destination was a restaurant called Il Sogno, which he'd started to frequent back in the spring when he'd travel back here from Saigon for meetings and such. Madeline ordered a pasta with edamame and duck, and I think that Sadie ate some sort of noodles with parmesan cheese, and it occured to me that there are a lot of places to eat in Calgary with kids that don't feature take-out windows. 

Since we lived here last, the local southern barbeque spot closed up shop, but we've stumbled upon Holy Smoke BBQ (and it really was a stumble - it's in one of the industrial areas that Chris often meanders through at random when it's his turn to drive) which has charmed the kids with seasonal pumpkin corn bread, and relatively small-sized pulled pork and smoked chicken sandwiches. They also sell Happy Pop in nearly glowing shades and Madeline is fond of the pineapple flavour. This is a very casual eating establishment - the tables have tableclothes, but they're vinyl :)

Before being displaced by Il Sogno, Madeline's favourite place to eat since moving here was another little Italian place on 17th Ave SW called Borgo. It serves many dishes family-style, which works out nicely for dining with kids who are better suited to smaller portions. Pasta with cheese isn't officially on the menu, but the waiters we've had cheerfully volunteered it as an option and gave the kids crayons and Da Vinci-inspired colouring sheets. I'm not sure what the crowd at Borgo is like after eight at night, but at five pm the atmosphere in the joint was fine for young diners. We've also been there for their Sunday brunch, and the hot chocolate was kind of cool: you're served a tea cup with chunks of chocolate and a tumbler of hot milk to pour over it. So much better than Tim Hortons!

The third place that is working out well for us is the Calgary Co-op nearest to our apartment - they have a curry bar! And it's inexpensive. Sadie is a huge fan of basmati rice and butter chicken. Aren't we all, though?

Stupid Repatriation Problem: I Miss My People

We've been here for three months, and still, every time I see a notice on a community message board with the headline "New to Calgary?",  I wander on over with great expections.

And then read the paragraph below: "Learn English with Other Immigrant Women!"

So. Yeah. 

Stupid Repatriation Problems: Food is Expensive!

So, we've been reintegrating for almost three months now, and I am still having a crisis everything I step into a grocery store. I guess that loaves of bread and cartons of eggs have probably only increased by about a dollar in price since the last time I bought them in Canada, but my brain has a hard time valuing those products at their current selling prices. 

Joining the backyard chicken movement seems kind of complicated, seeing as we're living in a high-rise condo building, so it looks like I will be circumventing the system by baking our own bread once we have our sea shipment delivered and my stand mixer and baking tools are back. 

Saigon-Related Throwback Thursday - so you moved here with small children. now what?

The following is an un-finished post that I started in April 2013!

-----------------

So, when we left Bangkok, I wrote up a few posts (largely on my other abandoned blog) that kind of summarized all of the things that I ended up liking about our life there. I'm not really sure that I'm going to feel sentimental about anything here in Saigon, but I figure that since our moving day is coming up, I'd put something to together about living here with small kids. 

Firstly, googling "things to do with kids in HCMC" isn't going to produce a lot of hits (as I write this in April 2013 (particularly, if you're looking for a website in English)). We find out about family-friendly events through more traditional mediums, like notices posted at cafes, local-interest magazine like The Word, and advertising posters at the schools our kids attend. The Word has actually been a really good resource for us over the years - the back section has a large listing of restaurants, places to shop, and this "Generation V" category that has information on where to buy baby gear, shop for clothes, shop for schools, and so on. 

There are also a few message groups that are used for finding out all manner of things about living here: Vietnam Parents Network, An Phu Neighbours, and Phu My Hung Neighbours (and there are probably more of these for other communities with a decent ex-pat population  that I don't know about!). 

I'm not a great authority on areas of this city beyond the one that I live in, but there appears to more indoor playgrounds here than outdoor ones (though there is a very nice one in Pham Ngu Lao - the backpacker area). We've always found them very affordable (like, one dollar per hour affordable), but the quality does vary. The newest one in our area put a trampoline right up against a glass window, for example. The funnest one might have been the one with the zip line that I blogged about here, but there's a very tidy and well-maintained one called "Joymax" across from the British International School in District 2. 

I ran into a suprising problem clothing my children here. Places like Saigon Square and the markets are fantastic for buying inexpensive clothes for babies and toddlers (and American brands like Carters, BabyGap, Old Navy, etc. are easily found), but finding items in larger sizes (Madeline's worn sizes 6 - 8 while we've been here) has been more challenging! Once I even resorted going to the newly-opened Gap Kids in the Vincom shopping center to buy her a pair of jeans (seriously, it's like blasphemy here to buy Gap clothes at the actual Gap store when you can buy Gap clothes cheap at the markets). We haven't had to buy Madeline much clothing here in Saigon, thanks to the school uniform policy, but there's a chain called DLS (outlets across the city) where we've found some lovely pieces in her size, and a newer shop on Xuan Thuy (D2) called Pure Heaven that carries this European Copenhagen Delights line of apparel (up to size 12, I believe), and Madeline's really liked the quality of the outfits she has. 

 

 

 

 

same same (of course it is)

Well, we're in our new apartment now. The air shipment (mostly toys, some kitchen equipment, and clothes) landed in Calgary late last week, and it looks like it might be delivered here tomorrow. 

The amount of displacement dysphoria that I'm feeling here suprises me; we've lived in Calgary before, but it isn't really helping me feel settled at all. It feels just like it was when we moved to St. John's, BKK, and Saigon - everything is new or not-quite-similar/not-quite-different and I haven't quite figured out what I really ought to be doing.

We've lived here before, but it was in another part of this sprawl of a metropolis, and today, as I was walking to the grocery store, I couldn't shake the feeling that there were other places to buy bagels that were a lot closer than where I was going. I may not be working with a language barrier for the first time in six times, but there's definitely a knowledge barrier.

Right now it's summer; my kids like being busy and all of the stuff that I thought we'd pass our days doing (visiting the Zoo, the playground on Prince's Island Park, the central library) have been closed due to flood clean-up, so it seems like there isn't anything to do here, but the truth is just that I have no idea what else there is to do around where we live!  

 

 

hello. or howdy.

So, some updates!

About two weeks ago, the relocation company found an apartment for us in downtown Calgary. We imagined walking to the big library, walking to Prince's Island Park, taking the train to Sunnyside to buy groceries or to the zoo. I love urban apartment living, so I was quite happy with this development. So was Chris - he could walk to the office.

And then our relocation contact guy failed to finalize the apartment, and stopped communicating with us for a week. This was a very fraught week - honestly, our pack-out in Saigon was starting, we were landing in Calgary very shortly. 

Then the HR department intervened, and another two bedroom place in downtown Calgary was sourced for us, and all was good again. Asian Tigers came and packed up all of our heavy furniture, artwork, and kitchen gear. Madeline and Sadie had their final days of school. We flew to Calgary via Tokyo. 

And there was some rain, and the Bow and Elbow Rivers overflowed and flooded a lot of places, and the apartment that we were supposed to move into yesterday was in an evacuation zone. Chris spent part of our layover in Narita booking us a suite at the Holiday Inn, so there's where we are now.

I'm not sure that we could have picked a less ideal weekend to land in Calgary, but it's not as bad as the media reports kind of make it seem. The drinking water is fine, the vast majority of the city isn't under water, and you can get across the river, albeit slowly and with some detours. 

We're really hoping that Chris's office re-opens by Wednesday and we'll be able to move into our new apartment then!

 

we're still here

And it's a good thing that we're still in Saigon, because we don't have any place to live in Calgary yet. I've been trying to get many things sorted out for the summer - a couple weeks of summer camp for the kids, getting Sadie on the wait-list for speech therapy through the health authority - but all of these forms would like to know our address and phone number. Of course they do. The best I can do right now is offer up my mom's address in Edmonton, or Chris's office in downtown Calgary.  I don't think that I will have another good nights' sleep until I know where I'll be sleeping at night at the end of June. 

I've been doing all of our move prep on my own because Chris has spent most of the last six weeks in other cities, but it's actually working out well because I can organize things that way I want to and he gets to investigate things that would be hard to do if he was still in Saigon, like check out cars and take them on test-drives. I don't think that either of us has ever bought a vehicle that hadn't been previously-owned, so it's fun to check out all of the colours and trim levels and such on the manufacturer websites. I'm trying to not get too attached to the idea of something blue because reality is that we're going to be buying a new vehicle in a hurry so we get to pick from whatever is on the dealer lot. I'm so ready for something that isn't silver! 

 

 

the farewell tour

On Wednesday at breakfast, I sat staring at my empty iced chai latte cup and thought, "I'm going to miss this place." I was sitting with my kids at a Starbucks on Orchard Road in Singapore. There is a very good chance that I'll never be there again. 

I can't remember how many months we were into our life in Bangkok when we first visited Singapore, but I do remember that it felt soooo good! The streets were clean. I spoke a common language. There were familiar things - organized traffic, playgrounds, parks, shops, etc. I took a photo of the view from our hotel window and thought that it reminded me of Vancouver. 

Singapore is easily the place that we traveled to for a family-oriented getaway the most during our six years in SE Asia. It's only about a 90-minute flight from BKK and Saigon, and plenty of the discount airlines in this region fly there. I think that we kept going back to stock up on shopping (baking ingredients! vitamins!) and because there are were more quality things to do with children. 

Usual highlights from our trips:

• The wildlife parks: Singapore Zoo, Jurong Bird Park, and the newly-opened River Safari. There is a zoo in Bangkok and there's also one in Ho Chi Minh City, but the ones in Singapore are modern, spacious, educational, and  conversation-minded, and they do not dress the animals up in costumes for exploitive photo ops. 

• Botanical Gardens, because 1) the flowers in SE Asia are lovely and exotic to my eyes and 2) it has a terrific playground area.

• The Forum: This is a small shopping center that has a lot of retailers focused on children. There's a Mothercare (a UK-company that carries a lot of baby apparel and gear that is hard to come by in SE Asia - things that I bought there include packages of onesies (nicer than Old Navy, actually), See Kai Run shoes, and a SwaddleMe)). There's a shop called Vitakids where I've found other things that were a challenge in BKK and Saigon: children's vitamins, supplements, and safer sunscreen/shampoo (they stock TruKid, among others). My kids are fans of the children's bookstore called Bookaburra, and there's an Early Learning Center toy store next door. On the top level, there's a Stride Rite and also a Toys R Us (though it doesn't stock the same quality of merchandise as the stores in Canada, it's a lot better than the TRU in BKK).

• SEA Aquarium on Sentosa: This is quite new, and is marketing itself as the largest aquarium in the world. Madeline was thrilled to see about a half dozen exhibits on jellyfish, and I was happy to have a (flash-free, of course) photo of a clownfish in an anemone. I have a four year-old, so Finding Nemo still heavily influences our aquatic interests. The aquarium is located in Singapore's maritime museum, and I wish that we'd spent more time looking at the exhibits because the did look really cool (and very hands-on).

• Gelatissimo: Madeline's dearest request for our last trip was that we go for gelato because she really wanted more of the green apple gelato that she had the time when we checked out the Singapore Flyer. The Singapore Flyer was out of the way, but luckily, there was a Gelatissimo outlet on Orchard Road that we could walk to. And they did have green apple on the menu on that day!

I picked up a second-hand "things to do with small kids in Singapore" book before our final trip, and there were more than a couple of museums that earned kid-friendly marks, and a science center that sounded like something my girls would be into, though we didn't have the time to check it out. We've been on the Singapore Night Safari, so we saw a lot of animals sleeping, and we've been to Universal Studios on Sentosa, but it wasn't as interesting to our younger kids as a Disney Park is.

We've sometimes had difficulty finding taxis for return trips back from places like the zoo, so on my last trip, the kids and I  got around using the MRT and the SAEx coaches and it was inexpensive (as far as Singapore goes) and easy to figure out. I also saw one of those double-decker sight-seeing buses, and thought that would have been a practical way to navigate between several of the tourist attractions. Wish I'd known about that before ... 

So, yeah, I was a little sad to have my farewell tour of Singapore come to an end earlier this week. I always felt a little bit more like my old self there, like I was slightly less of a foreigner than I was when in Thailand or Vietnam (and maybe even Newfoundland, you know). I will be glad, however, to never again feel the frustration of trying to search out a hotel that had rooms that could accomodate more than two adults and one child simultaneously. Oh, Asia :)

so many words, so little time (and stuff)

I'm thinking that this blog is heading towards closure. I haven't had much content or interest in a long time; my kids are getting older, becoming their own people, and deserve privacy, and life overseas is taking me by surprise less all the time. 

I've got bigger things to devote my time to, like preparing the inventory for our air and sea shipments. I probably should have started that already, to be honest! I've managed to get my annual photobook project finished and uploaded for printing, but that's only one item crossed over the list. We don't exactly know what Chris's start date for his new job is, and we also don't even know what our post-move address is going to be. There's just lots of stuff that I need to be doing away from sitting in front of a computer. 

And if I was to write more? It would probably be all bitter and angry words on topics such as how insanely hot it is here, how there aren't many houses for sale that would work for us, how darn powerless I feel in this whole process because I have, like, zero agency to decide anything in this relocation. 

I do have a good rant about Madeline's school saved up inside me, so I might post that when the school year is over :)

 

if I were the reviewing type

I'd be raging somewhere against the (fellow foreigner) photographer we had a photo session with two weekend ago.

The crimes:

• Actually telling me that I am a "lady of leisure" without actually inquiring into how I spend my time here in Saigon. There is nothing that I despise more than being stereotyped as a typical ex-pat wife, because I'm really not. 
• Frequent high-pressure emails, like he's trying to sell us a brand-new Prius to make an end-of-the-month sales quota.  We don't want to upgrade the trim line!
• Sending us proofs that look lower-resolution than the images on my child's Fisher Price digicam. Seriously, I can't see my childrens' faces in the proofs well enough to see if their eyes are open or if they're smiling. 
• Quoting me a price for an 5x7-ish  print that is equal to what he'd sell an 11x14-ish for. 

Well, I feel better by typing out my itemized list of complaints, really I do. Now, onto bigger (actual) problems. 

Is it October Yet? Or: Pop culture monsters and me.

I was listening to an old Halloween-oriented episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour this week, and the theme that the panel was discussing was "pop culture that scares you". And while I heartily agree with Glen Wheldon that there is something inexplicably disturbing about Bing Crosby's Sleepy Hollow Song, what I would have discussed if I had been invited to sit in with the gang is my fear of creepy things of the monster/alien/mascot persuasion.

It might have all started when I was five year old and in kindergarten, when my mom asked me if I wanted to "stay up past my bedtime" (of course I did!) and "go see a movie!" (yippee!). So my mom, ever the fan of science fiction, took me not to see E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. I liked the part with the Reese's Pieces, sure, but after seeing this movie, I was pretty convinced that there had to be E.T. living behind the furnace in our basement (thus, it was dangerous to walk past it to get to the washing machine), or E.T. living behind the chest freezer in the basement (thus, it was dangerous to even go down the stairs to the basement), or the might even be E.T. hiding amongst my toys in the basement. That last one seemed like it was the biggest betrayal of them all. 

Before you laugh, remember that I was only five years-old!

But my fears did not end there. My dreams were largely populated by vampires and invisible ghosts that would lure me away from my family with levitating phantom ice cream cones and chocolate bars, only to snatch me up and ... well, I don't know what come after the "and ..." because that's when I'd wake up from my nightmares. 

The worst offender of all, even worse then E.T., was the A&W Root Bear. I would lay awake for hours after being tucked in for the night, imagining that I could hear the Root Bear coming to kidnap me, each sinister step punctuated with his "ba-dum ba-dum" tuba theme music. I was terrified of this fast-food chain mascot like nothing else. I don't know why. 

I had a healthy distrust of anyone wearing similar mascot costumes like that for many years. Even Mickey. Even Fred Flintstone before Bedrock City in Kelowna closed down. To be honest, I'm still a little suspicious.

 

the one about the dishes

Today, we loaded ourselves into our trusty Kia minivan and drove to the Minh Long porcelain factory/showroom/outlet in District 9. It was only about one hour away, but with Madeline in the car with us complaining about having to take a drive longer than her school commute of ten minutes, it kind of felt like four or five hours. Our mission at Minh Long was to cross another item off of our Stuff to Buy Before We Move List - new "everyday" dishes. It probably seems excessive to have porcelain for regular use, but here in Saigon, a porcelain soup bowl is about $1.50 while one from Corelle is $10. The math seems self-explanatory, right?

The actual purchasing of our new dishes doesn't make a very exciting story, but there were a couple of crazy things that happened. Chris took the kids to the cafe on-site for ice cream while I lurked around the showrooms free of tiny grabby hands. I joined them in time to see the kids each presented with large colourful sundaes. We amused ourselves for awhile with trying to guess the flavours - Sadie's had a purple scoop that I think was purple yam, and one that was definitely durian. Chris quit sneaking spoonfuls as soon as he realized that that the white scoop was durian and not vanilla or coconut, but we both were rather amused to see that Sadie thought that her "exotic" ice cream was just grand, regardless, and she kept working at it until it was entirely gone. Madeline barely touched her dish.

The other crazy thing was when we were in the parking lot, filling up the back of the minivan with the boxes of tableware. When we took Sadie over to the teapot-fountain to take a quick photo, the excited paparazzi swarmed our little girl, and I really couldn't get a good shot of her because of the crowd.  

Sadie wasn't really amused.

reveal

So, remember how I wrote about ordering hand-sewn quilts for my kids back in October? They were finished in time to be tucked under the tree for Christmas. This one is Madeline's (please excuse the quality of the actual photo - the lighting was lousy):

I love it. She loves it, which is probably more important. The dark turquoise of the applique looks fantastic with the white background, and I can't find any faults in the workmanship. 

I'm less pleased with Sadie's:

The pink fabric was supposed to be pink tie-dye, but sometimes those things are tricky to communicate, so I can mostly forgive that. The thing that really bothers me about Sadie's quilt is the proportions. It's really long, and the center applique is small and leaves lot of "blank" (or yellow) space. I don't really like the large section of plain fabric between the top of the center applique and the top of the quilt, and I don't like how the applique isn't centered in the middle of the bed (see: problem with the length). I think that this was actually my fault though - aren't twin beds normally longer in Asia than they are in Canada?  I'm kind of tempted to relegate this quilt to guest-bedroom duty and start over for Sadie. 

field trips: not always the best idea

Today, Madeline's class went on a field trip to the zoo here in Ho Chi Minh City to study animal habitats. Both Chris and I were wondering about what the outing was intended to achieve; we've been to the Saigon Zoo before and it's more of a lesson in "habitat don't" than "habitat do". This is the developing world, after all ... 

Still, when Madeline's teacher stopped me in the corrider to talk, I was internally freaking out that she'd unleased her belligerent streak again. Instead, he apologetically recounted all of the things that apparently deeply upset her on the excursion, like:

• the elephant was chained up
• the otters had no access to water
• she heard some classmates excitedly talk about how one of the snakes was being given a cute little bunny to eat*

I'm still unclear what the point of going to the Saigon Zoo was, but I do know that I'm pleased that the treatment of animals in captivity is something that matters to my kid. 

 

*I wasn't sure what Madeline thought that snakes ate. I asked her, and she figured that it was animals that were "less cute" than bunnies.

best of 2012*: things that made me happy

* Not an exhaustive list.

What I spent a lot of time doing in 2012, aside from healing broken parts of bones in my left leg, was reading. I read a lot. I actually read a lot of YA, and I'm not ashamed to say that I've enjoyed reading YA more than I have adult fiction. I live with adult problems, after all, so why do I need to read about them? 

The first book that I read in 2012 was Dash & Lily's Book of Dares (so charming and wonderful and NYC at Christmas!). This led me to Will Grayson, Will Grayson, which got the whole John Green snowball rolling. I read everything with his name on it (including some obscure/neglected Kindle singles), and it turns out that I love Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars as much as everyone else seems to (maybe a little bit more?). And then I went back to the other author of Will Grayson, Will Grayson and read Boy Meets Boy (deconstructed fairytale-ish) and Every Day (AU) by David Levithan. Both were fantastic and took awhile to leave my imagination. 

I can't write about my favourite books of 2012 without mentioning Code Name Verity (finally, a grown-up book!), which probably was the most gripping novel that I read. I loved that the protagonists were awesome and intelligent women who were devoted friends instead of written to compete with each other, I loved that one of the characters was a pilot, I loved that it was set during WWII, I loved the epistolary element, and I loved the complicated and clever way that the author unfolded the mystery. 

And honorable mention to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I haven't seen the film, but the book was perfectly complicated and engaging. I liked the mulitiple narrators. 

Non-fiction-wise, I adored Mickey Rapkin's Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory  (which is nothing like the movie) and Bill Bryson's Shakespeare. I honestly think that one might be my favourite thing that Bill Bryson has written; the author basically starts off by explaining how history has left little factual information about William Shakespeare, but he still manages to write a few hundred pages :)

 My tv discovery of the year is a show that I wish I'd actually discovered a couple of years ago: Community. I do not understand why this show isn't the highest-rated show on tv instead of being on the verge of cancellation. The way that this show plays with genre is amazing and the fact that a character like Abed Nadir exists just makes me happy. Six seasons and a movie, please.

I also watched a lot of back-seasons of Project Runway with Madeline, and now I want to go to Mood and have Tim Gunn pop into my life at opportune moments to offer advice. But doesn't everyone?

Pop Culture Happy Hour is still my favourite podcast, and this year, I think that Trey Graham became my favourite co-host because he's the guy who talks about things in the theatre world.  I also listened to Manic Mommies (relevant, I guess, because this started out as a parenting blog) and some good stuff put out by my beloved Canadian Broadcasting Company: Under the Influence (about advertising and media, and it's always really interesting) and The Vinyl Cafe.  

Two movies that I am totally smitten with that I think that rest of the world should be: Moonrise Kingdom (a gorgeous quirky Wes Anderson film) and the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (because Maggie Smith is flawless). 

I really enjoyed our summer holiday in the United States. I got to see a real space shuttle, after all! I also learned that selling fireworks must be lucrative, if all of the advertising on the interstate that we saw is any indication. 

All of the organic/free-range/way-better-than-in-Vietnam food that we ate on our Christmas vacation in the UK is making me happy. And wistful, now that we're home in Saigon and the four grocery places I've visiting in the last three days haven't had any broccoli. 

Pilates is one of the things that I started this year that I'm really happy with. That reformer is one versatile contraption. 

I took some awesome photographs this year. I didn't post them here, so you'll just have to trust me. 

We paid off the mortgage on the house in Calgary in October, nine years and two months after assuming it. We actually only lived in it for two years and a little bit. 

Lastly, I have to mention that my Air Cast is a pretty brilliant discovery of 2012. I would have loved to have had it when I broke a bone in my ankle back in February and it was totally worth the effort and expense of going to Bangkok to get it this past December when I fractured a metataral on the same foot. It's miles ahead of the casts I had put on at Family Medical here in Saigon in terms of mobility and muscle retension. Not to mention that I can clean the grime of Saigon off of it!