Most of the way through Q1.

So far 2015 has included some of the busiest months I have ever had. But this time has been good, mostly because in all the busyness, winter has gone by with me often in a survival-auto-pilot state. That might sound negative, but not having time to think too much in the depths of winter has actually been a relief. Supposedly February was the coldest in over a hundred years, but I was so busy going from one job to another that I hardly noticed. In fact, I was often loosening my scarf or removing one mitten because I was warm from jogging to try to catch the next bus so I wouldn't have to wait 6 or so minutes for another one.

Advent.

I've always thought of Advent as some sort of merry, ascending on-ramp toward Christmas.

This year Advent feels like a descent into darkness.

It's a snowy deep winter night full of unknowing and quiet waiting.

Drifting toward darkness.

Around here it's clear that the darkness is gaining on the light, a little more each day. I just googled to find out when the winter solistice is (December 21), so that I will know exactly how long I have to hang in there before the light starts making a comeback.

Death and resurrection.

Where I grew up, Easter Sunday was important. There was usually a new Easter dress and sometimes there were hats, but there was always an abundance of pastel-clad people. And green plastic tinsel grass inside bright cheery-colored Easter baskets with chocolate, Paas-dyed eggs and jelly beans.

Until this year, I didn't really have much experience with death. And it turns out, resurrection feels pastel-colored only if you don't know what it's like to go through some sort of death.

Tenacity.

As I sit here in my sunny living room, the sound of chirping birds just outside the window reminds me that spring is technically here. Nevermind the incongruous detail that we had a snowstorm on the first day of spring and another small one two days later. It still looks like winter, but there are whispers of spring. Those tenacious birds confirm that winter will not last forever.

I probably should be working on one of the many projects I am in the middle of right now. I am getting ready to enter week four of a very busy four-week period. But I saw this article ("This is what 80 Looks Like") on Gloria Steinem and wanted to share it. So here I am.

Woken by rain.

I'm not sure I ever wrote about this before, but in the winter of 2011 our bathroom had two leaks coming from the ceiling. There was one leak coming through the vent thing over the tub (which convieniently dripped into the tub) and one through the light fixture beside the tub (which required a bucket). I quickly realized that the leak only came when I heard the upstairs neighbors using the toilet and then flushing. But the leak started dripping before the flush.
 
***

          Lights up.

The audience hears the sound of the upstairs neighbor peeing.

Drips begin coming through ceiling at a rate of more than one per second.

Toilet flushes.

Drips continue for a while, then slow to a stop.

          Blackout.

***

So....yeah. Gross.

Well. This morning the sound of running water woke me up.

Here and there.

• I bought vacuum cleaner. A Miele. I love it. It's black and silver, though I chose it for other reasons. However, it coordinates very well with my home's color scheme.
• I vacuumed the whole apartment the day I brought it home. There are no longer little rocks on the floor in the 3-foot (half) radius around front door. And Booboo was pretty comfortable around it, which is a huge change from how he was with the previous vaccuum.
• At the store, the registration process for the 10-year free warranty (!!!) asked for the reason for buying a vacuum. There was not an option for "My ex left me for another woman and took the vacuum cleaner with him." So the guy at the store said I should just choose "Replacing a broken vacuum."
• My new Miele rolls behind me so easily, like a happy little puppy following me around. It was on sale, plus I even got an extra $40 off because I took one that had an almost invisible scratch on the bottom. Honestly, I probably did more damage to it on its maiden voyage around the apartment the other day.
• You know the risk I talked about in the last two paragraphs of this post?

The coup continues.

Well, it's clearly not over, this rebellion of my belongings.

My computer arrived at work today, and since I wasn't working today at the office, I drove to pick it up so I would have a back-up plan if my old computer decides to stop working again before the translation is finished. I had my coins ready to stick in a meter, but no metered spots were available near my office. Then I saw there was a loading zone spot. I thought, huh, I am here to pick up something for 2 minutes, this is exactly what this spot is for! So I parked and ran in to get the computer and was back out super quickly. I was unlocking the passenger door to put the computer in, and my key broke off in the lock.

My possessions are staging a rebellion.

So. My laptop broke on Monday night late, and I had to buy a new one on Tuesday because I have a freelance translation contract to finish for Friday. It was supposed to be delivered Wednesday, but it was not.

On Tuesday I came home and walked in the door and the lights wouldn't work. I thought it was the light bulb. I tried two and determined that it wasn't. Then I thought it might be the fuse. (The fuse box is a mystery to me because it is the old kind of fuses because the apartment is 100 years old.) After someone else checked for me (and I made notes of which fuses do what!), I know that all the fuses are fine.

The process of elimination revealed it is a problem with the contact in the lamp itself (for one of the non-working lamps) and a timer explained the other non-working lamp. The timer is now adjusted and that lamp works now.

Wednesday night I tried to go to meet someone to borrow a laptop to use until the new one arrives and to see if there was anything to be done for the broken one. I got in my car and turned on my windshield wipers. They started up then stopped in the middle of the windshield on the first swipe. So I couldn't drive anywhere because driving any significant distance without windshield wipers in winter in Québec is just not wise.

Winter stuck like molasses.

Things improved after my last post, and just when I relaxed into a new, pretty positive state, those same disappointments have boomeranged around again.

Winter. I don't see any magic in it right now. Winter is looking out my kitchen window onto my part of the snow-covered balcony and seeing lots of piles of poop from the neighbor's dog, along with some yellow snow for good measure.

At least it is sunny today. And I made some cinnamon rolls. (And I am happy to know that I can make brown sugar by adding molasses to regular white sugar. I often can't use up brown sugar before it goes as hard as a rock, so my new plan is to do this from now on, every time I need brown sugar. Did everyone except me know this?)

I know I can recover from these disappointments; I've already survived the worst. (And Booboo is here for a while visiting, and he's being particularly sweet right now so that really helps.)

Downhill.

It was one of those weeks that started out good and then all of a sudden went downhill in the middle and by today, there was a pile-up of bad things. The bad things were bigger disappointments and hurts, and as I walked home from work I was thinking about them.

Though I didn't feel like it, I managed to summon the energy to stop at the grocery store because I needed to buy a few things for the weekend. It was a quick stop and soon I was walking home again. As I was thinking about the most recent turn of (bad) events, I fell on the ice. There were people around, but no one said a thing. I picked myself and my grocery bags back up and continued walking home (carefully) on the dark, ice-covered sidewalks.

No going back no going home.

I got home from my holiday travel three days after my return flight was originally scheduled. The domino-effect delays and cancellations caused by the recent snowstorms led to my Thursday flight being cancelled and rescheduled for Friday. Then that Friday flight was cancelled. After lots of time on hold yet again, I was told the next flight I could get was for Monday. I later called back and managed to get a flight for Sunday, but then that one too was cancelled. More time on hold and the feeling I would never make it home led to looking for flights out of a nearby city an hour and a half away. I managed to get a a flight out of that city for Sunday. I was told that if I didn't make that flight, my next option from either city would be the following Wednesday. Both legs of that Sunday flight ended up being delayed, but I eventually got home at 2 a.m. or so Monday morning.

Darkness and light and the belly of the whale.

I've been thinking a lot about darkness and light, death and rebirth, and the journey into the belly of the whale.

In writing about the monomyth, Joseph Campbell described three overarching stages of the journey: departure, initiation and return. The last step of the departure stage is the journey into the belly of the whale, where the hero seems to be swallowed up by death.

The boots are on.

Crisis: Dead-End or Transformation

This was in my neighbors' mail outside their door. I took it as extra motivation to fight my way through to the other side of this experience. I recently watched Under the Tuscan Sun, and it's just like when Patti says to Frances (whose husband left her for another woman):  

"You know when you come across one of those empty shell people, and you think 'What the hell happened to you?' Well there came a time in each one of those lives where they are standing at a crossroads... someplace where they had to decide whether to turn left or right. This is no time to be a chicken-shit, Frances."

Today my ex moved his stuff out.

Choosing thanks.

As I sit at home with Booboo in my lap, I look at the snow outside and think of life and it's unexpected turns. Sometimes life's surprises are exhilarating, sometimes they're excruciating, and sometimes they're just...different.

It's American Thanksgiving, but since that's not a holiday here, it feels like a normal day. Thursday. Except it's not just Thursday, so I am choosing to focus on what I am thankful for today. I have a purring Booboo in my lap, I have a home to live in that is within walking distance of most of what I need, I have a job I enjoy (and freelance opportunities I love), and family and friends that love me and support me. I am lucky...blessed...and thankful. I'm also thankful for hope that everything will be alright in the end and that life has good things in store for me in the future, despite the hell of these past months. It may not always feel that way, but I will choose to believe it anyways. Life does have a way of surprising us, after all.

Morning coffee.

 

As I was walking home from the grocery store the other day, I realized that I had lost track of how many times I have been to the grocery store since July. I suppose that is a good sign.

Digging before the ground freezes.

"It doesn’t go away, the importance you put on one single person, the value that he had for you, the assumption that you would lie beside him forever; the hope you had for your union is so great that the loss of it doesn’t go away. To move forward you have to dig an internal grave and intentionally put that hope to rest. People will try to help you, but you must do it yourself. You bury it like a body in the earth and pray that whatever it was for you will give life to something else—like a tree—and hope that with every year that new life will become bigger, stronger, and more beautiful. But that loss doesn’t ever go away, not entirely."
-Isabel Gillies, A Year and Six Seconds: A Love Story (p. 32)

So we signed the divorce paperwork. It was the saddest thing I have ever done in my life.

Around here (in no particular order).

• On Saturday, I opened the fridge and found the cocoa powder in there. Oops.
• I have only been to the grocery store twice since June. I have been to the market at the Old Port twice or so for fresh veggies and to the corner convenience store a lot. Somehow this is working for me.
• I am working on a challenging and fun artistic freelance project.
• Did the title of this post make anyone else think of Counting Crows circa 1994?
• I only have about a month more with Booboo and that thought makes me so terribly sad I can't think about it too long.
• This summer I finally found coffee beans that make coffee I really enjoy. I used to like the beans from this one place near my apartment, but then the coffee started tasting like dirt. After I inquired about why their coffee now tasted like "la terre," as I put it in French, I found out that they had changed the blend's mix of beans. Unable to find anything better, we drank overpriced, dirt-flavoured coffee with a hint of "burnt" for months. Finally, I decided to experiment with beans from a different place in the neighborhood. My first try was an improvement but a little weak; the second try was perfect. I am now on my third bag of that coffee. No more dirt coffee for me.
• I finally ordered beautiful embossed stationery with both our names on it in mid-June. A lifetime supply probably. I went with stationery instead of an address stamp, because I figured our address was likely to change at some point. It was a little too risky. I had the beautiful cream correspondance cards shipped to my parents' home, and they arrived just before everything exploded. I never saw the stationery, which is probably for the best. I had been so unreasonably excited about that goregous stationary with our names embossed on it. I guess it will get recycled.
• Thankfully I had also ordered some for myself with my monogram. My dad mailed that to me, and I have been thoroughly enjoying using it.
• My car turned 20 years old in April. But I don't drive very much anymore. Maybe once a week, often less. But the car works well still, much to my surprise and happiness.
• I find I love having a life that is so local. I love walking to work and having most everything I need a short distance from where I live.
• I am not looking forward to winter coming. I keep telling myself if I can survive 'til spring life will look better. I just need to survive this death of our marriage and my life as I had expected it and make it to spring and wait on some sort of rebirth.
• Shoveling. Ugh. Do I need to say anything more?
• I have a bag of green tomatoes in the fridge. I bought them to do fried green tomatoes. I have been unable to motivate myself to do that though. My level of energy is more on the basic sandwich-level of Maslow's hierarchy of culinary needs.
• Last week I spent $11 and some change at the thrift store and got a pair of jeans, a skirt, and a top that all fit. This helps. Baggy jeans do not.
• I was undecided on the skirt but thought that for $3, it was worth a shot. Once I got it home, I realized it is kind of the perfect skirt. It is black with thin pinstripes, plus it's quick drying and ideal for travelling. A pretty great find.
• It's still raining. I don't mind.

Three haiku.

1.

My world exploded.

I am left here surrounded

by sharp shards. Alone.

2.

That day in July,

time stopped. But the pain keeps on

reverberating.

3.

The path obscured by

broken promises and dreams:

winter came early.

Before and After Birks



Photo credit: Adventures Along the Way

It's winter and I've been thinking about ways to avoid the Season of Splinters in our little apartment. As you can see from the photo, the wood floor is rather worn. We kinda like the rustic look, but we do not like the huge splinters (over an inch long sometimes!) that we get during the dry winter season, which, to be honest, is closer to about half the year here in Québec.

This past weekend, I was reorganizing my shoes and looking for ones that need repairs. I ran across these shoes I got for cheap at the Birkenstock factory in Germany over 10 years ago. Clearly they have seen better days, and they could use some leather conditioning and re-gluing of the inside liner thing. The strap on the shoe on the right of the photo had broken a year or two ago, and I had tied it in a knot to hold it together.

But sitting there on my bedroom floor surrounded by shoes (and soon-to-be splinter territory), an idea struck. Voilà! New and improved indoor shoes! (Though they are not quiet enough to wear at night since we have downstairs neighbors, so it's probably not the final splinter solution. But for now, I am happy to have a no-splinters-in-the-daytime solution.)

Photo credit: Adventures Along the Way