The summer of 40 and 100.

This was the summer of my 40th birthday and my great-aunt's 100th. Her birthday was July 2, which was a great way to reclaim that date. There was a big family reunion the week before her birthday, so I went down to where she and her children live, and my parents came up. More family met up there, then we all drove out to the middle-of-no-where West Virginia, to a camp resort where even more family people I'd never met before converged. Most were from the side of my great-aunt's late husband's family, and I didn't know them since I am from my great-aunt's side. (My grandfather was her brother.) It was great to meet and get to know the extended family.

While I was down there, before we went to the camp in no-cell-phone-reception-West-Virginia, I introduced them to my boyfriend via the magic of the Internet. We had hoped he would be able to come on the trip, but he had to work, so we did the next best thing. My second cousins were eager to meet him, and I wanted him to meet them all. As I sat down with my great-aunt and was in the process of connecting to my boyfriend using Google Chat video, I glanced over to my right and saw a stereoscope casually sitting on the table beside me. I thought about how much change my almost-centenarian great-aunt has seen in her lifetime as I watched her video chat with my boyfriend.

Because sometimes you have to throw your own parties.

I threw myself a birthday party. I knew the first part of this month might not be easy for me, so I planned ways to intentionally take care of myself. I wanted to feel surrounded by loved ones and welcome in a new year, and a birthday is a perfectly normal reason to have a party. (Unfortunately a I-survived-the-depths-of-hell party is a little less socially acceptable.) And since I didn't have someone to throw me a party, I decided to throw one for myself. This probably broke some etiquette rules, especially because I made it a potluck party, but I don't even care. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.

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.

Things Not to Say.

When someone tells you that their husband/wife/partner left them for someone else suddenly without any warning signs at all, here are some things it's probably best not to say out loud to that person.

"C'est la vie." 

3 months.

It's been three months since my husband left me for another woman. Completely out of the blue. In those first stunned weeks, I couldn't see how I would survive. I felt like I was dying. I am certain that I've cried more tears since July than I've cried during my entire life before that. Which is really weird because this was the surprise ending to the most wonderful and happy five-and-a-half years of my entire life. (The time I was with my husband, during our dating and marriage...up until the day he came home from that trip where he fell in love with her.) It's mind-boggling. And devastating. And I just don't have the ability to get my head around it. Time hasn't really helped yet with that.

With that I think I will just list some thoughts as they occur because that's about all I can muster right now:

• Last weekend I went to a free open house two-hour life drawing session. It's something I've wanted to do for over two and a half years. I used to do visual art in high school, and have only done it sporadically since getting into theatre. It was fun. I want to draw and paint more.
  

Digging in.

This is my second year to choose a verb as a theme for the year, inspired by my blogger friend, Fiona. In January, after thinking about my artistic goals and dreams, I chose "dig in" for 2013. I had been trying to pursue my dreams here in Quebec these past couple of years I've lived here. But on New Year's Day, after another grant rejection letter, I realized that this was the year I needed to really work to try to make my dreams happen. Even harder than the hard work I had already been doing throughout 2012 and before that. I knew that more determination and persistence were called for if I wanted a crack at the life I envisioned. And I knew that if I didn't give it my absolute best effort, I would regret it forever.

Dig in.

So I made choices to do just that. I stopped some part-time work I did on the side (that I was doing in addition to my main day job) so that I could focus my energy and time on the artistic pursuits. And wouldn't you know, somehow I got a few paid artistic gigs that balanced out the financial side of having stopped the other non-artistic work. In June, I looked at the past half-year and felt good about my progress and excited to see where the rest of the year would lead.

Then July happened. Overnight, my life became a landslide.

I have spent the last two months holding on so that I won't be washed away by it all. Or, much more accurately, it's my friends and family that have been firmly holding onto me. Abandonned and stunned, all I had enough sense to do was reach out. And they grabbed me and held me tight as the debris thundered by and the rain beat down.

Thankful.

I have an amazing group of friends, and I am thankful beyond words for them. Friends from long ago and from recent years; those that are here and those that are far away. Even friends I have not yet met in person, and the new friend I made as I got off the plane at Midway airport in Chicago last week.

I am thankful for them all.

Broken.

It's been 4 weeks and two days since my world fell apart.

But I am still here.

Surrounded by the devastation of broken dreams, I know I have no choice but to try to figure out how to get the hell back up.

They say the grief process is not linear, and now I can say I agree with that. There are just so many triggers. I never know when I'll encounter one, but I am trying to just let myself experience the pain as the waves hit.

And hit they do. While at work, walking down the street, climbing the steep stairway to my apartment, or hanging out at a BBQ. I am getting used to crying in all sorts of places. Thankfully I am surrounded by a supportive community.

They say the only way out is through. So I am trying to make my way through.

I find solace in the river and water. Usually I walk to the water on my lunch break because it helps somehow. I am thankful for working near the water, loving friends and family, Booboo, daisies, waterproof mascara, sunglasses and my favorite dresses.

The worst month of my life (thus far, and I surely hope, ever) is over. Here's to a less bad August.

Living Abroad (and Reflecting on Home)

I just read Chelsea Fagan's What Happens When You Live Abroad. Feeling inspired to write, I opened up a new post and quickly started to entitle it "Leaving Home." But then I stopped. What do I mean when I say "leaving home"? It surely isn't as simple as that for me. "Leaving One Physical Place for Another and Discovering Something New About Home" might be closer.

The other day my dad sent me a few emails with charts of our genealogical history going WAY back. Back to the "Old World." When I looked at the branches going back over several hundred years, it's clear that our roots are mostly in the general region of my home of origin. Basically my ancestors established themselves in one state and made their way to the neighboring state and stayed there. This is the state where I grew up, as did my parents and grandparents and others before them. Our family history is definitively there. But when I go back far enough, there is that one very distant ancestor who was born in England then died in the "New World." He is the one that changed the path of our family tree by leaving everything that was familiar to make a life in a new place.

And here I am, an immigrant in another country, with the realization that I have made a similar jump that impacts our family history. I feel a little like I betrayed my roots and The Sense of Place of my family.

Well, I'm still here.

Hello! It's been a while. Nothing dramatic has been going on here; it's just been cold and wintry and I guess I have been hibernating a bit. Or maybe it's that I blog so much for work? Who knows. Or quite possibly, it could be the impending deadline of a big project I'm working on. Which reminds me...I should probably be working on that now.

Anyhow, before I go back to that project, I wanted to share some links of a number of interesting articles I've recently read that address societal changes in regards to marriage, singlehood, and concepts of community. Enjoy!

• The Atlantic's All The Single Ladies
• The New York Times' The M.R.S. And the Ph.D.
• The New York Times' One's A Crowd
• The New York Times' Alone Again, Naturally
• The New York Times' Room for Debate: Being Alone Together
  

First Thanksgiving Dinner in Canada.

I forgot today is Thanksgiving until I got an e-card that reminded me that (American) Thanksgiving is, in fact, today. Here in Québec, they obviously don't celebrate American Thanksgiving, but neither do they celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving (which comes earlier anyways). Last year, I did not celebrate either Thanksgiving and I missed it, so this year I decided to host dinner this coming weekend for some of S's family. I will be the only American at our Thanksgiving celebration, and most of the conversation will be in French, which I find pretty great and also kinda funny. I am looking forward to sharing this part of my culture with S's family.

In Chicago, I used to host an annual Day-After-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving Potluck and I miss that. Since I am an only child and our celebrations eventually became just me and my parents, one year I decided it would be fun to invite a bunch of Chicago friends, and we celebrated the day after so that more people could come. We once had 16 people there, and we often had to eat on chairs in a big circle in the living room, with our plates in our laps. I have great memories of those celebrations with my family and friends and am so glad to have had those years of potluck Thanksgivings.

However, having only been in our new apartment since July, I still don't quite feel established enough to host a big shindig. Plus, it would probably be weird to have a potluck for Thanksgiving here, since it isn't celebrated here and the guests are not people who celebrate Thanksgiving. But I think I can handle a sit-down dinner for five adults and two kids. I have cooked before for seven adults, so I have experience with this size of group. But I have never cooked a whole Thanksgiving dinner without my parents' help, so I am a little nervous about the timing of it all and have created a spreadsheet schedule to organize every dish and every task that needs to be done. I hope this level of organization will help it come together and that I can pull off making all the dishes I want to do, some of which are new dishes. (Yeah, I like to live on the edge like that and often try new dishes for company.) And I still have to figure out what to do about the turkey. As a mostly vegetarian, I am not going to cook one. So...I guess I will look at the grocery store to see if there is an already cooked turkey or chicken I could purchase from the deli, and then do the rest of the dishes myself. Or maybe skip the meat part altogether, like I usually do when I cook? I like dressing with gravy (and no turkey), but I don't know if it would be weird for others. Though since they don't do Thanksgiving here, maybe they wouldn't miss it? I enjoy hosting and I am looking forward to it. The only thing is that I often (almost always?) run late in life and when I host people for dinner, I often get stressed in "crunch time" when trying to pull it all together. Hence, my work to prevent this by creating the extensive schedule that begins with tasks today. I will not be trying to iron tablecloths right before guests arrive this year. :) And I am excited to try this new recipe for delicious-looking yeast dinner rolls.

If this goes well, I'd like to host a drop-in Christmas gathering in December for a larger group? Maybe one weekend afternoon with appetizers and desserts? Or an evening, but make it potluck? Our apartment is not quite ready for that level of event right now though since we still are getting settled. Last night we completely re-arranged the living room and now have a configuration of furniture that is infinitely more pleasing. Before it looked like we had thrown everything in the living room with the couch in a bad orientation and had not unpacked much; now our living room looks like a living room. We are slowly making progress in finding the places where things truly belong in this apartment. We lost a room before moving into our apartment, so we have too much stuff for the size apartment we have (and almost no closets), so it has been quite a task to get organized. Plus we are combining all our stuff (since this apartment was the first time we lived with all our stuff together). I used floorplanner.com to create a floorplan for our living room and the furniture, and then could virtually experiment with various arrangements. It is an amazing (free!) tool, and I highly recommend it! Plus you can even look at your design 3-D to see how it "feels." The square shape of our living room was weird to work with, and I had to think outside of the box to fit everything in. Anyhow, now our couch floats in the middle of the room and half the room is the TV and couch area and the other half is my desk, one of our sewing machines, and a reading area. It feels pretty good so far.

Getting settled.

Moving is hard work. Physically, of course, especially if it is a DIY/DIT move, but I find moves are also emotionally exhausting. It hate that feeling of displacement while you are between places without a home base anywhere. Traveling is different because you have a home out there somewhere, even if it is far away. But moving means being in-between homes and living in that liminal space when you have to say things like "our new apartment" and "your old place in Québec" and "my apartment in Montréal" because there are just too many home-like places floating around out there making things a little confusing.

We accomplished our bizarre (and, we hope, worst-ever) move between June 21st and July 11th.* We used the help of professional movers in Montréal to move out of the apartment there (3rd floor apartment with a couch that had to be sent over the balcony to get it out!), and we were so thankful for the help of many friends and family in Québec in moving and getting settled here. S's mom graciously welcomed us to her home so we would have a place to stay while we waited 11 extra days beyond our lease start date for our bathroom to be renovated, S's friend let us store our massive amount of stuff in his warehouse for those weeks when we were apartment-less, and friends and family helped with the prep and the actual move into our new apartment. It was hot on our Québec move-in day, and everyone worked so hard helping us.** Everyone was drenched in sweat after the REMARKABLE feat of moving all our stuff into the apartment (which is one flight up) in only an hour and a half. I have absolutely no idea how that happened so quickly. S and I had for real thought it might take all day. And I had worried I might end up in tears multiple times that day from the stress of it all, but it was all exceedingly better than expected. It went really, really well and I was especially moved by the generous community that helped us.(Haha, pun not intended but I am keeping it cause it makes me laugh!)

In the week or so since move-in day, we have been unpacking and cleaning and trying to figure out where things go and maneuvering around an overwhelming amount of boxes. And trying to buy the things we need to get settled, like curtains and curtain rods and other needed apartment-y things.*** We have been trying to buy stuff second hand, for the eco-friendly aspects, and also for the thrill of discovering something we can re-purpose to fit a need.**** It is going well and over the weekend we even found an unconventional solution to a coat closet. (Our almost 100 year-old apartment doesn't have an entry coat closet, and has very pitiful closets in general. Sadly.) And we found a vintage table we love.***** More to come on that later, after we get more unpacked and take some pictures.

Settling in to a new home is a slow process, at least for us. But thankfully, Booboo seems to be handling it quite well.

*Well, really like four separate moving days: 1) My Montréal stuff to warehouse in Québec; 2) S's Québec stuff to warehouse in Québec; 3) Loading almost all our joint stuff from the warehouse into the moving truck; 4) Moving all the stuff from the truck to the apartment; 4) Some upcoming day where we will get the last of the stuff from S's dad's. Maybe in a week or two?

**That was the week of the "canicule," or heat wave, here in Québec (and elsewhere). And some of our boxes were HEAVY, as many of my Chicago friends certainly know. I am still SUPER thankful for all that help with last year's move. Boy, we have amazing friends. And we should really try to stay put for a while. :)

***This is the first time I have been in an apartment that didn't have blinds left by the previous tenant. Now I am entering a new era of being a curtain-and-curtain-rod owner.

****And we love that it is WAY less expensive too.

****Not that we needed a table at all. But we were surprised by discovering it at the flea market while looking for other things on our list. And we couldn't leave it there. Some things are like that.

Invitations in the approach of an Amish barn raising.

I realized that I never blogged about our DIY wedding invitation making experience last August, so I thought I would share in case somebody out there is considering DIY invitations.

When we started planning our wedding, one of the first things we started with was pricing how much having invitations printed would be. After realizing that they easily cost several dollars a piece, and even the very most basic (and often ugly) ones were about a dollar each, we decided maybe we should make our own. I enjoy making invitations and stationary, and we figured we could create something nicer than those cheap/ugly ones for slightly more than the least expensive cost we saw. So we priced out the supplies we would need. I think our estimate came down to $1.23 or so an invite. (This did not include the cost of a paper cutter, tape, and the punches we bought.)

Then we took a slight detour and decided to check out the kits you can buy at craft stores. We had seen some online that matched the look we were going for, and we thought this could be a low-maintenance solution. With half-off craft store coupons, it would have been cheaper too. So we bought the kit that matched our desired "look" from a craft store in the U.S., but after opening it, I was disappointed by the quality of the paper. Really disappointed. I love quality paper products and this kit was far from that. Parts of it looked like it needed ironing to be flat and some white paper had black random print smudges on the edges. After some evaluation of our situation and deciding that the invitations were very important to me, we decided to work hard and pay a little more to have invitations we would be proud of. And since we wanted to do bilingual invitations, we thought we could get what we wanted more easily if we had more control of the layout.

After deciding (for the second time) to embark on the full, "from scratch" DIY invite experience, S, my parents, and I came up with a design for the invitation. It was back in July and we were visiting my parents in the south. While we were there, and since my mom is an expert in craft-store shopping, we figured out what supplies we needed and bought it all with coupons at various craft stores. We bought a paper cutter too, since we were doing massive amounts of cutting and my dad said we needed something "professional" that could handle it. I don't know if our cutter is professional, but we did get one on the top of the spectrum available at normal craft stores. Thank goodness for all those 50% off coupons we used! We got most of the supplies we needed and took it back to Chicago.* We waited to get the black envelopes and the cards until we got back to Chicago, since I already knew where I wanted to purchase them.

Once back in Chicago, I started researching wedding invitation wording and creating drafts of the invitation, in French and in English. I started out trying to do this in Word, but then ended up teaching myself how to use Publisher because I realized I would not be able to do what I wanted in Word. Finally after many edits and the help of S's mom with the French grammar and etiquette of invitation wording, we got it down to the text wording we wanted.

Then there were some minor aesthetic disagreements about fonts. (I liked the two fonts look, but others thought that looked a little weird and wanted only one uniform font.) The initial two fonts I had thought of using were dramatically different, but I finally decided to compromise by finding two fonts that looked like close cousins of each other. A more elegant one just for our names (Freebooter) and a more standard pretty one for the other text (Monotype Corsiva, which comes normally with Microsoft Office). Because Freebooter looks like a dressed up Monotype Corsiva, I think everyone was pleased. I had the interest I wanted with two different fonts, but everything looked like it "belonged" together and did not have the jarring effect of my initial font combo proposal. I ended up really loving our font choices. Way more than my original idea...

Then I sent out an email to friends in the Chicago area asking (er, begging?) for help assembling our invites. (S was in Canada at this point.) To me, having friends help was necessary (I never-ever-ever could have finished in our short time frame otherwise), but also having those friends gather with me was unexpectedly calming. These friends kept me sane and kept the experience enjoyable. It felt like a communal effort, like what I imagine an Amish barn-raising to be, only not mandatory and with less physical labor and no expected gender roles. (Yes, two of my guy friends did help and put in HOURS of work, along with some female friends.) It did wonders to have those friends around me, successfully pushing back my feeling of being overwhelmed just by cutting, taping, sticking, and chatting.

The above pictures showed the part put together by my parents who, a week or so before, had spent a couple days cutting and assembling this external decorative strip that would eventually be wrapped around the invite. They cut the red strips and white strips; the red being slightly wider and longer than the white, so it would create a red border around the white piece. Then they attached the red and white strips together using double sided archival quality craft tape. After that, they punched out the two fleur-de-lys holes. Finally, they attached double sided tape to the ends of the strips so that they were ready to affix to the cards later in the process. As an added bonus, they divided the strips into groups of twenty-five so we could keep track of how many we had, and they wrapped up the little punched out fleur-de-lys holes in red and white for potential use in another project. Because of the massive amounts of punching they did, they went through two or three of the punches. Evidently those are made for more occasional punching and not repetitive and frequent use like this project.

I got the black envelopes and cards that would be the main "base" of the invite at Paper Source in the Chicago area. My friend L went with me on a lunch break one day, and we had a quick task of figuring out how many packages I needed and how many extra we would need to buy to get the bulk discount. Since our numbers were so close to the number needed for the discount, we bought a few extra to get the discount. (As a side note: weeks before my mom and I had briefly thought of making the cards ourselves by cutting them down from larger paper, but after one or two failed attempts to get a folded card with 90 degree corners and a clean fold and some frustrated, stressed tears by me, we all decided my sanity was worth the $20 or so difference in cost to buy the cards pre-made. And a huge plus was that the cards and envelopes matched exactly and looked great together.) These cards from Paper Source were great and I was very pleased with the quality and the customer service! I love that store.

At the first night where friends were coming to help for our invitation "barn-raising", I was having the font crisis mentioned above and had not yet printed the invites. So, just before they arrived, I finalized my font choice and started printing on my ink jet printer. As I printed and let the pages fully dry, my friends arrived and we established a kind of assembly line approach. I printed the white text pages for the inside, one friend cut the pages with the paper cutter to the proper size**, one friend attached the white invitation text parts (one French, one English) to the inside of the card, and the next friend attached the wrap-around strip. Broken down into parts like this, the process went pretty quickly, but if I had had to do this alone, it would have taken forever!

After they were all assembled, I had another friend who asked if she could take the invites and the envelopes home with her overnight and stuff them for me (while I was packing for my move and trying to get the addresses in the spreadsheet so we could print labels for the invites.)*** Meanwhile two other friends volunteered to help create a label design into which we could import the addresses and print. I had bought large labels already, with the thought that I wanted to use black envelopes and print the recipients' address, our return address, and some sort of wedding image/motif on the label we would attach. But I had no idea how to do that, and these friends stepped in to figure it out.****

On the way out of town, right before our vintage jewelry shopping adventure, we stopped at the post office to mail the invites. I was working myself up to the experience (because my then-neighborhood post office is notoriously mean and many people rant on Yelp about it) but it turned out to be a fine experience, other than a long time in line, and the clerks did not make me angry or cry out of frustration. (Which was often my experience there.) They were quite nice, actually, and went to the effort of finding enough pretty stamps for the envelopes, which ended up being the wedding ring ones. I didn't care what stamps went on there as long as they weren't ugly, so this was fine. We stamped them all then dropped our U.S. invites and some international ones in the mail, and saved all the Canadian ones to mail from Canada several days later.

All said and done, it was a LOT of work for me and a LOT of friends and family who donated hours and hours of time to help. It did end up being less expensive than ordering invites (well, invites that were anything more the very cheapest ones available), but what was most special to me was to be able to create an invite that was very "us", with the French and English, and with the colors and design we had chosen. It makes me smile to know that our invitation was truly was one of a kind, made just for us with people that love us. We got some good feedback on it, and I am kinda proud of the fact that our invitations looked a little unconventional as far as a normal wedding invite goes (at least where I come from), but still remained classy. I loved using our fun labels (S was great at applying the labels and stamps, and very precise at sticking them on straight, which was surprisingly difficult for me!) And I know it is standard to use calligraphy and black envelopes are probably a wedding "no-no" to some, but we didn't care and it felt just right for us!

 

*A fun benefit of making the invites is that there was some leftover supplies and I have been using them for business cards and have enough cards and envelopes to make some cool stationary later. And the paper cutter has totally come in handy many times. Who knew how useful they were?


**For some reason, the act of cutting the paper down into the proper size while keeping it centered (there were two on each page that had to be cut out) almost sent me over the edge. Thankfully, I was rescued by my (male) friends, M and D who manned the paper cutter and did a FABULOUS job cutting them down exactly right. 

***We skipped calligraphy, handwriting, RSVP cards, and inner envelopes and I am still so thankful we made each of those choices! It saved trees, expense, effort, and reduced stress.

****How did we end up with such amazing and giving friends? I feel so thankful. All these wedding-helping friends saved me from countless tears and from losing the little sanity I was holding on to at that point, less than two weeks before an international move and about seven weeks before the wedding. As did the many friends who about a week or two later helped me pack and move. And then the friends who helped with even more wedding stuff before and at the wedding. I can not say enough how much all that amazing help those few weeks carried me through one of the most stressful times I have experienced.