Busy Nothings

Ava's very first road trip. That's Mount Robson reflected, and she is SO excited. Remember road trips with your family as a kid? I do. It was always very exciting except for the part where my dad made us get out of bed at 4 a.m. so we could be in line for the first ferry in the morning. Yup, the joy of living on an Island in those days (pre-Confed Bridge) was having to wait in line for the 6 a.m. ferry to the mainland. Yeesh. Anyhow, we rarely travelled all that far, maybe to Lunenburg to see the boats, or Cocagne for the boat races (see a boat theme here?), or even to Cape Breton to do the Cabot Trail. My husband remembers driving from British Columbia to Manitoba every summer. He claims his dad told them to go to the bathroom at home 'cause they weren't stopping again until Manitoba. Now that we have our own children we know the frustration of having a small but demanding voice coming from the backseat every half-hour, "I have to peeee...

Books are my drug of choice. When I don't have a book, I am thinking about getting one. I have books in every room of the house, and I carry my e-reader around just in case I can snatch even just a little fix while I wait outside the school for my kids or at a stoplight. Just kidding about the stoplight. Really. As addictions go, I suppose reading is a good one to have, although my husband might think otherwise when he is trying for the third time to ask me a question and I just look up blankly from my book and then continue to ignore him. I still love real paper books with pages, but I love my e-reader as well, so I alternate between the two. A couple of real books, a couple of e-books. My usual goal is about 100 books a year. Sometimes I reach the goal, sometimes I don't. I am a bibliophile. Now that I am on sabbatical from the library, I really miss the day-to-day book chat that has always been my favourite part of working there. One of the greatest compliments I e...

Just when I think about how difficult it feels at times to set up life in a new place, I get a reminder that we have a head start on settling that so many don't have. At least we are in our own familiar country, where people speak in languages we understand (mostly) and every step we take is not a struggle to survive and fit in. My youngest daughter goes to daycare part-time at the local association for newcomers, where she stands out as a newcomer of a different sort, an Anglo-Saxon Canadian newcomer. Let's just say she glows there. It was her idea. She was bored at home with me in the afternoons, so she said, and wanted to play with other children. The other kids are from many different parts of the world, and we both love that. She talks about her friends from Saudi Arabia, Africa and other countries she didn't even know existed before. Today we saw a woman sitting, her face turned toward the window, her beautifully-embroidered clothes covering all but her sandall...