House Hunting part deux

The whole process of house hunting, which admittedly began as something of a lark because I wanted more room for art on my walls, has ended up being quite an experience.  Personally, I have never disliked renting.  Yes, I'm paying someone else's equity; I get that.  Yes, I have been forced to move house because of my building being sold.  Yes, I've had crazy - and I mean crazy - landlords.  I've also never had to fix my own roof, replace my own furnace or appliances, do my own maintenance, or any of the like.  I've been allowed to paint, to personalise and to garden.  As far as I'm concerned, this has amounted to a good deal for me.  It also suited my somewhat transient lifestyle.  I take risks and move across the country, take new jobs in new cities, and use travel (and moving) as a way to escape life's problems.  I'm not good at settling down. 

On Friday, we put in an offer on a house and it was accepted.  I had a minor fit in the car while we waited for the realtors to finish their negotiations.  Glenn got concerned because I stopped communicating.  Words became noises and when he asked me if I was okay, all I could answer with was, "I love you."  As sentiments go, it's a nice one, but not really an answer to the question.  I imagine what I experienced was something not unlike the feelings people have when they get married.  It was a sudden, horrifying realisation that I was doing something big - really big - and making a major life commitment.  I was also making a very clear commitment to Glenn and our lives together.  When words finally returned to me, I called my mom.  First things first, after all.  Then I said to Glenn, "How anyone could think an engagement ring is a bigger symbol of commitment than buying a house together is nuts.  You can skip the engagement ring and go straight to wedding ring, okay?  We just bought a house."

Suddenly, I'm settling down. 

The house is not in the neighbourhood we were hoping to move in to, but after viewing something like twenty homes, it became evident that with the money we were able to spend, we wouldn't be getting what we wanted unless we looked further afield.  I won't be able to walk to work, but on nice days I'll be able to ride my bicycle.  We're literally three houses south of a park on a dead-end street.  We have what is very likely one of the largest homes in the neighbourhood, with plenty of room for me to have an office, Glenn to have a practice space, while still having a guest bedroom and room for kids.  The house dates from 1906 and has the structural trappings of the period - high ceilings, hardwood - but at some point the original mouldings and details were removed.  While this is a bit sad, it allows for Glenn and I to put a very personal mark on what amounts to a very blank canvas.  We're already having a conversation about whether we need a formal dining room, or whether it would be better to have an adaptable, funky and elegant, multi-purpose living/eating space for entertaining.  The back yard is also a blank canvas.  It is wide, long and stunningly boring.  We'll start planning its landscaping in the winter.

Of course, this is all contingent on the house passing its home inspection.  I suspect it will, but you can never be too sure and there's no way we'd waive an inspection.  The closing won't occur until the beginning of January, which will give us a bit of time to address the terrible carpets that need pulling out and some of the more agregious paint colours.  Otherwise, it's mostly in move-in condition.  I admit that I'm pretty excited by the large, blank art-ready walls and many more spaces that will need decorating. 

I hadn't realised my desire to nest was this strong.  Is this also part of settling down?  Maybe.

TEN YEARS?

Holy shit.  I've had this blog for 10 years.  I haven't used it a great deal in the most recent years, but I never plan to delete it.  Maybe I'll back-date my old livejournal entries into it.  Maybe one day this will form part of my memoires.  I don't know, but I'm amazed I've lasted as long as I did, even though I naively thought I would never call it a "blog" when I started. 

I was studying computer animation when I began this journal.  The world had changed a month and a half before, when icons of my childhood came crashing down.  I was living in Toronto, working at the ROM and at Heretic and just barely existing at the poverty line.  I was dating Rick.  This blog would see me through that relationship, which taught me how to love a man and how to respect him for who he was, and then it would see me through the tumultuous long-distance affair with Gareth. (By the way, Rick, congratulations on your upcoming marriage to Kat !)  It saw me in Toronto, working for a politician, and selling my art (or not selling as the case tended to be) at conventions.  It saw me go back to school after a period of finding myself.  It saw renewed enthusiasm for learning and direction and personal ambition.  It witnessed death and loss, anger and joy and contentment.  It saw me abandon security for risk as I moved first for an internship to Winnipeg and then terrifyingly far away to Whitehorse.  It followed me back to Ontario into the life I now lead.  I can look back and see constants relected here, and the changeable, and the things I thought would be forever that ended up the least permanent of all.  I can see myself growing into my skin and becoming a person I both respect and admire.

A toast, then, to longevity and commitment, and the written word.

Modernity Comes to the Forest

Since Monday night, I've been at my cottage, which is less a house in the forest and more a rustic cabin.  We have some modern conveniences, but also some notable throw-backs. 

When I was a child, I would inform my mother that when I was grown-up, I would winterise the cottage and live here.  I had great plans for bringing the little five-room camp into the 20th century.  By the time I was in my teens, I had grown quite accustomed to the propane lights and a refrigerator that needed its pilot light lit.  Unfortunately, the appliances were getting old, breaking down and it was becoming increasingly difficult to get them repaired.  And Superior Propane, long the supplier of the gas we used to run those appliances was no longer close by, but a substantial drive down the highway and not remotely convenient.  As my mother priced out replacing the dying propane appliances and compared the costs to electrifying the camp, it became clear we were going to have to modernise.  14-year old me was utterly horrified.  As far as I was concerned, there had been plenty of change in my short life and the cottage was a constant.  It did not change.

The first summer we had electricity, the camp was struck by lightning and I was electrocuted.  See?  That would never have happened if we'd stayed on propane.  That is a story for another time, however.

As I write this, Glenn is showering outside and the electric pump (which replaced the propane pump that required pulling a beligerant rip-cord to start) clicks on and off, I am admittedly grateful for electricity.  For instance, we now can shower with, more importantly, hot water.  Amazingly, it took us a full ten years after electrifying of lake and sink bathing to realise we could rig up a shower outside (we do not have a bathroom). So it's probably fair to say that change happens in fits and starts.  We also have a splendid toaster oven and a counter-top roaster which we enjoy using for big roasts.  I take issue with the microwave that my mother installed, and stalwartly refuse to make use of it for anything but a breadbox.  And yet, thanks to Glenn's fancy "spacephone" and the free data usage he gets for working for a cellular company, we have Internet.  I find this far less troubling than a microwave.  I'm not even troubled by a window-mounted air conditioner, but the microwave makes me furious.  And God help us if a TV ever turns up.

Still, when I am here, I feel like I am in a land that time forgot, regardless of whether I write by hand on paper with a pen, or type into my blog on my laptop.  Yes, Highway 50 is finally open and, yes, I can hear it, but it's not any less intrusive than the aeroplanes and helicopters that fly low overhead, or the sound of the river rafters' bus and truck passing on the road in the summer.  I thought I might be horrified by the 50, but, unlike the microwave, I've adapted to it readily.  Go figure.

We leave here tomorrow.  Tonight I will put the non-essential pillows away in plastic bags (to keep the mice out) and strip the bedding off the guest bed and the slip covers off the couches.  Tomorrow morning, we will roll down the window blinds and shut off the power, put the cats in their carriers and hit the road back to London.  Sometimes people ask me if it's worth it to drive seven hours for a week's worth of vacation and I never hesitate.  It's worth it.  Every bit of being here in this land where time moves in fits and starts is worth it. 
Except the microwave.

On the passage of time and love

It's midsummer. The crickets have started chirping in the evenings and the nights are perceptibly shorter. When I drive through the country, the farmers are harvesting wheat, cutting their second hay and there is local corn at road-side stands. Where has the summer gone? Where has the time gone? In 25 days, I'll celebrate my 34th birthday. Many of my friends, if not most, are in long-term committed relationships, as am I, and probably half of them have children. I am measuring time in the growth of babies and the long periods between visits. It feels like yesterday that I was preparing to go off to my internship in Winnipeg, but it was six years ago.

Six years ago, Rick and I broke up. He'll be marrying his longtime girlfriend this Hallowe'en. I won't be attending, I guess. He once told me that he thought it would be weird to have an ex at a wedding, even if they got along. I have no reason to expect an invitation, but it makes me a bit sad I won't be invited. Six years ago, I met Gareth. Not long after, I had fallen completely and utterly in love with him. Five years on and he's not talking to me. His new girlfriend, I guess, feels threatened by me, despite an ocean between us. His family have told me that it's not just me, though, it's everyone. Since meeting her and especially since they moved in together in the spring, he's cut everyone out.

I was looking at Gareth's old deviantArt gallery, which he hasn't updated since 2006 when we were headily in love and full of dreams and wishful thinking. He had a passion and a drive then, which he's all but abandoned. What happened to his determination to make films? He's working for an insurance firm. I don't know. I mustn't judge. But it's certainly easier to cut off the people you love than have to examine your life and what they may represent, I guess. It's sad, I think. There was so much going on in his head when I met him, so much creative energy desperate for an outlet. I won't blame it on his girlfriend, it's not her fault. He was losing himself before he met her, but now all of his closest friends and family have lost him. Looking at his old gallery was like looking at the digital traces of a dead person, archived forever on the Internet.

In October, three years will have passed since I met Glenn. Glenn, who I took a chance on, because we both had relationship baggage. I didn't expect to love again after Gareth. I hoped, at best, to fill a void and to find a measure of comfort and satisfaction. We joked about my fear of commitment, yet I suggested we move in, I pushed for it to happen despite a long held fear of co-habitation. I forgive his foibles and love his cat. I push him and take him out of his comfort zones the same way he helps ground me and keep me from floating off. I am extremely lucky to have learned that, indeed, I could love again, and completely. Glenn is a deep, still water, difficult to fathom while apparently simple of need and desire. Nearly three years on and I am still learning new things about him. He isn't always easy to like, because there's a broodiness to him and he encircles himself in walls built of his own melancholy thoughts, but the love, support, humour, kindness and strength he possesses and shares with me makes a more than even trade. He adores me in a gentle way, never overbearing or smothering, just always there. I love him very, very much. I am lucky and I am grateful.

Now, if he'd only just get off the pot.

Life Decisions and a Very Nice Holiday

If you're a friend on my livejournal, you know the gist of my academic intentions up to this point. If not, well, allow me to summarise.

I had an awesome time in Halifax and fell in love with it. I also had the opportunity to meet with faculty in two departments: Interdisciplinary PhD and History. I hadn't initially planned to visit the History Department, as I had no intention of applying to it. Unfortunately, every part of my visit to the InterDiscPhD co-ordinator made me uncomfortable. Firstly, they have no department headquarters. Dalhousie actually took away their building. They have no office space, which means no space for grad students to work. They don't really assist much in the locating of research or TA jobs. The application process is unfathomably complex and they basically want you to have a fully fleshed out PhD research proposal before you begin. Because of the nature of the programme, it's not unheard of for students with particularly narrow focuses to get stranded upon the retirement/death/transfer of one of their faculty advisors. Plus, the co-ordinator didn't tell me where to meet her, or even remember that I was meeting her. I had to wait half an hour while she was on the phone, after trudging from place to place and asking directions multiple times trying to find where she was located. And then she told me she'd thought she'd cancelled my appointment because she was recovering from being ill. Oh man, every possible negative vibe a person could get, I got. I was happy she was so honest about the programme's shortfalls, but I came away from the meeting wondering if I was cut out for doctoral studies at all. It was really disheartening.

In discussion with Deanna (with whom Glenn and I were staying) and Glenn, I began to rethink just what I was looking for in further education and realised that perhaps it wasn't me who was not cut out for it, but that particular programme that wasn't suitable for me. I decided to contact the Department of History and see whether the PhD co-ordinator could meet with me on such short notice. So, I began my visit with a negative experience at Dalhousie and ended my week with an amazing one. I really liked the history co-ordinator. He was approachable, genial and humourous. He clearly articulated the diversity of the programme and the parameters for getting accepted to it. We talked about my interests and they definitely mesh with the larger interests of the faculty and we both got genuinely excited talking about some of my particular areas of knowledge. While I wouldn't be able to do a project-based thesis, they're very strict on that, there's certainly no reason why I couldn't work with material culture and artefacts during my research. Perhaps the best part of the programme, in my mind, is that there is no coursework. The whole four years is devoted to the research and working toward the thesis. I think that's brilliant. The big catch was that I had to apply to SSHRC for funding before my Dalhousie application could even be considered and the SSHRC deadline was a month later.

I tried very hard to meet the deadline. I even managed to get referees on short notice. What I couldn't get on short notice (and short of cash) were the necessary transcripts from my various schools. Leicester, in particular, required me to send a cheque and then wait for the cheque to clear (up to one month), before transcripts could be mailed. Even had I gotten it together immediately after returning from vacation, I still couldn't have made the deadline. I made the difficult decision to delay my application by a year in order to make sure I could have everything I needed and not be rushed. It gives me an extra year to try to get some conference presentations under my belt and fight for a publication at the museum. I'm short on both and they will look at my academic participation at that level in judging my application, both for SSHRC and for school. In fact, this weekend, I am writing some proposals to upcoming conferences to see if I can get myself out there. Exciting.

Halifax was amazing. We pretty much ate and drank ourselves around the town and surrounding country. We took the train from London to Halifax, which took a day and a half and was totally worth it. Waking up at dawn in Eastern Quebec with the Laurentians crimson with changing colours and eating delicious breakfast in the dining car made the whole trip. It didn't hurt that the guy sitting behind us was a guitar wholesaler, either. Well, that part was good for Glenn, at any rate. I got a bit tired of the steady stream of big-eyed oohing over tobacco-burst Les Paul copies... I don't even know what I just typed there. That was from memory, not true understanding. Anyway, we visited many very old cemeteries and historic sites (Citadel Hill, for instance, Pier 21, etc.) and got to enjoy Annapolis Royal on the 300th anniversary of its founding (even though it was actually about 100 years older than that). We ate traditional foods like Rappie Pie and oatcakes and drank delicious microbrewed beer. Glenn took me for a more-or-less-anniversary dinner at McKelvie's (Delicious Fishes Dishes) where he was utterly revolted by my devouring of a lobster. We visited Peggy's Cove and the Swiss Air 111 memorial. AND, I even got to see the grave of Prime Minister Tupper ! I did a project on him when I was 10. He was one of Canada's shortest serving PMs, but he's a hero in Nova Scotia. I have a bizillion beautiful photos, which perhaps I'll manage to upload somewhere at some point. Mainly, life's been very hectic since August and I never have the time. Anyway, our holiday was amazing and the weather was gorgeous.

So that's a brief update on life.

Okay, here's one photo - Tupper's grave !



Is that a patriotic flag flying or what? Timing is everything.

Those Pesky Life Decisions (part two)

My summer was great, how was yours?

In all seriousness, my summer was pretty fantastic. Although we didn’t go to England and I didn’t get to attend my graduation at Leicester, we did go to my cottage. My mother bought the place 42 years ago and we have steadily used it ever since. Glenn likes it there and, of course, I adore it. We packed up the cats and hit the road for Quebec, spending almost two weeks in the forest by a lake. It was the first time in a long while that I was not actively working on a project while there. Last year, both visits were spent heavily focused on my dissertation (which if I didn’t mention before, received distinction) and the previous year I was definitely doing other school work. This year, while I did do some research for work, it was leisurely and enjoyable and not the sole purpose for my seeking solitude.

There were visits with family and friends, old and new, dandling of babies on my knee, trips home to see Mom, long hacks on the horse and a couple of divine days spent at the beach. Sure, I was busy at work, what with an exhibition looming in September, and my stress level was rising, but I was able to mostly burn it off in positive activities such as rec-league softball and multiple birthday celebrations.

And then it was over.

Quite suddenly, it seemed, summer was over, the days were growing shorter and my deadlines were rushing at me and piling up at my feet. These responsibilities, mainly of a professional nature, left me with little time to work on the PhD applications I was planning on getting underway. As of today, I have managed only to secure one referral confirmation and have emailed one of the universities I will be applying to in order to set up a visit or interview with the department. That would be Dalhousie University, located in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for those following at home. Dal is a very good school and it offers a unique interdisciplinary PhD programme that would, I think, suit my purposes very well. As it happens, Glenn and I are going to Halifax in eight-days’ time to visit a friend and I am hoping to check out the campus and meet with the programme co-ordinator. Glenn adores Halifax. It’s his favourite city. Excluding an unscheduled stop-over on a flight to Holland some twenty-six years ago, I have no experience with it, but I’ve heard really wonderful things.

The other school to which I am assuredly applying is Queen’s University in Kingston, ON. They have a PhD in Cultural Studies that is interdisciplinary in its very nature and apparently similarly structured (or could be) to the programme at Dalhousie. The added feature of going to Queen’s is that I could possibly mesh my studies with the conservation/museum studies programme there, and potentially develop projects in conjunction with their incredible costume collection or the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. This is a stronger point in its favour than working with the costume history programme at Dalhousie. Anything that actively connects social history and material culture with museums is favourable.

To this date, I have not yet done anything about my application to Queen’s, but I will probably sort that out before we leave on vacation. Queen’s requires a letter of intent before you apply, which kind of frightens me. Queen’s has very high standards, and even though I am a professional museum curator and received my MA with Merit from one of the UK’s top-five rated universities (several years in a row), I still think of myself as a lazy underachiever. It’s safe to say that although I have periods of weak work-ethic, I am far from an underachiever and, indeed, take great pride in my work. Still, a PhD is a big deal and I can’t help thinking that because my MA was done by distance (which in my belief is actually harder than doing it on campus) it will seem somehow lesser of a degree. That’s right, I haven’t even sent them my letter of intent and I’m fretting already.

Even though the admissions office stresses that you do not need to submit a research proposal and that you merely need to state the area in which you plan on researching, I feel I’m at a great disadvantage because I do not know what I want to study, except the vagaries of wearable material culture from within a Canadian context, and the challenge of creating a balanced, representative collection. Or, sometimes I still think about returning to the work I was doing with Native beadwork in the Yukon (which could form part of this, I suppose), or perhaps the interplay of cultural strata and questions of form versus function in early Canada.

And then, when it all becomes so frightening that I find myself balking, I think about staying where I am and writing books about the museum collection here. Except there isn’t any money in the budget for it, so the chances of getting a publication of note under my belt while working for this institution are pretty unlikely. At that point in the thought process, I mostly just want to go home and curl up with my cats and a video game and switch off my brain all together.

Coming up in what will surely be part three of my Pesky Life Decision posts, I’ll talk about the application process as I’m slogging through it.

A new look. Again. And other stuff

You know what? Let's just talk about the "other stuff". Which other stuff? Let's talk about Glenn.

Glenn is my boyfriend. He's a kind, giving man, funny, articulate, and damn smart and he lives with a quacky cat. He plays guitar and sings, impersonates voices and works as a retail manager. Sometimes he worries too much.

I met him in the fall, October, to be exact, on plentyoffish.com right about the time when I'd decided to give it up. I'd met and dated a few nice (and not so nice) guys and the novelty had worn off. I was taking what was essentially one last survey of what was out there when I came across a profile with a goofy, but not unattractive guy staring out, accompanied by what was probably the most open and honest bio I'd seen. So I sent him a message.

We had our first date at the Alex P. Keaton, my favourite (lately closed) pub in London. By the time I'd finished my first pint, I'd informed him that the photos on his profile didn't do him justice, because he was "kind of hot." I still maintain this. By two pints and a bit, my inner monologue had leaked out and I stated quite bluntly, "You know, I'd totally shag you silly." He seemed taken aback, but not displeased.

Many doubts about my feelings for Gareth made me freak out a bit in the beginning, and I'd be lying if I said they didn't sometimes catch me off-guard now, because they do. But I like Glenn. A lot. And since New Years or so we've been exclusive. I don't know where this relationship will go, or how long it will last, but it's good and healthy and I care for him a great deal. So that's the story about Glenn.

Or at least part of it. I could talk more, but I don't know if I feel comfortable doing so in this forum. Funny, eh?