Author: Rae

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Another "No Update" Update

I just survived another rent collection day. I can’t believe I only have three left! Even though I will have ultimately spent a year in Lethbridge, it really doesn’t feel that way since I’ve changed location and circumstances.

I’m having fun working on the route I’ll take in the fall, trying to cram in as many states I haven’t been to as possible. I’d like to be able to hit about half of them going east and then the other half when I come back west. And then I’ll just have to schedule a trip to Hawaii. 😉

For those who are curious, these are the States I still haven’t set foot in:

1) Alabama
2) Arkansas
3) Hawaii
4) Idaho
5) Iowa
6) Kansas
7) Kentucky
8) Louisiana
9) Mississippi
10) Missouri
11) Nebraska
12) New Mexico
13) Ohio
14) Oklahoma
15) South Dakota
16) Tennessee
17) Texas
18) Utah
19) Wyoming

I think it’d be easy to figure out a round trip circuit that would include all of these States except Hawaii as they are all clustered together. I’ve basically done the entire east and west coasts, New England, and the states around the Great Lakes, plus Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado. That leaves me most of the midwest (including Wyoming), the southwest (including Utah), and the south.

“I can’t wait to get back on the road again”

The weather here is still surprisingly decent. We had a nasty snow storm on Wednesday, but it’s since warmed up (all I needed today was my fleece sweater). That said, this is my least favourite weather: it warms up during the day so everything melts… and then it gets frigid at night and everything freezes. Can we say slick?

Miranda is doing well. I haven’t measured the temperature inside her with just the one heater, but we haven’t really hit frigid yet except for a couple of nights. I’ve lived in her in this kind of weather with just the one heater and been comfortable, so I’m not worried about anything at this point. I do keep hoping for free daylight hours in warmish weather to get some work done in her. I’d like to take advantage of the rig being cat-free to do a really thorough deep clean and de-furring before the spring.

That is all at my end. I’ve had a very long day and have no transcription so collapsing into a muddle of exhaustion sounds good to me right now.

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Starting to Feel Like a Routine

This was my fifth weekend in a row of powering away at a transcription project. It was also another weekend of breaking the tedium on Saturday by going to dinner at Jody and Gary’s. I decided after taking just a single bit of The Most Amazing Club Sandwich I Have Ever Eaten that they are going to have to follow me around so Gary can cook for me every night. 🙂 His shrimp minestrone was also delicious, and the leftovers much appreciated for lunch today!

(Are there any single RVing guys out there who cook? I’m available! 😀 )

I like that I’ve had the discipline every weekend to get the work done by Sunday dinner, so I have time to make a nice meal or go out for one, and then spend the evening unwinding to give me a semblance of a break before starting all over on Monday.

Tonight, I’m making something I haven’t had since Dawson (!!!), pasta with vegetarian ground. The sauce is ready but the water stubbornly refuses to boil. I can’t believe how long I put up with an electric stove in my housebound life! I have timed things and discovered that I can boil water and cook the pasta on my propane stove in the time it takes to just boil the water on the electric stove!

So, not much to report, again, but I’ve learned that if I don’t post regularly I get an ‘are you alive?’ email from my mother. 😀

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Visits From the Mountain Folks and the Muffin Faery

I read an article today that claims that seeing friends regularly boosts your immune system, so it’s important to not get caught up with work and brush off social engagements.

That was interesting timing since Donna and Ken were blowing through town today and wanted to meet for lunch and Jody had plans to pop in with muffins for a quick visit.

Needless to say, I gave both visits all the time I could! Spending time with loved one makes it much easier to get that headset back on and those fingers typing!

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Slightly Busy This Week

With the U.S. Thanksgiving this weekend, I knew I would either have little to no transcription to do this week or be swamped. I was right. A request landed in my inbox on Monday evening asking if I could take a week-long (due Sunday evening) project. Estimated completion time: 32 hours.

I’ve been plugging away at it and am well on my way to having a reasonable amount of work to do both Saturday and Sunday, but there’s no getting way from needing to do five hours of transcription per day this week, every day excluding Monday (when the lateness of the hour in which I got the files means I only did about three hours). So that will be five weekends in a row of work.

I am most certainly not complaining. In fact, I relish this. Yes, there are other things I would like to do with my life, but I pretty much had from September to the end of June to do that! My work schedule is full right now, but I am enjoying what I am doing. During the day I have a variety of tasks that challenge me in ways that are allowing me to discover I have strengths I was sure escaped me. Mornings and evenings, I get work for myself in my PJs if I so choose, proud in the knowledge that I have finally built a viable business for myself in the field I discovered is best suited to my lifestyle and abilities. Besides exhaustion, I currently feel an overwhelming sense of pride and accomplishment.

Let me share, once again, this wonderful quote that beautifully illustrates my philosophy:

The universe puts us into places where we can learn. They are never easy places, but they are right. Wherever we are is the right place and the right time. The pain that sometimes comes is part of the process of constantly being born.

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My First Chinook!

Growing up out east, I was fascinated by the idea of a chinook, a warm wind blowing in from the ocean that would significantly raise temperatures in a very short period of time. I always associated them with Calgary, but it turns out they are more prevalent in Lethbridge!

The temperature started to rise yesterday and the wind to pick up. I was standing outside enjoying the sun when a tenant came up and explained to me that a chinook was rolling in! Today is incredibly windy and the snow is melting very quickly. My tenant says that if I am fortunate I will experience a much more dramatic chinook this winter, with temperatures going from, say, minus 15 in the morning to plus 15 in the afternoon, but even I don’t I can cross ‘experience a chinook’ off my bucket list!

Fun fact: chinook is pronounced ‘shi-nook’. The reason for this (and why it’s Shi-ca-go, not Tchi-ca-go) is the influence of the French-Canadian explorers. We (because I am a French-Canadian explorer) pronounce ‘ch’ the way ‘sh’ is pronounced in English.