Personal

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This is Our Home

I just stumbled onto this wonderful tribute to Canada:

I’ve been almost everywhere mentioned and shown in this video (!) and I have to admit that tears welled up when I got to the segment about the ‘favourite place in the Gatineau Hills’ with its shots of beautiful Wakefield, Quebec, the village I called home for four years. There’s even a reference to Campbell River and an obscure reference to Dawson (midnight looking like high noon on the Dome!).

There have been a lot of songs written about Canada, but this is definitely the most all-encompassing one I’ve found. It tells me that I have fulfilled one of my RVing goals, to see as much of Canada as I have of the US, and reminds me that there are so many wonders back east for me to share with my readers. I’ll get back there eventually! 🙂

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Feeling Blue

Today’s our first sunny day in over a week and I’m feeling down. I spent a couple of hours this morning troubleshooting my water heater (more about that to follow) and I’m looking at a costly repair.

This is definitely not the winter I’d envisioned or saved up for. Just about everything I had went to the brake repair this fall and the rest to keeping me afloat until I got full-time work hours. It’s already the middle of January and I haven’t done any exploring or renovations. At this point I’ve pretty much conceded that neither is going to happen.

My cashflow has improved slightly, but not nearly enough to make up for how much financial bleed I’ve had since leaving the Yukon. I really don’t like to talk in great depth about my finances, but I think I need to make a comment on the subject. My global financial picture is sound, but my daily budget isn’t. I ‘have money in the bank’, however it is off limits for daily expenditures. The only way I am going to survive financially in this lifestyle of unstable income is to limit my daily spending to what I’m taking in through my various income streams rather than continuously dipping into my investments and savings. Exploring counts as daily spending. Renos and maintenance have their own saving account, but maintenance takes precedence, of course, and there’s a minimum cushion that needs to be in there at all times. Soon as I hit that limit, I can only use the money for real emergencies and not for sprucing up my home.

I’m a homebody, so a part of me doesn’t mind having an excuse to stay home, watch movies, read, and go for long walks on the beach. However, I didn’t enter this lifestyle to have such a monotonous sameness to my days. It’s only the thought of my imminent return to the endless Yukon summer that enables me to remember just what it is I’m working so hard at to build. I can tell that I’m making progress at supporting myself on the road in a manner that will enable me to travel freely. My various income streams are slowly picking up and my writing contract is a major step in the right direction. However, I have conceded that this winter is looking at being a wash and that there probably won’t be much more to blog about until I take off in May.

This situation is of my own making and only I can fix it. I never forget that I chose this life and the financial instability that it brings, that I made a decision to honour my belief that the true riches in life are not material. So, please do not take this post as a ‘woe is me’ type of update, but just an honest comment on where I am right now. I don’t deserve pity or sympathy because I could still be an analyst for the government, living in a nice house in the city with no debt and plenty of disposable income.

In my about me page, I quote Sterling Hayden. Here are more of his words that ring so true to me:

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsman, who play with their boats at sea — “cruising”, it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and have the means, abandon the venture until your fortune change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.
“I’ve always wanted to sail to the South Seas, but I can’t afford it”. What these men can’t afford is not to go. They are enmeshed in the cancerous discipline of “security”. And in the worship of security.

I’m off to take a long walk on the beach so I can enjoy some of that fleeting sunshine!

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Common Decency

This post has me on a soapbox. I witnessed something today that enraged me and I really need to talk about it.

As a bit of background, gas purchases need to be prepaid in BC. When someone lifts a nozzle at the pump, there will be a grating beeping sound inside until the pump is activated by a cashier. Today, this sound went on for five minutes as I dealt with customers. I was becoming increasingly annoyed with the person who had left the nozzle in their tank while they came in to pay. I was incredibly busy, but as the line dwindled down I concluded that the person whose pump was shrieking wasn’t in the store. The alarm finally turned off, but I could still see a car parked at that pump. For some unfathomable reason, a feeling of dread overcame me. Something just felt wrong.

I still had several customers waiting in line and I told them to wait while I went outside. There, I found an old woman sitting on the curb, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I fell and I can’t get up,” she whispered. The first responder in me kicked in and I did a quick evaluation. She seemed okay, although her knee was swelling up a bit. I helped her up, no small feat as she was quite heavy set, got her pump started, and helped her gas up. She assured me she was okay to get home and that she was going to be seeing her doctor tomorrow. Remember that I still had a lineup of people in the store as I was doing this.

When I came in, I apologized to everyone for the delay and explained what had happened. Two people replied “Yeah, we saw her go down as we came in” in the same tone that they would use to state that the sky is blue.

WHAT?! While this poor woman was on the ground crying two men just walked past and ignored her. They were about my age and I have to say that this sort of apathy is too common within my generation. I feel ashamed.

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Siren’s Call

I remember staying at a friend’s apartment in San Francisco’s Russian Hill and being unable to sleep because of the fog horns. Tonight is my first foggy night in Campbell River and a fog horn has been going off every few minutes. It’s very loud and it’s irritating the cats, but I’m hardly bothered by it and know it won’t stop me from getting a good night’s sleep.

RVing has really enabled me to block out and even sleep through noises and lights that I never used to be able to before. I’ve stayed in such a variety of locations, from loud and brightly lit Walmarts to pitch black quiet highway turnouts. I find it amazing that I’ve been able to adapt to such a variety of circumstances, but am still unable to become a morning person!

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A December 25th Worthy of Remembrance

I really feel that Christmas is ‘just another day’ so I debated whether or not to write up about today’s happenings, then decided that they were worthy of note.

First of all the weather was incredibly mild by the standards I’m used to for this season. For me, this Christmas was truly a balmy one spent by the ocean. How idyllic does that sound?!

I worked today from 10 to 6 and it was non-stop crazy busy; so much so that at one point I had to ask the manager, who sat in his office for a few hours, to come and help me! What didn’t help was that first thing someone spilled their French vanilla ‘cappuccino.’ That stuff is basically flavoured water mixed with sugar that dries to a sticky mess. It took me an hour, between customers, to mop up the mess, which made its way deep into the cabinetry. Later, someone dropped a container of milk in the dairy cabinet, so I had to clean that up, too.

My eight hour shift flew by and I practically had to throw my last customer out the door a six. I love shifts like that! The manager had thought we would be super slow, but nope. We were apparently one of the few stores open and the only one in all of Campbell River with good coffee. I think Tim Hortons might have lost some customers to us. 😀 A lot of people came in and said to me “Oh, poor you, being stuck with this shift”, but I cheerily told them that I had volunteered for it and was quite happy to be there, which, really, I was. I just learned that I’ll be doing the New Year’s Day shift, too, which is fine with me.

After work, I headed home to change and then walked UP to my friend’s parents’ place. It was only barely more than one kilometre, but straight up a steep hill. I worked up quite the appetite! Within a few minutes of arrival I was sitting at the computer with a glass of white wine Skyping with my friend back in Wakefield, Quebec! That Star-Trekish technology never ceases to amaze me! We had a good time catching up and I finally saw how much progress she’s made in building the house of her dreams.

A wonderful turkey dinner, and too, too much white wine followed. I find that a lot of people go overboard with the food at Thanksgiving and Christmas and was glad this was not the case tonight. There was a lovely salad to start, a reasonable amount of delicious sides to accompany the turkey, and a very light dessert of cheeses and sweets. I had a lot more wine than I normally have, but I wasn’t driving, so I decided it was okay to indulge. 🙂

I think that my favourite part of the meal was the Brussels sprouts! Now, I like Brussels sprouts well enough, but I had never had them like they were cooked tonight and I am now motivated to make them for myself. They were steamed for about five minutes, cut in half, dried well, and then sautéd in olive oil with previously browned garlic as well as a minced red pepper and slivered almonds, leaving them nice and crunchy. I think it’s the first time in my life that I only had one serving of potatoes and turnips and two of Brussels sprouts!

My gracious hosts gave me some suggestions for day trips to make in the vicinity of Campell River as well as places to visit elsewhere on the Island. Some of the suggestions are for free excursions and I just happened to get gas as a gift this Christmas (a highly original idea from the gas station manager 😀 ), so soon as I get a nice day for hiking I have something fun to do.

Today was a nice, low-stress, more-special-than-normal day. I feel truly blessed.

Happy holidays to all my readers!