A laugh a day

One day at school a teacher was trying to instruct children in the relationship between color and taste.  To do this, she demonstrated using Lifesavers, the "candy with the hole."  The children began to identify the flavors by their color:

Red.....................Cherry

Yellow...................Lemon

Green...................Lime

Orange ...............Orange

Finally the teacher gave them all HONEY flavored lifesavers.

None of the children could identify the taste.

The teacher said, "I will give you all a clue.. It's what your

mother may sometimes call your father."

One little girl looked up in horror, spit her lifesaver out and

yelled, "Oh my God! They're ass-holes!"

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Now that I have your attention....oh my God, that joke made me howl when it landed in my in-box yesterday.  And boy did I need a laugh.  Because you know?  This whole "let's pack up our lives, sell our house and move clear cross country" thing we've decided to do?  Yup - it hasn't been much fun so far!!!


The house is still for sale.

 

We're leaving in 9 days.

 

We thought we had a week to ten days to get from the Atlantic to damn near the Pacific, but some big muckety-muck at the corporate office has decided it's best if Buzz started sooner rather than later so, yes, the plans we spent last weekend making (about what route we'd take, where we'd stop, where we'd stay) - those plans got thrown out the window long about 8pm on Monday night.  So now Buzz and I are driving together as far as Ontario where he'll leave me in the comfort and care of my folks and he'll fly to his new hotel, work with the big brass from the home office on some very important, so important, it couldn't POSSIBLY wait until you drive with your family across country in 8 days stuff.  Then, about a week later he'll fly back, collect me and the dude and the midget and we'll resume our trans-continental journey once more.

Ahem.


Wasn't laughing much at that one.


Then there's the whole sell the house before we move pressure.   UGH.  I hardly even want to rehash here how  I feel about living in a house that's on the market and so therefore must be "show ready" at all times.  Note:  I don't like it much.  Not much laughter wiping down faucets every time they're used.    But, whatever.  It's what we've decided to do and so therefore we're doing.

Selling houses season is almost over on the sandbar and like sand through the hourglass of time so is our time on the island.  So to expedite matters we buried a statue of St. Joseph upside down in our garden in the hopes that he'd hear our prayer and find us someone to love our home and buy it.  We pray this prayer to him every day.  NOT kidding.  Don't laugh.


Anyway, seems like good ol' St. Joe was lending us an ear because right about the time we decided to test the waters to see if there was anyone interested in renting our house while it's on the market, a lovely couple who own a business in our neighborhood have decided to winter-over on the sandbar and were looking for a short-term rental.  Like in month to month.  Like in until our house sells.  They move in next Saturday.  And while I wasn't exactly laughing when we finalized the application last night, I was very much relieved to know that two fine people will be caring for our house and keeping Frieda company over the winter months.  Not laughing, but definitely smiling.  And relieved. 


Part of the process of getting ready to move is figuring out what goes and what stays...one of the things that cannot go with us is the Fred-mobile, Buzz's car.  But what to do, what to do?  No one wants to buy a 1994 Chrysler LHS because really?  It's an old man vehicle if ever there was one and not in the "coooool" old man kind of way, but in the big beastly, gas-guzzling kind of way.  So we've decided to retire Buzz's ride and finally figured out the many hoops we have to jump through in order to retire Fred.  We've jumped through all but the last one which involves dropping it off next week before we leave the sandbar.  Done.  Next.

Next up...well, there's lots of things next up and I don't think they're going to get done any faster if I just sit here writing on my little blog!  So, 9 days and counting.  Looking for the laughter.

Sleepless on the Sandbar

We're counting down the days left on the sandbar (as of today 13 to be exact).  And almost as if to say "hey Kim & Buzz, let's make the most of the limited time you have left" our body clocks have turned off and so has our ability to sleep.

So amidst budget season at Buzz's hotel, my trying to impart the wisdom of debits and credits to my students, trying to sell a house, organize in preparation for the movers and selling off bits and pieces of our life here...we're also sleep deprived.

We're soooo looking forward to the time when our lives are more stable, when we have time to spend together, when we're settled in somewhere in the mountains of BC.

Of course by then I'll be complaining about being bored.

Such is the ying and yang of life.

uhn-sur-tn-tee

un·cer·tain·ty

Spelled[uhn-sur-tn-tee]

–noun,plural-ties for 2.

1.      the state of being uncertain; doubt; hesitancy.

2.      an instance of uncertainty, doubt, etc.

3.      unpredictability; indeterminacy; indefiniteness.

4.      the state of my life at this moment.

You know we’re moving, right?

Packing up, heading west?

To scale some mountain peaks?

Oh, and for Buzz to start a new job?

If you haven’t heard before…well, yes ma’am (sir) we sure are!  Buzz has accepted a transfer to do a clean-up job at a resort at the top of Tod Mountain, a quaint alpine resort just north of Kamloops, BC.

I’m thrilled for this move not only because the West is the Best, but also the fact that Buzz was tapped for this opportunity means the work he has done here on the sandbar is being recognized by those important people that count…you know…the ones that sit in their office towers in the centre of the universe and decide the fates of people below them?  Those people have Buzz on their radar and it’s a very good thing.

So yes, a couple of months ago the call came:  “We need you.  We want you.  We must have YOU.  Because YOU and only YOU can save the universe from collapsing in upon itself.  Oh, and because you did such a good job on the sandbar, we want MORE of your YOUness in the west.”

The decision to go wasn’t hard.  Aside from 30-days of pro’ing and con’ing, the choice to list our house, quit my job, load up the Dude & the Midget and make tracks west really wasn’t tough at all.

It’s all the OTHER stuff that came along with that one decision that’s filled our lives with so many “uhn-sur-tn-tees”.

We had some friends for dinner Saturday night and as our move is (theoretically) impending rather quickly of course the conversation turned to us and our plans.  They had lots of questions:

           

          Them                                                      Us

Q1       “So, when exactly are you leaving?”                          "um, don’t know."

Q2       “When do you start there?”                                       "um, don’t know that either."

Q3       “How long will it take you to get across country”     “depends on the answer to Q1 & Q2”

Q4       “Where will you live”                                                “um, not sure”

Q5       “What will you be doing, Kim?”                                “uh, don’t really know”

Q6       “Where will you spend Christmas?”                           “hopefully not in a tent, but don’t

really know”

Q7       “What will you do with your house if it doesn’t sell?”“REALLY don’t know”

Q8       “How long do you think you’ll live there?”               “beats me”

And so it went for over four hours.

Sigh.

It’s hard to make plans when you don’t have answers to some of life’s most basic questions.  And you all know, I’m a girl who always likes to have a plan.

I’m trying to look at this time before our move west as a real growth opportunity for me.  Not having a plan buttoned down means I’m trying not to control every little contingency.  It means an opportunity for me to take a deep breath and just go with the flow.  It’s a chance to really test my ability to not eat away my anxiety.  (So far, so good, if you don’t count the big bag of Hallowe’en candy I just bought for my “students” nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

Someone’s Facebook status update recently said:  “let go, let go, let go some more.”

It’s becoming my mantra as we approach the end of our time here on the sandbar.

Let go, let go, let go…some more.

It Has to STOP.

Usually I use the space on this blog to write about the minutiae of our life here on the sandbar and to muse about the uncertainties ahead on our road west.  I like to keep it lighthearted, humorous and mostly frivolous.  Usually.  But yesterday, I came across a post on a blog I follow that stopped me cold in my tracks, moved me to tears and made me so angry.  So today, my little blog, with my small following will become my soapbox in the hopes that the more people are aware that this is going on the more voices we can raise to stop the bullying that's killing kids.

I see it every day at the school where I teach.  Kids who think they're being funny, or smart, or just for the sport of it think it's okay to demean and demoralize another, just because they're different.  This particular article is about gay teenagers being bullied, literally to death...I haven't seen that yet at my school, but I can easily see how it could happen.  We've all become really good at tolerating intolerance, turning a blind eye, pretending we didn't hear that racial/sexist/homophobic slur.  When we pretend we don't hear or see we are in fact promoting the behavior.  It's time we stopped.  So they'll stop.  And then the kids will stop...killing themselves.  

 Here is the article I'm referring to.   I hope you'll read it.  And then do something in your local community/school/office/work-place/park/mall to  MAKE THIS STOP.