More Canadian – or everyday – adventures (originally posted Sept 9/09)

I promised an update, and today seems appropriate: Six months since we set out on our grandest adventure. I’m glad I haven’t been blogging recently, since we’ve had a rubbish fortnight, thanks mainly to holiday fatigue. Writing about the everyday would have been bitter and uninspiring, when really life is so good, it’s embarrassing.

So here we are, in our rental place, with the two elder weasels back in school, and Tiny Weasel off to Kindergarten next week (pause while Dim runs around waving arms in the air and cheering). My car is parked outside, and Mrs Dim has taken her car off to her job, which is going well. She likes the people she’s working with, the work isn’t hard but it is interesting, and she’s already been told to slow down by her boss. She doesn’t feel she’s actually started yet. We’ve beaten the back yard into submission and this weekend just gone I built the world’s largest Gazebo so the other new resident (Moose the dog) could visit her outdoor piddle pad in the rain without getting wet – how indulgent are we? Plans are forging ahead for our first visitor, my writing partner Steve, who’s coming out to visit in…uh….twelve days! The idea of converting the basement has been abandoned, or at least put on hold, since it would involve technical things like re-wiring. We’ll try camping in it and see how that goes.

We’ve been on outings with friends we’ve made here – sailing trips, beach days, hiking up the mountains. We’ve been out to dinner at theirs, and had them over to ours. Everyone has had a birthday in Canada. We all agree that the only things we miss about the UK are our friends and the Grandparents, but Facebook has done a pretty good job of keeping us up to speed on the gossip (am I allowed to say “Facebook” on WordPress?) This week we sent the latest DVD of our exploits to both sets of grandparents and assorted friends (they had to be dedicated, since it was 26 mins long…That’s a lot of screaming weasels, as it was the Summer Hols roundup…)

We had something go wrong. Although it was (and is) a minor hiccup, everything else has gone so smoothly that this really stands out: The carecards that prove our medical insurance didn’t turn up. We needed a Doctor (just because that’s something you should have, not because anyone was sick) but we couldn’t get one without the numbers on the cards. As it turned out, we hadn’t completed the forms correctly, and the letter that told us that had not been delivered because a swarm of wasps had scared our Postie away…Anyway, that’s now being corrected, and besides, we get cracking medical insurance as part of Mrs Dim’s job.

So that’s the six month report, I guess – everything is fine. Living in Canada is no harder than living in the UK, except the weather has been better here, there’s more for the kids to do during the holidays, things seem to be better organised in general and the entire population is calmer and more polite.

The only thing that isn’t going like clockwork over here is my career. In that I haven;t got one over here. I’m still writing and script reading, but all that income goes into the UK bank account. Which is fine, it’s all in our general money pool, sloshing away healthily, but it would be nice to be doing some work over here, for Canadian clients and earning Canadian money. the talking to the Schools and Universities hasn’t led anywhere, and I think I need a confidence boost before I give it another shot. I’m several pages into a new screenplay that might turn out to be a tv series or a movie, but my problem has always been following through. I need to make the time to finish the script, redraft it and then find somewhere or someone to submit it to.

Today I went to the library and took out one of the Self-help books that make me laugh. I’m going to try reading it and then try even harder to do what it says. I know I have more time to work than I actually use – I can tell by the scores I get on the games I play, and the amount of time I spend surfing the net thinking “There’s nothing to look at!” I need something that’ll strengthen the little voice shouting “If there’s nothing to look at then switch it off and work, Bozo!” If the book doesn’t do the job I’m seriously thinking about visiting the hypnotherapist who lives across the street. Better working practices, by hook or by crook. If this was January, that would be my new Year’s Resolution.

And in that spirit I’m going to pick up the phone and see if I can find our missing mail, then crack on with some work before it’s time to venture back out into the rain to collect the larger weasels. And I don’t mind the rain, because it’s falling on me in Canada, and anything seems possible.