A Weekend Offline

We called Bell. Tech­ni­cal sup­port said there were issues in our area and that it would be solved with­out two to twenty-four hours. “Twenty-four hours like… like a day?” we shrieked. “What are we going to do? Talk to each other? Play board games? Clean the house? Make babies?”

Oui, I hablo Spanish!

A lit­tle while ago, Guillermo, my good blog friend and fel­low immi­grant in Ottawa, asked me if he could inter­view me. “No wor­ries!” I replied—hey, who doesn’t like being interviewed?

“The inter­view would be in Span­ish” he quickly added. See, Guillermo and is fam­ily are from Argentina and even though I know for sure he speaks Eng­lish flu­ently, the inter­view was for his Span­ish blog.

“Well, sure” I replied, men­tally review­ing who could edit my Span­ish replies.

“Oh, and it’s a recorded inter­view” he finally added.

Splitting Hair on Haircuts in Canada

I don’t care about my hair. I don’t dye it (although I used to when I was a teen), I don’t blow-dry it (that’s what the wind is for, right?) and I don’t style it (why bother?). I had long hair, braided hair (please, don’t ask for pic­tures, that was a long time ago) and I’ve had short hair for a few years now. I do have very thick hair though. It’s a bless­ing in dis­guise: I need a hair­cut once in a while oth­er­wise it looks like I’m wear­ing a wig, but it keeps me warm and I don’t really need to style.

We May Be Stupid But We Are Good At It

I’m not say­ing I’m always smart but I gen­er­ally have some kind of common-sense. But hey, we all have occa­sional embar­rass­ing “duh” moments… well, this is one of these.

28

Happy birth­day to me!

Still no white hair (although it got bleached by the sun dur­ing our last trip).
Still no plan other than the usual—writing, tak­ing pic­tures, trav­el­ing.
Still freez­ing my butt off in Canada, the coun­try that adopted me.

The Professional Worrier

Feng calls me a “pro­fes­sional wor­rier”. I do worry a lot. I worry about the past, the present and the future. I mostly worry about the future though. And time. Time is my biggest issue. I don’t have enough time to do what I love and I spend too much time doing stuff that I don’t like. There are never enough hours in the day except when I’m bored, never enough time to accom­plish everything.

The Runaway

Many years ago, as I was head­ing to Aus­tralia, a friend of a friend tried to psy­cho­an­a­lyze me. “But, don’t you think you are run­ning away?” she said, wisely, at the ripe old age of 20. “Trav­el­ing so much… what are you escap­ing from?”
I quickly brushed her com­ment away, both because her supe­rior air of wis­dom annoyed me and because I quite didn’t know what to say.

My November

Novem­ber is such a depress­ing month—I don’t even know why it exists. Days are cold and damp and it is pitch black by the time I go back home at 5 pm. This month is an inter­reg­num between pump­kins and Santa Claus, between red leaves and snow. I guess we need a tran­si­tion period to adapt but boy, Novem­ber drags on forever.