Dan in Tennessee

He just crossed the Mississippi River into Memphis, Tennessee a few minutes ago. It's 35 degrees Celsius, just after 10pm, and he is going to get himself a motel room for the first time on this trip.

Dan has been sleeping in the back of the truck, at rest stops this whole time, save for the one night at the parents' cabin in Datil, New Mexico. I guess he decided it's time go get a proper sleep and a shower (or more likely, a bath).

I think this means he will arrive in Kinston on Thursday. I can't quite get an accurate sense of how long it takes to get across a state, given that there were dust storms in New Mexico that halted him entirely, and hail storms with a twister in the north of Texas that propelled Dan to keep going. He put in 2200km yesterday, drove for 23 hours. He was too freaked out to stop.

I am really missing My Sweety. Knowing he was that near danger is concerning. I am relieved at every moment I hear from him, knowing that he is safe enough to send me a message. He left a week ago today and I will feel unsettled until he is installed in his new/temporary digs in the Brewer's Residence.

If I were the praying sort, I would pray to the heavens and the ancestors to please keep My Sweety safe. Please let me find a way to get there soon. Please let everything I have to do in the time between now and our reunion go smoothly.

trip to Victoria

I have just decided that I will take a trip to Victoria in June. It will either be the weekend of the 10th-13th or the 17th-20th. Victoria friends, are you available either of those weekends? Let me know...

fifth night without My Sweety

I was able to talk on the phone to Dan today.

We both have iPhones, and we have this app called WhatsApp that we use in lieu of text messaging, because it uses the Internet rather than the telephone line and is therefore free (well, subject to data usages, but it's negligible for us).  We can use it to send each other our location (a picture of a map appears) or photos or video, as well as text. We are both also on Twitter, and since others are also interested in Dan's progress (@han_zolo Dan's sister Zola, presently living in Germany; @djfractal Dan's brother Thor, presently living in Boston; @joshbrewer Dan's new boss & soon to be coworker at @MotherEarthBrewing; et. al.) he sometimes posts his waypoints on Twitter when he has a connection.

I can't say it's been easy, having him gone, because it hasn't. I thank the heavens though for such inventions as we have available to us to make contact like this possible. Our communications over the last few days have been a bit choppy, as Nevada and Utah and Arizona have wide stretches of road where there is no 3G service, but as Dan heads east into Connectivity Land, I expect we'll hear from him more frequently.

Dan has been driving the 1986 Nissan 720 pick up truck. It's a bit hard on the butt & back, the seats definitely need replacing. Dan bough a cushion a few days ago and his back is still not doing very well. Dan has been sleeping on a foamie in the back of the truck. There wasn't much head space when he first started out, and decided after having dreams of that scene from Kill Bill 2 that he needed to change the configuration of the bed. (That was meant to make you laugh, but if you haven't seen KB2, you'll have no idea what I'm talking about. Sorry, not going to explain).

Today I got to have a phone conversation with Dan. He is in Datil, New Mexico just now. That's where his mom & stepdad have a cabin and 30some acres of high desert just east of the Continental Divide. Dan & I went there on our honeymoon road trip in 2009, I would love to go back. John & Melinda are there right now so they'll get a visit in. That's good. I guess they also recently put in a land line, where previously they had no service at all. So I got to talk to Dan! It was so nice to hear his voice, and once he settles in in Kinston, North Carolina, I'm sure we'll be having Skype conversations several times a week. It makes the pain of our separation a little easier to bear.

more purging, packing, cleaning, etc.

One of the three bedrooms is completely cleared out. The front bedroom is where I am putting everything I will be taking with me to North Carolina. So far I have started eight Rubbermaid bins, labeled them, and am compiling a list of the things that are going into them.

I have another big pile of things to take out to the garage, for the garage sale or for friends to pick over. I think I'm almost done with this task, actually, I think I'll be done with the sorting by the end of tomorrow. It is really coming along swimmingly. Someone is coming to look at the house tomorrow, interested in renting, so I am going to bust my butt to make sure it is presentable.

I need to take a trip out to the landfill, but I don't know if I'll be ready tomorrow. I have started filling the truck, so it might just have to wait until after work on Monday, on my way home from Tofino.

I started going through the kitchen, but that's a two-phase process, because I have to decide what tools I will need until I leave & what food I will eat, as opposed to what things I know I'll never use and what foodstuffs are either no longer edible or simply unlikely to get consumed.

Here's what I still have left:
Futon we got from Dean, going to K2 when they get rid of their current couch
Dan's old futon, which might go to a coworker at the hospital or the fish boss if she doesn't want it
The slider rocking chair that was my mum's - no one wants it (really) but I will likely keep it until I leave
Table & chair set from Toni & the Skipper, going to K2
Table & chair set from my mum, going to Faye
Table with drawer from Toni & the Skipper, also going to K2
Spice rack going to K2

And lots of little things. Faye wants the ice cream maker. K2 might be interested in the slow cooker. A few friends who picked through the stuff in the garage last week indicated interest in coming back for another round. By the end of tomorrow, everything that I'm not taking with me will be out there. Maybe I'll have a garage sale next weekend.

The yard needs a bit of tending too. I have been using the push mower, which I love, but it does have its limitations. With a power mower, tall grass is no problem. In this case, I am really going to have to learn to use a weed whacker, because after spending an hour and a half with my little hand snips today, I realized that in that same space of time I could have finished the entire yard, and not just a small fraction of it. I found my protective eyewear today, if I can find some ear plugs or other ear protection, I might have a crack at it tomorrow.

I also need to fill in the newly created raised bed and plant some stuff in it. Darnit! I gave all my seeds away. I will happily go buy some romaine lettuce seeds and plop them in the ground - what doesn't get eaten by deer or slugs will likely not have a chance to bolt here.

There is also the rectangular depression in the back that in the winter fills up with water (there is not much soil above a clay bed here), and that I found a source of free fill for. I need to go through and pick out the big rocks, even it out, and tidy up that area. I thought about planting potatoes there but I might just seed it with grass.

A few other things. Dan wasn't able to part with the diesel engine or the Albacore sailboat. It may well fall to me to find homes for them. I also noticed that the pile of red brick, which our landlord had no use for, is no longer a nice neat stack. What happened to it? I get the lovely task of restacking discarded bricks that in many cases have lots of mortar attached to it. Great.

And O yeah there are the boxes of books in the crawl space, and the trombones. Dan used to play low brass when he was in high school, still has three trombones that he will never ever play again, that he's been dragging around for years. What to do with all this stuff? The horns might come with me. Honestly, I'm going to a place where there is tons of music that requires brass instruments. If there is a place for brass instruments, its the South. The books... I think it will all depend on how much room I have in the truck. I will take all I can, and leave the rest somewhere to be sent at a later date. The 'somewhere' might be Victoria, though friends have offered to ship them from Ucluelet too. I think it would make more sense in Victoria though, because of family who can cart that box across the border and ship them stateside.

Ugh. So many details to think about.

There are a couple of things that I have not come across in my cleaning, purging and packing. I would really like to find my Master's degree. Why did I not frame it? Why isn't in the safe place I thought it was? I absolutely remember packing it last March before we moved here, surely it must be among our things somewhere. (Perhaps in the said boxes of books in the crawl space? Due to lack of shelving, we have never even unpacked them). I might need to present it to the nice US Immigration people when I go for my interview. I could get another one printed but... you know... The other thing I would like to find is my pendulum.

Yes, I use a pendulum. It's nothing at all fancy, just a piece of raw crystal crudely strung up with some red embroidery thread, and it should be inside a little silk bag with the Om symbol on it. I can't recall having seen it in months. It's my quick  & easy divination tool for when I have simple Yes or No questions, when I feel a bit unsettled or need to make a decision about something. I do have other things I can use as a pendulum, but that little rock has been with me a long time. I miss it.

I'll go to bed early again tonight, perhaps get an early start tomorrow and get everything done tomorrow. All that will be left for me then is to wait out my time here, knit & listen to audio books (just finished Voyager, yesterday I started Gone With the Wind), and go swimming in Kennedy Lake as much as I can before I leave.

sometimes I listen

I sure thought I was coming down with a flu. I had the pain with swallowing and the all over body ache on Thursday night. I called in sick for Friday, waiting for the onslaught to come.

I let myself sleep in on Friday morning, and was surprised that I didn't feel as bad as I thought I would. Went to bed very early on Friday night, got a full ten hours of sleep, and felt absolutely refreshed this morning. So yay for not being sick! Turns out, my body just needed sleep, lots of sleep, and I listened.

walloped

Holy crap.

About fifteen minutes ago, I got SMACKED with a flu. The painful swallowing, the all-over body ache.

Guess I'm calling in sick tomorrow.

blah...

#floundertruck

I hope you will indulge me, dear reader. I spend the majority of my social media time on Twitter and it seems that is how I do a great deal of communication with friends near and far. Thus, this post has another hashtag as its title.

Dan has been looking for a nickname for a while. Sometime last year he decided to start blogging again, called his blog Flounder Guts. When he saw how much fun I was having on Twitter, he signed up too and became @flounderguts. 

I wish I could have taken a photo of the fully loaded Nissan before he drove away in it, but a) I forgot and b) I wasn't there. But Dan has started tweeting with the hashtag #floundertruck, regaling us with his adventures along the road. Yesterday he reached Victoria, today he crossed the border. His first stop was to send off the petition for my immigration. Ball is rolling. Here we go.

Yesterday was a hard day. I left for work in the morning, knowing that Dan would have left by the time I got home. Cried on the way to Tofino. Then, while I was at work and opening a box of freshly sterilized suture trays, the tears came again. At one point the nurses popped in, asking "Are you okay?" to which I replied "I'm just sad". They understood. I had told them earlier that Dan was leaving. My nurses are great.

I started the day being tired, since we had stayed up late the night before, talking. It was our last night together, we were trying to spend every waking moment we could. While I was at work at the hospital yesterday, my fish job boss sent me a text, asking if I could do an offload that evening. I knew he must have been desperate if he was asking me on a weeknight, so I said yes.

On my way home from Tofino, I hit the junction (about 8km/5mi away from home on a 41km/25mi commute), and the truck started to shudder. I knew something was wrong, wondered if it had anything to do with the brakes. We had lent the Ford to a friend the week before, the brakes had seized on her. I got the truck home, sent her a text message, saying "so what do seizing brakes feel like...?" and she & her partner came over within minutes. I learned all you need to release a seized brake caliper is a gallon of water (to cool it off) and a hammer. Good friends. I was on my way.

It was a long and slow offload. When the pump broke, I knew that I would not be able to stay for the end of it, so fish boss had to come take over for me, so I could go home & get to bed at a decent hour and get sleep for my hospital job. I put in a 10.5 hour day yesterday. Both jobs required travel. I was tired.

While I was at the offload, I discovered my new friend Jason, who commented on the previous post, is a news junkie and spends rather a lot of time on the Internet. I gave him the URL to my blog, he is my newest reader. Welcome, Jason!

Dan called me from Victoria last night and I was up way too late again. The house is still completely messy and I am dying to get it clean, but I am so tired, I fear I may not have the energy to get to it until Friday after work. I host Stitch Night here on Fridays, and despite the disruption in our lives, the show must go on. Most of the furniture has left, but I'm sure we can find a way to tuck in my four knitterly friends who come regularly.

We moved here just over a year ago, and given how much our life has changed, I'm thinking a future post should be A Year in Review.