Pilgrimage of the Kindred Spirits

Recently we spent several days in PEI on vacation. It was so much fun!

First, we took the ferry from Nova Scotia to the island and then spend that evening and most of the next day in Charlottetown. We went to the musical "Anne" and it was so much fun!! Then we drove to the north shore and camped at Cavendish campground right on the shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence for three nights. It was so beautiful and a neat experience to see the ocean from our site. We had perfect weather every day except the last full day that we were there....then there was a scary rain/wind storm. I was kind of a chicken, but our tent proved to be a good one so I was thankful. The highlight was going to Green Gables! I have wanted to go there since I was little and read the Anne series for the first time. We are kindred spirits for sure and it was such a treat to go see the beloved Green Gables and to see her world. It was also wonderful to learn more about L.M. Montgomery and visit the site of the home where she grew up and where she wrote 4 books, including Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea. And Anne/L.M.M. weren't joking, there really is so much scope for the imagination in PEI!

Boarding the ferry.

Matthew on the ferry. 

First lighthouse on PEI! And check out that red earth!

Fish and chips!

Province house in Charlottetown. We watched a light show on this building on the first night it gave some history about the province and about Confederation.

Our campsite.

Eating breakfast at our campsite.

Eating breakfast another morning.

 My first Anne display! (There were PLENTY more just like this one!)

So many gorgeous Victorian homes with intricate detail.

Matthew, shootin' the breeze with John A. MacDonald. ;)

A visit to the Anne of Green Gables chocolate store. Oh how I wish I had hair like hers!

Down at the Charlottetown harbour.

Beloved Green Gables!

 A view from Green Gables. So pretty, its no wonder Anne loved it so!

In the front room

 Matthew Cuthbert's room

 Kitchen....can you spot the "Raspberry Cordial"?!

 There it is!

 Anne's room!!

 The smashed slate....just the beginning of her and Gilbert!

 Spare room.

 Marilla's room. Prim and proper, just like her!

 We took a walk in the Haunted Woods. They really were kind of spooky!

 Foot picture on Lover's Lane. It was lovely!

 Sand dune on the beach by our campsite.

 Red rocks on the shore.

 L.M. Montgomery's grave in Cavendish. (It says MacDonald, because she married Rev. Ewan MacDonald but continued to publish books as L.M.M.)

 Visiting the site where L.M. grew up. This is the well.

This is the foundation of the house she grew up in. Unfortunately, after her grandmother died, L.M. moved to Ontario to marry Ewen MacDonald and the house was not cared for, so it just got old.

 This was the view that L.M. looked over from her window in that house. The desk where she wrote Anne of Green gables was at her bedroom window, so this is what she may have looked at while writing. Cool eh?

We drove to Dalvay by the Sea....why? Because that is where William and Kate visited when they were here this summer!

And as luck would have it, we found them!! ;)

Fancy hats in the Avonlea gift store!

We came home via Confederation Bridge.

 Here are a few treasures we picked up along our travels. The bottles are Lemon Olive Oil and Cinnamon Pear and Wild Blueberry Balsamic Vinegar. They were at the Olive Store in Charlottetown. So cool and delicious. We'll have some yummy salads at home now! The mugs are the two most recent additions to our "random pottery mug" collection. And the book is the short autobiography that L.M. wrote in 1917, I did not know about it but was lucky enough to find it at her historical site. Such a great read!

So much fun! Can't wait to go back!

Walking for Jack

Last night we joined a memorial walk for Jack Layton. It was a neat experience and a great tribute to his life and work for Canada and the NDP party. He will be missed!
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Front/1260058.html

Fun mail!

Two days ago we received our first piece of mail at our new address and it wasn't just a bill, it was fun mail! My dear friend Natasha is studying in the UK and she sent me a pair of earrings from her travels to Prague over her school break. I love them! And getting fun mail is just one of the best things in life. :)

Missing these sweet faces:(

We spoke to Shannon on the phone this morning. It was so great to hear her voice and to hear about what has been happening around there in the past couple of days. When we were in Regina we spent ALOT of time at her house and even lived there for the last ten days before we moved. She is such an amazing big sister and friend to us both and I just love her.

Then another sweet voice came on the line and it was Emmanuelle! How we miss that girl. Every time we talk about her, one or both of us gets a lump in our throat and our eyes well-up! This morning was no exception. That little "Hello auntie!" or "Hello Uncle" just squeezes my heart. We were really so blessed to live close to her for past few years and watch her learn and grow and get to know her personality. She is just so wonderful. And so is her little sister, Karyss. What a little sweetheart! She was almost walking when we left and eager to get moving faster! When we see her next time she'll be walking all over the place and talking too! That is a crazy. Although we'll miss out on lots of her "firsts" at least all of that learning will eventually lead to her being able to talk to Auntie and Uncle on the phone! And when they get to come visit we will have scoped out all of the good parks in our neighbourhood and we'll be ready to play like never before!

Beautiful!

This morning we received these from a dear friend as a house warming present!

Thank you Janet, you are so thoughtful and sweet!

It has arrived!

After a two-day delay, our furniture arrived yesterday! We've had a lot of fun unpacking and finding new spaces for our stuff. It was kind of like Christmas as we opened box after box. I kept greeting everything as I saw it, like "Hello teapot! Hello toaster! Hello little measuring cup!" Ha. Anyway, here are a few pics of how things are shaping up out here.

Matthew in a heap of boxes just after the truck left yesterday morning.
Matthew is excited to be reunited with his leather couch!
Our dining room before boxes and furniture arrived.

After we got some things unpacked and put in place it now looks like.....

Looking from living room into the hallway/bathroom
A glimpse of the bathroom. It is too small to really get a good picture!
The entrance of our apartment.
Bedroom is still a total disaster, but it is nice to to sleep in our own bed again!
Bedroom again
Living room
Living room again
In the dining room....we don't actually have a table yet, so for now you just get a picture of our pottery and Kelly's beautiful painting!
And my quilt is hanging in the dining room too.
Dining room
Kitchen
Kitchen again

So far it is a pretty cozy little home. I think we're going to like it here! Wanna come visit?!

New digs

We have been Haligonians now for five days and we’ve enjoyed our days so far. Our moving truck was supposed to come on Sunday afternoon but it couldn’t fit down the side street, because it is a 53’ trailer. So the drivers had to go away to find a smaller truck to transfer our stuff into and then come backL. Our stuff was so close but not close enough! We will feel much more settled once we have some furniture in our place. Here is a glimpse of our new place so far…

Surprisingly though, we have said a few times over the past few days that this place already kind of feels like home. I guess home is wherever we are, as long as we’re together. Yep, that must be it. (I should probably call Hallmark to let them know that I have a new line for them to use!)

Pedestrians

This past Saturday was our first full day without a car, so we are officially full-time pedestrians. To initiate this new lifestyle, we packed our backpacks and headed downtown. We started walking at 10:15 and returned home around 3:30. We didn’t take pictures, because we didn’t want to carry a camera. (We are locals now after all, so we don’t want to look like tourists!) It was just a perfect day though: the sun was shining and there was a slight breeze and a few clouds. It was beautiful! So we walked past the Citadel and down to Spring Garden Road and wandered through a few shops. We passed Saint Matthew’s United Church and it was open for people to wander through, so we stopped to read some of its history, admire its stain glass windows and its old pews with the gates at the end. Then we happened by Government House just in time to catch a guided tour. Our next stop was the Farmers Market! I have been so looking forward to frequenting that place. I just love it there! On Saturdays and Sundays it is a buzz with people, chatter and creativity and it just fires me up! It is great. We wandered through the maze of locally grown produce, meats, cheese, eggs, chocolates, crafts, sewing, food, and wines just to scope things out. We found a delicious place to eat Mexican food for lunch and a delicious latte stand for dessert. Then we made our way back through the maze of activity for to make our purchases for the week. It was so much fun! Supporting the local economy seriously feeds my inner hippy and it feeds my tummy too, so it is basically a win-win situation. J

New Chapter: Halifax

In November 2010 I decided to apply for grad school to do an M.A. in International Development Studies. I had toyed with this idea since graduating in June 2010 but I was so burned by the intensity of my first degree that it took me a while to feel ready to go back to school again. Don’t get me wrong, I loved what I studied in my first degree (Honours BA in International Development Studies) but Matthew and I both did undergrad degrees at the same time. Financially it was very tough, but we chose to do it that way so that would be faster and at least we would both have the same focus. (And now that we’ve recovered from the experience, I think we would choose to do it the same way again.) There were many wonderful lessons learned from doing our degrees together too, for example, we truly learned to work as a team and we were completely united in our goals as a couple. That was great! Also, I got to learn a lot about Nursing from Matthew and he got to learn a lot about international politics, economics, and development issues – whether he wanted to or not ;) However, somewhere along the way it became apparent that am a crazy perfectionist. Who knew? I thought only my mom was that way! I guess it must be true that we all become our parents eventually. Anyway, this added unnecessary stress to my life as I tried to write 10-17 papers per semester perfectly, clearly not an attainable goal. I did, however, write some darn good papers during that period even if they weren’t perfect. From my first degree I have learned better ways of dealing with stress and I recognize that my desire to write a perfect paper every time is not reasonable and I think I have learned how to balance my life a little better. I suppose we will test that out this September when I start an MA at Dalhousie University.

Two days ago we moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia. How crazy is that? We were extremely sad to leave our life in Regina. We had a good thing going there. We loved being close to several good friends and we adored living near Matthew’s sister Shannon and her family. We absolutely love them and we are blessed to have had several years near them. We already miss them like crazy. We were also extremely blessed to have an amazing Christian family at Glen Elm Church of Christ. We were truly part of a great community there and we take many lessons and wonderful memories from our time with them. We know that Halifax will be a good experience for us though. It will be a time for us to grow stronger as a couple and a chance to meet new people and experience the east coast culture of Canada. Not everyone gets such an opportunity. We know we are blessed and we are thankful. Also, we are at a stage in our life that we are totally unattached: we do not have a mortgage, debt (besides student loans), children, or well-established careers to consider. We truly can just go. So we did!

Despite our relatively ‘free’ stage of life, the move still took a lot of effort! We began packing boxes in June because we knew that once summer hit we would be gone most weekends with camping and a family reunion. Also, after learning that moving companies charge by cubic weight we decided to sell about 4-5 car loads of belongings at a garage sale and online and to store some personal things at my parents house. Why move it if we don’t need it in the next few years? In May we took a holiday to Halifax to scope things out and to find an apartment. After considering several options, we chose an apartment on the 7^th floor of a high-rise just north of the commons and fairly close to downtown. We are going to try to live without a car and just use the bus and our feet instead. This will be an interesting challenge for two people who have always had a car. Really though, the majority of people in the world do not drive cars, so I’m sure it will be just fine.

During this next chapter of our life we are going to try to share a few glimpses of our experiences through this blog. If you stop by to read from time to time, please let us know by sending a comment or an email, we’d love to hear from you!

Shell Shocked

Lately I am amazed at how tired I am.

My heart is tired and my spirit is tired.
The past 3 years have been excruciating in many ways. Don't get me wrong, there were abundant blessings throughout it all. But there has been a lot of struggle as well. Matthew and I knew that we were taking on a challenge of significant proportions when we decided to both be full-time students for the first few years of our marriage. I don't think we knew just how enormous of a commitment this was though. By this, I mean that we underestimated the size of our commitment to school; and not that we underestimated our commitment to marriage. Although that has its own unique challenges, I feel like we were prepared for that challenge - but not for the toll that the intensity of school on each of us as an individual and as a couple. It was an unreal experience and I don't know if I would recommend it to other couples; if anybody asks me in the future, I pledge to be brutally honest with them to try to convey what our experience has been.
After our wedding in May 2007, we had four months of just being married and living. It was wonderful! And then September hit. On the first day of school, I flew up the stairs of our old basement suite, coffee in hand. Running late, I hit the third stair from the top, at the wrong angle and with abundant velocity, and my coffee and I went soaring into Matthew, the stairs, and the door. Perhaps that was an omen of the chaos to come in the next three years:
- Two sets of midterm and final schedules
- Two sets of assignments and papers
- Two GPAs to nurture to an appropriate level above 80% (minimum)
- Two sets of notes and powerpoint slides to print each night (at the expense of countless trees)
- Two types of study habits: one characterized by extensive note taking/copying and memorizing into the wee hours of the morning, and the other characterized by calm textbook reading accompanied by various colours of highlighters, in the comfy leather chair, with a pre-scheduled bath and bed time of 9:30 pm. (Can you guess which is which?!)
- Two individuals riddled with near constant stress, causing frequent sleepless nights, night sweats, floor pacing, headaches, and even occasional chest pains
- Two bodies who let their muscles atrophy while sitting at desks for 12 hours a day
- Two schedules of random part-time shifts whenever possible
- One joint bank account that grew accustomed to no income for the majority of each semester, because study schedules demanded every waking hour of attention

This is a snap-shot of our past three years. Now, I realize that many people have gone to school and I am certainly not trying to say that we've had it worse than most. Certainly not. In fact, before this experience I can honestly say that I didn't understand why so many people drop out of university. I probably thought that I understood, but I didn't. The biggest lessons that we learned from all of this is the necessity of sticking together and the necessity strong social networks (our family and friends). We could not have done it alone. The other thing I've recently learned is the necessity of rest. It is good and it brings much needed perspective.

Long time no blog

Wow. So it looks like its been over two years since I've updated my blog. I'm actually kind of ashamed of this! I think it might be time for another crack at this blogging thing. I won't attempt a slavish recap of my life since 2008; that would be insanity. Rather, I'll start with this short entry today and in the days and weeks to come I'll start to share some of the thoughts and happenings in my life recently. This could be fun!