California Canuk

I just can't even with 2020 anymore. I thought I was coping pretty well, to be honest. I mean, I'm an extrovert, but I'm not an idiot so staying away from people--while difficult--has been a no-brainer. My hair has grown to ridiculous lengths, I haven't had a pedicure in 6 months, and I've even started making my own sourdough bread, FFS.  But I was handling it.  D and I had found our routine; I sacrificed my hobby room so he could have a dedicated work-from-home space with a door. We watched a bunch of stuff in our Netflix queue, we had game nights over Zoom with friends, we started meditating. We can do this. We ARE doing this!  Or so I thought. Jacques had his first seizure on August 2 at about 8 in the morning. A second one followed 4 days later. We got him in to see his vet who ran a full blood panel but found nothing. We started him on anti-seizure medication and made an appointment to see a neurologist. Monday the neurologist told us our beloved Frenchie, only

 So, 2020. Amirite? What a shit show. But in all seriousness, I know a lot of my family and friends are worried about me since California has been on fire for what seems like forever but has really only been a few weeks , and now Oregon has decided it felt left out , which means I appear to be living on the set of some kind of post-apocalyptic film production except Hollywood is largely shut down so this must be my reality somehow. When I wrote my previous post in December 2018 about being homesick, I had no idea that a year later California, and the rest of the world, would be inundated by a virus that could potentially make me very actually sick. And then only 8 months later something called PM2.5 , something I'd never even heard of before, would be doing its damnedest to get into my lungs and fuck my shit up and it is LITERALLY EVERYWHERE RIGHT NOW.  Friends and family, I can tell you not to worry and that I'm fine, and this is actually true right now. We have good qualit

During the 10 years D and I spent separated by an international border, the times I missed him most was the days immediately following one of his visits home. Having recently returned to California from a 10-day visit back "home" to Canada, I am now finding myself very homesick. It's a weird feeling to miss a country. Don't get me wrong, I miss my family and friends, too. But I have been missing them all along. What I haven't missed--and now find myself pining for--is my "home and native land", actual Canada with Canadians and shit. Not the snow, though. I don't miss that at all. The US is a strange, uncanny-valley-type place: it looks like Canada (a land of immigrants, many of them white), it sounds like Canada (in that English is the predominant language), so you kind of expect it to act like Canada. But here's where things diverge. Culturally this country is very different from Canada. So much so that I'm astonished that dec

I just realized it's been a month since my last post.  A half a dozen posts in and I'm already slacking off.  It's not like I haven't been doing anything blog-worthy, I'm just lazy. Probably. So what exactly have I been up to? Well, I joined a pool league. That's my team, Pocket Siths.  I am the lowest skill level member of the team so they play me every week--pretty much because they have to, not because they want to. We play on red felt at our home pool hall and I have learned I suck at playing on red felt.  That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. I've also had some fun taking pictures of myself and the fur babies to send to D while he's at work: I went to New Orleans with D and some friends from back home.  We loved it!  Definitely need to go back at some point, maybe when it isn't hot at balls (which is almost never). First night: cocktails on Frenchman Street (that's where all the good live m

Today is Columbus Day in the US but more importantly, it's Thanksgiving in Canada which is a statutory holiday so almost every Canadian has the day off and plans to spend it stuffing their faces with turkey and pumpkin pie. This makes it similar to Thanksgiving in the US in that families gather to eat too much, watch sports (football for Americans, hockey for Canadians) and of course, give thanks, but Canadians don't have a giant sale the day after--that comes after Christmas for us, the way God intended .  Come to think of it, Christmas is a lot like Thanksgiving but with more presents and angels and Santa and baby Jesus. And often snow. But I digress. I have to say I'm surprised by how much I'm missing celebrating Thanksgiving with my family. I'm even kinda missing eating turkey, which is weird because I'm not a huge fan of turkey. And not only that, I'm all by myself today because D is off in Yosemite for some kind of work off-site, team-building, mak

One of the things I missed the most from "back home" was my daily dose of homemade kombucha. Let me tell you, the store-bought stuff just doesn't cut it.  So I ordered myself a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) from our corporate overlords  Amazon and got brewing.  I bottled my first batch on August 26 and it turned out great! Here's a picture of my second batch bottled and my third batch brewing: So far the second batch has turned out to be as delicious as the first, so I'm pretty pleased with myself right now.  I've gifted bottles to a couple of suckers  friends and they haven't died yet so that's good.  Anyone who brews kombucha knows you get way more of it that you can actually drink so finding people you can con into taking it share it with is a necessity.  So anyone who's thinking about coming to visit us, now you have the added incentive of enjoying my homemade kombucha while you're here. Who knows--maybe I'll g