CHANGE, CHANGE AGAIN

Wow, we haven’t posted about our lives for a year! First, nothing much changed from what we’d posted in September 2008. Then, suddenly, everything about our lives exploded into turmoil.

But thanks, everyone, for leaving comments even though we’re not faithful bloggers. We feel less alone when we know that people out there are, in some small way, connecting with our lives.

We’ve had lots of comments raving about Eric’s writing and funny stories. Unfortunately for those fans, you’re stuck with me today. Don’t worry, though. After this, I’ll leave the blogging to him, at least for a while (more about that another time).

We are the Earth and The Cottage is our Sun

Eric’s project in Silver Beach was originally projected to end by August 2008, maybe early September. But it lasted through September, October, and into November. Even then, he only stopped because freezing, snowy weather forced him to.

Some people think that while Eric was away I sat on my ass doing nothing, leaving all the hard work to him. Perhaps from a certain perspective, that’s true; I certainly didn’t make much money. But sometimes work can’t be measured in dollars. Nor can it always be seen or touched by the physical body. Work happening behind the scenes is difficult both to describe and to understand. In the end, only the person doing the work can accurately determine its value – although this society’s feverish belief in capitalism would seem to indicate otherwise.

Even harder to grasp for some people, at least those non-introvert types (who make up the majority of the population in North America), was that I actually enjoyed my own company. I was generally content with my limited socializing. And although the constant battering of noise from trains and inconsiderate neighbours drove me partially mad, I was never bored or not busy.

However, once The Cottage job passed the Thanksgiving mark, Eric and I were sick of trying to live apart. With no Internet and limited cell phone service in Silver Beach, we connected for maybe an hour during the four days each week that Eric worked. And the weekends we spent together eventually became filled with arguments and irritability as the lack of communication wore on our nerves. Our relationship suffered from us not being able to share our thoughts, ideas, and experiences with each other. We were essentially living as single people with separate lives, yet still stuck together as a married couple through a partially shared life. Some couples find a happy balance in this kind of arrangement. But for us, it was the worst of both worlds.

As well, the weather was getting too cold for Eric to live in his travel trailer. So we looked for something that would allow Eric, me, and Dinah to live together during the week and not freeze. At the last minute, a family with a cabin four homes down from The Cottage who had heard about our dilemma rented us their pet-friendly “summer” home (it was winterized, but they didn’t use it much in the off-season). The living room window framed an expansive view of the lake, and I savoured the beauty and calm of sunsets, migrating geese, and weather shifting from fall into winter. The serenity slowly stitched back together a mind and soul worn threadbare from living in a paper-walled apartment beside Canada’s busiest railroad.

We lived in Silver Beach for four weeks, each weekend making the trek back to Moosomin to do laundry, check our e-mail, pay the bills, buy groceries, and complete a dozen other little tasks. We finally drove away from The Cottage on November 15, Eric’s work still incomplete. He would have to return in spring to finish.

Third time’s the charm? Yup, another winter move

At the end of November, we decided to move to Regina. It seems random, but only because we can’t cut windows into our skulls to reveal the intricately grinding gears of our brains. A rough explanation is that we thought living in Regina would keep us within reach of the bus while providing more opportunities for work, mental stimulation, meeting people, and finding eco-friendly products like non-toxic deodorant (which was a 1.5-hour drive away when we lived in Moosomin).

We went on a house-hunting blitz on November 27, but three things made our search difficult – pets had to be OK, we didn’t want another noisy apartment, and Regina’s housing market had something like a one per cent vacancy rate. We looked at three houses/main floor suites all within a similar price range. The last place was the most attractive, in the least-sketchy neighbourhood, and the most expensive.

We drove to a coffee shop to talk it over. Would we chew through all our bus savings due to the increased living expenses? Would living here distract us so much from the bus that we’d never go back? What would it mean to actually “settle,” even if just for a year or two, since we’d been living out of suitcases, backpacks, and Rubbermaids for the past two years?

Despite the possible outcome, we knew we had to move to Regina. And if we were moving, this place was really our only option. So, we took it. It’s not the perfect place. And it really hurt us financially. But we still believe we made the best possible decision, all things considered.

So for the third time in three years, we moved in December/January. Maybe our mental processes have been compromised by brain freeze …

Welcome home!

We had an entire month to move. At first we thought this was great because we wouldn’t be forced to pack everything into one massive load. Then we picked up the keys to our new place. When we walked inside, we immediately realized why those four weeks were so important.

I have to interject that when we looked at the place in November, it was still occupied. Very messily occupied. And the current resident was sleeping in one of the bedrooms. So we didn’t poke around very much. Or turn on many lights, or open many doors, or really linger at all. We saw enough to know that the layout was OK, the building wasn’t falling down, the basement tenant was friendly enough, and the landlord seemed reasonable.

With the previous occupants and their belongings gone, everything looked, and smelled, a lot different. The stench of old cigarette smoke triggered a severe coughing fit every time we inhaled. Then we noticed our socks had turned grey from walking across the filthy floor. None of the bedroom doors closed, and one of them didn’t even have a doorknob. The oven was encrusted with lumpy, black bits of charcoal. Only one window had blinds (and it wasn’t the bathroom window). Vinyl tiles, the peel-and-stick kind, were scattered loosely over a closet floor, having never been peeled nor stuck.

Luckily, we hadn’t brought many boxes with us that first trip. We shoved them in the cleanest corner, cranked open all the windows, and zipped off to London Drugs for some basic cleaning supplies (vinegar, baking soda, cloths, rubber gloves, and a broom). We spent the next three hours scrubbing walls, cupboards, and the kitchen ceiling. Its Nicotine Yellow hue provided a striking contrast to the Salmon Pink walls, but it just wasn’t our taste.

We brushed our teeth as usual before going to bed. But as we rinsed our spit down the bathroom sink, dirty water burbled up the drain and hawked our toothpaste back at us in a clear defiance of our attempts at cleanliness. Then, as though the former residents were flipping us their middle fingers, a cigarette butt popped to the surface and started doing laps in the dirty water that had half-filled the sink before we could get the tap turned off.

In retrospect, it sounds a lot like an RV we bought six months later … you’d think we’d have learned!

Vehicle troubles

In between cleaning and moving, we also spent the frigid winter of December fixing vehicles. First, Eric was determined to improve the fuel mileage on our Nissan pickup (Raoul) once and for all, especially since we wanted to make a quick weekend trip to Lethbridge just before Christmas.

That little endeavour took about three times longer than it should have and involved:

• installing the fuel injection system from a $200 parts truck, which turned out to be more screwed up than our truck’s system
• draining an entire 50-litre tank of gas within 100 kilometres or so
• shaking and rattling and not getting past 80 km/h while driving the first 20 kilometres of our quick weekend trip to Lethbridge
• limping back to the farm to drop off Raoul and pick up Eric’s heater-less work van, in which we almost froze while driving home from Lethbridge through a brutal winter storm
• putting the original fuel injection system back into Raoul
• discovering a little computer under Raoul’s passenger seat
• determining that the computer said a sensor was malfunctioning
• realizing the sensor wasn’t malfunctioning, but that the wiring was worn through
• fixing the wiring in 20 minutes
• improving our gas mileage by almost 50 per cent after four and a half years of driving this truck
• getting angry all over again at the Nissan dealership in Winnipeg that charged us $300 (when we were dirt poor but desperate for better fuel mileage) and didn’t even solve the problem!!!! A little broken wire that Eric fixed with a paperclip and the Haynes Vehicle manual!

Then, Eric’s work van decided to leak oil at an enormously no-longer-ignorable rate. Fixing this involved Eric:

• taking over my dad’s shop to replace the malfunctioning part
• removing the transmission (no small task)
• servicing the transmission while everything was out
• putting everything back together
• discovering the van couldn’t get enough power to start after having worked on it for 19 hours straight
• then, because it was 7 a.m. on Christmas morning, giving up, going inside, and sleeping on my parents’ couch until my dad (the mechanical genius) woke up
• watching my dad find the loose ground wire connection in 20 minutes and getting home around 9 a.m. on Christmas morning and, having had about 2 hours sleep in the past 24 hours, proceeding to sleep most of the day
• being stranded on the highway to Russell in -30 C weather one month later when the engine died and spewed oil all over the road while making what was supposed to be a quick two-day trip to check out a little something at The Cottage
• making a whirlwind trip into Winnipeg to buy a new work vehicle by taking the 3 a.m. Greyhound into the city and arriving back in Russell 17 hours later in a cube van
• transferring everything into the cube van and letting the Russell mechanic keep the old van for parts

New Year’s evaluation

We did have to move before everything in our new home was working, but by mid-January all the doors had doorknobs and closed smoothly, the bathroom sink had new plumbing all the way to the main stack, the kitchen and living room were freshly painted, and everything else was scrubbed clean.

Yet before we could completely commit to living in Regina, we had to assess our bus project.

Since its beginning, we’d been throwing around arbitrary numbers like we were playing catch – in six months we’ll be driving out of here; we only need another $10,000 to finish this thing. All these figures were groundless. We haven’t planned the bus; we’ve simply let it happen.

Exposing the wisps of your precious dreams to be seared by the light of the real world is cruel but necessary – unless you enjoy envisioning the fantasy and talking about the fantasy more than doing the necessary work to realize the fantasy; or unless you prefer jumping straight in and then muddling along until it becomes so jumbled that you can’t remember your original vision and you shrug your shoulders and walk away.

Eric and I didn’t want to get to a point with the bus where we would have to either start over or walk away. That meant we had to stop fantasizing about roaming the country in our modern, handcrafted bus conversion and start imagining the work necessary for each little detail our dream required before we could drive away.

Our attempt at pragmatism uncovered two numbers – two years and $20,000 until completion of our bus. Whether these will prove more accurate than past numbers in uncertain. But at least we seriously thought about them.

Life in the Queen City

When we realized those figures suggested we stay in Regina for a while, we went through the lengthy process of changing our identities (health cards, driver’s licences, etc.) and looking for work.

I didn’t think I’d find a paying job in my field (working with words), but then I saw an ad for Hansard input editors and immediately sent in my resume. (Hansard is the verbatim record of what’s said in parliament; in this case, the Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly.) I got the job after a lengthy process – including an interview, short test, eight days of training in late January/early February, and another test – and was at work by late February. The job coincides with when the MLAs are sitting, so I work for about 10 weeks in the spring and six in the fall, allowing lots of time for other pursuits.

Moving Eric’s construction business to Regina was more involved than me getting my job, especially with the whole van-exploded-must-buy-different-work-vehicle incident in late January. But he finally managed to get everything transferred and even found some work, too.

So here we are in Regina, trying to make life work. We’ve managed to get out and experience some culture, live music, good food, stimulating talks, and art (including a spectacular ballet, Joni Mitchell's The Fiddle and The Drum), which has been refreshing. Unfortunately, a chaotic summer – thanks to random circumstances and some bad decisions – has derailed us financially and mentally. Maybe we’ll eventually find time to post some stories about it, but currently we’re struggling just to regain our balance.

Meanwhile, all we want is to learn how to balance our dream of freedom as embodied by The Bus and the reality of living in a society opposed to our goals. It’s a difficult tension to keep.