As it was Canada a few days ago, I’m reminded of all the things I love about my country, and all the things I miss so much.  For an expat, the day of the year that your country celebrates itself is always super hard.  Worse when things in the country you live in are in a rough point.  Worse when you’ve already realized you (and your family) need to move already.

We love this house so very very much.  We love having so much land (though don’t love the slope of it or that there are so many trees to remove before we’d be able to properly use it the way we’d like).  We keep saying to each other that we just want to pick up the whole house and bring it with us.  It’s so “us”.  So perfect for our family.

At least I can take consolation for the fact that should we ever build a house again, this is likely going to be it.  We’ve got the blueprints and already know what minor changes we’d make (like a 2nd story window in the stairwell, somewhere we could put a woodstove, a window on the un-windowed office wall).  We already know we love the layout/flow of the house.  We know just where/how big a screened in porch should be.  We know where the deck will go.

But Ken’s job is quickly chipping away at us.  How much more time he spends working, how much more time he needs to destress.  How much strain it’s putting on all of us.  It can’t go on, and as much as we love this house it’s not enough.  So the job search begins.  It includes Canada now, without much limitation (not the Maritimes - as much as I love them, not Quebec - as much as I don’t, ideally not T.O. or Ottawa or the plains).  I hope we’ll be able to sell the house.  I hope we’ll be able to pull it together to really showcase it’s awesome features.  I hope people are still willing to move out of the city and into a ‘burb as far away as we are.

So many hopes…

I asked Ken about whether he’d had any further notice of when he was likely going to Hong Kong, since we figured it was going to be sometime in July.  With some passport issues and delays, he told me last night that he figured he wasn’t going to be going this time.

…

Today he let me know that it’s going to be the beginning of August.  I hope he’ll be able to be here until after Ethan’s birthday, but seeing as that’s the first Monday in Aug, and Ken usually leaves out on a Saturday, chances aren’t so great.  We can hope, though.  Not that Ethan will notice, since his concept of time isn’t broad enough to recognize specific dates, but still.

Perhaps this is also partly my fault.  This morning I realized I need to get cracking on our Christmas Stockings, and even now I’ve got a guage swatch sitting on the desk in front of me, ready to be measured and calculated and for me to reconfigure the pattern I wrote.  I also want to include some more colourwork in/around the toe/heel areas, so I’ll be fiddling with those too.  While Ken’s in China I’ll have many evenings with only my knitting to keep me company.  At least I have that.

Last night we slept under a tent in the pouring rain. Well. Not really, but it seemed as such. Saturday we put up a gazebo - one of the tent-types - outside our living room in the “patio/deck area”. It also happens to be right below our bedroom, and as we lay in bed the sound of the rain pounding on the tent roof echoed up into our room and sounded exactly like it was above us and we were *in* the tent. It was pretty nice and rather romantic.

Yesterday we also went to a party. One of Ken’s co-workers was celebrating his daughter’s 2nd birthday by inviting half of PA to his house. Thankfully, though it rained in spurts and we got wet, he has a HUGE playset in his backyard that the boys had an absolute blast on. One of those big wooden ones you see at hardware stores? The rain helped make the slide extra super slippery, to Victor’s delight and Ethan’s trepidation (though he went down it and mostly enjoyed the experience). They had a lot of fun on the swings, too. I’m glad I thought ahead and dressed them in their swim outfits (swim trunks and bathing suit material shirts) since they dried fast and the bright patterns hid the dirt well.

I love reading. Love it. That being said, in my opinion I haven’t read nearly enough, since I’ve only read 17 of these books. Pathetic! However, I’ve got 19 more of them on my “to do” list. I keep getting distracted by knitting and children and things, though… Life gets in the way of my reading!

Top 100 Book Meme
“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (first book, was turned off the rest by advice)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I’ve read many, but not all)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (forced in school and OMG I hate this book!)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (I’d love to but OY what a big book - it’s near the bottom of my list)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (I’ve tried! I keep trying every so often…)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (see above)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (loved the movie, hope the book is as good)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (I’ve seen the movies so many times but I really ought to read them - my sister loved them)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (I got partly in and somehow lost my copy)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (interesting - forced school read, but I didn’t enjoy it)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (adored this book as a little girl!)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (currently reading)
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (meh)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (currently reading)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (wouldn’t this be part of his complete works?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I was directed to this by another blog, but it’s wonderful. I cried… both times I watched it. Ethan’s remark, when I brought him to sit and watch with me the 2nd time, was the best part.

“Look at all the FRIENDS!”

(I tried to embed the vimeo file directly but broke… something.  You’ll need to click.)