March 2012
2 posts
5 tags
Camino de Santiago
I am amazed at how many different aspects there are to the allure of the Camino de Santiago trail in Spain. Many religious figures and celebrities have travelled this route, across the top of Spain, and been buried along the way — the religious figures, not the celebrities. In addition to that, it was once considered a path to the end of the world. For Europeans, before the discovery of the...
6 tags
Black Birds
This is an excerpt from my book, “I Woke Up in Paradise.”
It is Friday morning. I am sitting in front of my 10,000 lux lamp because if I don’t do this most mornings in the winter I start to get depressed and find it hard to wake up in the morning. They call this type of mild depression the “February Blues” because so many people get depressed from a lack of sunshine. In...
February 2012
6 posts
"I Woke Up in Paradise" -- Now available
9 tags
My Next Adventure
I had one of those defining moments today. I felt a hesitation as I pushed the “return” button to submit my book for publication. My book seemed to spring from nowhere and suddenly, seven months later it was out. Now on to my next project.
This may seem sudden, but as I practise what I preach, inspiration seems to be flooding over me and encouraging me to indulge in those things...
9 tags
My Sister Vicki
My sister, Vicki, always seemed to have bad luck. She was hit by a gliding swing when she was young that left a great gash on her head and she broke her front middle tooth in an accident a couple of years after that.
Vicki adored me. There is nothing quite as lovely as having someone in your life that thinks you are the cat’s ass. She was my personal cheering squad. She made sure that I...
9 tags
My Sister Vicki
My sister, Vicki, always seemed to have bad luck. She was hit by a gliding swing when she was young that left a great gash on her head and she broke her front middle tooth in an accident a couple of years after that.
Vicki adored me. There is nothing quite as lovely as having someone in your life that thinks you are the cat’s ass. She was my personal cheering squad. She made sure that I...
My Book Is Finally Available!!
Well, it has finally arrived. After seven months of writing, editing and learning the ropes around publishing, my book is now available for sale. I can’t tell you how excited I am to be able to share this with you.
This is how it came into being. During the summer, I was trying to write blogs that would be appropriate for my life coaching website and there was a story stuck in front of...
6 tags
Back To Work
Now the pressure was on. I had no income, but I had a job. I could go back to the job whenever I “wanted,” so Bob was constantly explaining how much money we were wasting with me not back at work. He saw no value in me staying home with the girls. He knew that we could pay someone a fraction of what I made in order for me to go back to work.
I was not going back while I was still...
January 2012
9 posts
mindingparadise asked: Hey - nice blog! Hope you don' t mind if I use some of your content, they're great. New follower, can you please follow me back?
9 tags
Baby Number Three
I was receiving cheques from the government. They had started to come again after my work at the emergency clinic, but they were about to run out. I had been applying to jobs and despite Bob’s insistence that I work; he was actively interfering with this process.
One company called to set up an interview. The job would have been in sales. Bob told the person that called that I was pregnant...
10 tags
The Best Defense is a Good Offence
It is so dark outside that I closed the blinds in my office. Otherwise, I would feel like everyone could see me and I couldn’t see them. It is early in the morning and this time of year the sun does not make any appreciable impact on the day until about seven a.m.
I was still at home with my two preschoolers, but soon, the money from the government was set to run out. My youngest daughter...
10 tags
My Father
While I was pregnant with my second daughter my father had what we all thought was a stroke. He was unable to stand on his own and ended up in the hospital. The tests failed to confirm that it was a stroke and my understanding is that they came to the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis by default. After hearing this, many things fell into place.
During the time that I was getting to know Bob I was...
8 tags
Sunrises and Rainbows
I can only say that I was enjoying myself. I loved this feeling of being a family, of having a gorgeous three year old daughter and a perfect newborn. We had a lot of family visit and we had friends come over. We were renovating the back of the kitchen that had been a mudroom. I had gotten to know a lot of people in the city and felt that I had a reasonable community around me.
In Canada there...
12 tags
Baby Number Two
Our new home had what could only be described as a professionally decorated nursery. The room had a soft pale beige, almost white, carpet with an oversized under padding. It had this luxurious feel when you walked across it and the added benefit of concealing any squeaky boards or any sound whatsoever.
There were two windows that both had metal horizontal pale blue blinds. This meant that you...
8 tags
12 tags
Early Labour
A totally new experience for first time moms is Braxton Hicks contractions. Named after John Braxton Hicks who first described them in 1872, these non-painful contractions are the body’s way of training to prepare for the big day. My entire abdomen would tense up and get really hard to the touch and then relax. Sometimes it would do this, at regular intervals, for hours.
Every night, at...
10 tags
Begin With a Move
It seems almost predictable that the first thing that Bob and I decided to do together was move. The house that I was living in was my home alone. Bob felt that if we were going to start a new life as a couple, we would need a home that was ours and not just mine. I couldn’t argue with this and we began the process of looking for another place to live.
Bob had managed to get a job at...
December 2011
11 posts
10 tags
No Leg to Stand On
What was initially a great job with a lot of accomplishments and room for me to contribute positively to how the calves were raised and their general care had disintegrated into a political battle with a pseudo-veterinarian. This man had been masquerading as the go-to man with health care issues even though he did not have any formal training. I can hear half of the audience sighing.
Our...
7 tags
9 tags
What's a Girl To Do?
I was just sitting out back on my deck. It is Thanksgiving weekend. This year it was even earlier than normal falling on the ninth of October. The weather has been extraordinary. By chance, I had knowledge of the weather forecast before I had actually closed the pool for the season and knowing that I would have a full house for the weekend, I kept it open.
It has been around 80 F and...
10 tags
My Outrageous Right Brain
With the view that I have now, from 2011, I can see that even though there is a corpus callosum, which is essentially a large bundle of nerve fibres that connect the left and right halves of the brain, I very much had a division in the way the two sides of my brain worked.
As early as grade four, when I was nine years old, I had struggled with this division between what my left, analytical,...
4 tags
I'm Publishing My Book!!
I have decided to take this blog and publish it (and a bunch of other writing) as a book. I would like your opinion on a book cover. I have designed nine covers and they are all in a ONE question survey. The photos have the front cover on the right and the back cover on the left. The single question follows the nine photos and is on the second page of the survey.
Let me know your favourite!...
10 tags
To Be Single, or Not To Be Single
Being a single mom when I graduated restricted the jobs that I could take. It was almost impossible for me to take a regular veterinary job because you were required to be on call. How could I possibly leave in the middle of the night when I had a baby in the house and no one to take care of her? I looked into sales jobs, research jobs and veterinary practices that had an emergency clinic in town,...
11 tags
Crazy Stairs
It is much colder out now. We are into the fall colours, but most of the trees still have their leaves. The temperature is supposed to be between 50 and 70 F over the next couple of weeks. I have left the pool open because next weekend is Thanksgiving. It is earlier in Canada because we have an earlier harvest. It is nice that way because it is separated from Christmas by over two months.
...
8 tags
Student Newspapers
Things got worse with Bob. Despite his education as a scientist, he had the ability to write well and he was passionate about getting published. The ultimate way to create an audience of adoring readers was to write articles. The campus newspaper survived on the enthusiasm of students that would write articles for free and Bob started to write pieces for the paper.
He was a good writer and his...
9 tags
Pregnancy Support
The main thing that I remembered about being pregnant was that I was tired and out of breath, and oh yeah, I was emotional. My emotions were so close to the surface that I found it embarrassing.
On the first day back to school, Bob and I biked up to the university. We had spent a lot of the summer biking around. We had biked about 120 miles to my hometown, we had biked to my friend’s...
9 tags
Midwives
Midwifery was in that legal grey area back when I was making my decision. The medical community was arguing that it put women in danger because all of the advantages of being in the hospital were not available. The literature, all written by scientists that identified more with doctors than with midwives, was filled with studies that didn’t even bother to separate the babies that were born...
13 tags
Medical Literature
Access to the medical research journals at the university was a blessing that I will be forever thankful for. As any new parents can attest to, once you become pregnant your focus shifts to things pregnancy and baby related.
My first concern was with weight gain. I was gaining weight way faster than any of the baby books thought reasonable. I went into the library to research aspartame. It...
November 2011
7 posts
6 tags
Pregnant?
The whole reason we had decided to get married was to try to get pregnant. That had been the plan all along. If you do the simple math, a pregnancy is nine months long and getting pregnant in August would have the baby arriving right after final exams of third year.
As it turned out, we were highly fertile. The first time that we tried to get pregnant resulted in a late period. To say that...
6 tags
Investing in the Future
The next year became a whirlwind of activity. I had my schooling to attend to, a wedding date set for June and we had started to look for rental properties. I had developed a passion over my lifetime for real estate.
Planning a wedding was really not that important to me. Unlike many young girls, I had never dreamed about my wedding day and although I had wondered who I would marry, I did not...
10 tags
The Fish Bowl
Needless to say at this point, my answer put quite a damper on the rest of our holiday. The time immediately following this trip was uncomfortable because once he had asked me to marry him and I had declined it changed the relationship. I remember there being this awkward feeling of not knowing how to proceed, what to do next.
The distance between us was palpable. I knew that I had to make a...
8 tags
Just Say No
I can’t possibly keep referring to this guy as the “guy” so lets call him Bob. That is not his real name but we will all know whom I am talking about. Bob finished up his degree and I still had a few years before I would finish my vet degree, so he decided to stick around and begin another degree as a way of being able to stay in the same city.
The relationship was rocky, but...
7 tags
Changing the Locks
The fall brought the return of my roommate. The guy that I was dating moved out of his boarding house and into an apartment that he shared with a woman. His bedroom was in what used to be the garage and her’s was upstairs on the second floor. He had heard about this place directly from her. She worked in the green house that was affiliated with the lab that he was working in.
His room was...
6 tags
The Yellow Dress
My best friend was living in a large city about an hour from where I went to school. She was studying fashion design and had offered to make me a dress for my graduation ceremony. I had completed my general Bachelor of Science and would be receiving my degree that spring.
She made me a lemon yellow dress out of two layers of fabric. The bottom layer was a shiny material that I cannot name and...
7 tags
The Professor's Party
This particular party turned out to be a rather significant turning point in my life. The party itself was a sad state of affairs. All of the guests were students, as far as I remember, even though this was not one of the newly minted professors that would actually be close in age to the students, but rather an older man. I guess he must have found it easier to socialize with the twenty something...
October 2011
9 posts
10 tags
Research
I no longer had to think about acquiring experience to get accepted into veterinary medicine, so I focused the next summer on getting a job in town. I could save a lot of money by simply not having to pay rent in two places. I liked my apartment, it was close to down town, walking distance to the university and there was a farmer’s market, grocery shopping, fast food and a Laundromat all...
5 tags
Doctor
The summer before I had been living in my hometown. I had one of my best friends living there as well as all of the people that I knew in town. I was dating a guy and my sister still lived there. I was close to many of the people that I worked in the restaurant with. They all knew that I was awaiting my letter from the veterinary college.
I had envisioned a great celebration and proudly...
7 tags
Lambs to Slaughter
The fall colours are beginning to highlight the greens with yellow and orange. It is still quite warm out and was over 80 degrees yesterday. My pool is still open and will be for a couple of more weeks. I’m sitting out back, partly because I know that soon it will be too cold to sit out here and partly because it is a beautiful morning.
I still needed to get “on-farm”...
8 tags
The Great Train Accident
My closest cousin became engaged to be married and asked my sister, Vicki, and me to be bridesmaids. This cousin was the daughter of my mother’s brother. I never really knew him very well, but I did know that he owned a monkey. When he was out of work for a while, he came to live with us briefly and brought his monkey.
Doesn’t every child want a pet monkey? This monkey was...
4 tags
Admission
The only thing that still remained unresolved was my application for veterinary medicine. In order to apply to veterinary medicine there were several things that you had to complete. First, you had to fill out the paperwork and sign a release saying that they could access your marks. Then, you had to write an essay explaining why you wanted to be a veterinarian and finally you were interviewed by...
7 tags
Milk is For Cows
I would get up in the morning and help the wife make breakfast. She was a teacher in town, so she would leave right after breakfast and I would go out with the men to milk the cows and do the chores. At break time, the men would come in and I was supposed to get the coffee and food out and then clean it up. When I was done doing this, we would go out and do more work on the farm.
This pattern...
8 tags
Second Class Citizen
After first year there was no thought given to returning to my home town. I had some friends there, but no place to stay. I needed to get a job that would help me get into veterinary medicine. Let me introduce the Farm Labour Pool.
The Farm Labour Pool was a loosely arranged group that was based on the mutual need of the farmers to have summer help and the university students to get practical...
6 tags
University
University was my first experience with “salad days”, which denote happy, fun filled days with lots of salads. I always think of BBQ’s where you are asked to bring a salad and there is cole slaw, potato salad, and macaroni salad—all of the ones that are implicated in food outbreaks. I worked hard in university. The classes and labs themselves were a full time job without...
September 2011
9 posts
11 tags
Residence
I’m trying something out of the ordinary. I went out for lunch and brought my computer, so we’ll see how that works. The atmosphere is totally different and I can expect interruptions, which are not as much of a problem when I’m writing at home. This is a fairly new chain restaurant in town. I’ve been to one in a near-by city and its chef is better. But, it still has a good...
4 tags
A Move of My Own
I’m now in the family room. It is a large room with three leather sofas, a large screen TV, a fireplace and three garden doors across the back wall. Garden doors are the same size as a regular door and they swing open normally, but about eighty per cent of them is glass. These particular doors do not all open. The centre has a lattice that makes them look a little like french doors, but the...
13 tags
You Get What You Need
I’ve moved again. I had to get up and walk around. I’ve started some coffee and there are leftovers warming in the microwave. I’m now sitting at the patio table that faces the same direction as the lounge chair, so the view is the same. It is definitely warmer.
If this ordeal in my bedroom had been isolated, it would have been enough of a reason to question the safety of...
10 tags
With Friends Like These....
My mother was still on a quest for status and it had occurred to her that one of the most prestigious things that she could do was to buy a racehorse. She envied the people that could enter the members’ only part of the racetracks and she wanted to be hob knobbing with the upper class. Unfortunately for my mother, she did not end up getting to know this elite group of people she fell into the...
12 tags
Perpetual Motion
We did not stay in the apartment in the house for very long. Soon, a townhouse where my mother wanted to live became available and we moved into it. It was a clean, two bedroom unit that was small but was so well designed that you could have privacy and space all at the same time. We had the coveted end unit, which is preferred because you only get noise from one side. The neighbours were all...
9 tags
Guardian Angel
A synchronicity joined the two major relationships that occurred during this time in my life. My heart knew that it was only fair to end the relationship with the older fella that I had had in my life since before my mother left my father. He wanted to get married right away and I did not. I still had my sights set on going to university and I did not plan to finish up high school and get married...