Twenty-Four Hours and Counting

At roughly this time tomorrow, my mom will be taking me to the ferry so I can make my way to the Vancouver Airport and from there to Ireland.

I was planning on have a small series of Irish themed posts to put up while I was away so I wouldn't feel guilty about not posting while on holidays.

Sadly, the posts were a case of too much time.

I originally started researching the Irish history ones back in June. I was going to make short narrated videos (and even did a couple of cartoon drawings). Realising I wouldn't be able to make my original target date, I pushed the posts back to my trip.

In the ensuing three months, I collected almost a thousand pages worth of typed notes. Just notes! In short, I have enough information to write a book. (Don't go getting any ideas, mom.)

About three weeks ago, I went to edit my notes into some sort of narrative...

...I'm still editing...

...and I just got to Cromwell. (That's roughly 1650... so, you know, another 350 years to go through. There's just an uprising in 1798, the famine, an uprising in 1916, a civil war, independence for 26 of the 32 counties, another civil war, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the Peace Process to cover... easy peasy!)

It took me until Thursday to realise that I'm not going to make my goal. I was holding out some ridiculous hope that I'd wake up and find it all pre-written and the video laid out and I'd just have to edit them (I was planning on three of them) and that would be that.

As a result I'll try pop in once or twice while I'm away but there will be no pre-planned posts. (And I make no promises that my other posts won't just be "STILL ALIVE! HAVING FUN!")

Storytime Sunday: The House

I stand at the road and stare at the building trying to reconcile it with the one from my childhood. It's just a non-descript house in a row of non-descript houses crawling slowly up the hill towards the church. Was that all it ever was? I ponder as I watch a lazy bumblebee loop-to-loop its way to the geraniums standing sentry along the front of the house.

The world stops. Even the breeze has disappeared. The unusually sunny sky paints the house but it's just a facade on the depressing stucco walls. Flecks of gray paint commit suicide from the front door overhang revealing the old pale blue underneath. Like a line of marching ants, four doorbells stretch along the doorframe. I can't help but think to when there used to be only one.

Movement.

The moment is broken as I feel the breeze on my cheek.

An ad for Skysports whispers out the window defeating the lace curtain’s attempt to hide life from the outside world. The whisper reaches the church bells and they answer in dulcet tones: it’s one o’clock and we don’t want Skysports.

The roar of life comes from the road and the bumblebee takes off.

You can never go home again.

Storytime Sunday: Returning Home

Our bus pulls away from our stop, leaving its two lone wazungu passengers in its wake of dust and diesel fumes. Kara turns her head left and right to stretch her neck.

"I want to be back in Nungwi."

"Me, too."

We walk across the road and knock on the big metal door. The small opening slides open and when the eyes see who it is, they're replaced by a big grin and a shout in Swahili. Jonathan opens the gate and hugs us as we walk through. Andrew walks out of the guard gate and hugs us as well.

"Karibuni! Habari za safari?" (Welcome! How was the trip?") His big white teeth are about all I can make out in the encroaching darkness.

"Nzuri," (good) I reply. His big hand messes my hair like I'm one of the toddlers. I  feign anger as I fix my hair but he knows it's just an act. Kara and I say good night and promise we'll chat more tomorrow when we're rested.

"Go. See your children," Jonathan laughs after us as we continue our trek towards the main house. "They've missed you." I wonder if the kids have even noticed our absence. They didn't seem to notice any of the other times we've been gone for multiple days.

We settle into our room in the newly completed volunteer quarters. I sit on my bed with a loud sigh and I glance around before settling on Kara's smiling face.

"Let's go see the children."

We're both up before she even finishes the sentence. We carefully make our way down the stairs and around to the back door. It's hasn't been locked yet so we're able to sneak in. Unspoken between us is the understanding that we want to surprise the children. We make our way as quietly as possible to the change and laundry room where the kids are being bathed before bedtime. We open the door.

"Hello," we call out.

All the chatter stops at the sound of our voices and there's a moment of silence while all the heads turn towards us. Suddenly, the room erupts in noise.

The nannies move forward to hug us and the toddlers walk and crawl as quickly as they can towards us. Maria gets out of her bath completely naked and beelines for my legs. Her wet, shivering body presses against them while Mama Musa tries to coax her back to the bath. She looks up at me with a big smile.

"Mommy," she screams. I pick her up, give her the biggest hug I can and then hand her back to Mama Musa. Kara and I gather up the toddlers and older babies that are done their baths and take them to the play room. I sit down on the ground and am immediately beset by Joshua, Cory and Simon. They crawl over my legs, drape themselves over my back. They have me pinned to the ground.

They hug my arms.

They kiss my head.

They tell each other that 'mommies are home'. Nosatwa comes crawling out from the change room with her pajamas only half on. Hadija comes running out after her to catch her and finish getting her dressed, but I pick up Nosatwa and tell Hadija that I'll do it.

"It is good to see you," Hadija tells me as she hugs me. I'd hug her back but Benny is pulling on my free hand as he jumps, repeating 'mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy'.

The older toddlers start to do laps around the area stopping on each go round to hug Kara and me. Kara has Junior in her arms and a huge grin on her face. The last time Kara and I were in this room was after Queen had died, very unexpectedly, in Kara's arms. Tomorrow, Kara will depart Tanzania for Uganda and continue her overland trip to Cape Town. I am so happy that her last memory of CoL will be of all this joy and not the sorrow which greeted us on our last day before our two week holidays began.

As the younger toddlers and babies take up residence in our laps, the older toddlers wind themselves up. They can't stop running and screaming. Constant calls for our attention keep our heads turning left and right. Philip stops running. As he turns towards us, he pulls his pajamas up over his head and throws them in the air.

Cory follows, then big Maria, then Benny. Soon, all the toddlers are naked. They throw their pajamas in the air, catch them and thrown them again. They scream 'mommies, mommies' each time. I teared up. I have never felt so missed in all my life.

We leave the toddlers totally wired and in various states of redress. We apologies to the nannies for getting the kids riled up but they're so happy to see us back, they don't seem to mind. We can still hear the toddlers shouting 'mommies are home' as we make our way back up the stairs to the volunteer quarters. Sleep may be a long time coming for the toddler room tonight.

"I needed that," I close the door behind me as I say it. I lock us in for the night as Kara moves into the kitchen to make some tea. We make eye contact and despite the tears dancing on her lower eye lashes, she's flashing me the biggest grin her mouth can make.

"So did I."

"Better than Nungwi?"

"Better than Nungwi."

CCM Round Two

After I post this, I’m heading up to Shawnigan Lake for a little R&R. Some family friends have rented a cabin up on the lake for a week and invited my parents to come up to visit. I get an invite by proxy. Not a bad arrangement, if you ask me.

Shawnigan’s not too far from Victoria so it makes a nice day trip but after a week of glorious sunny weather, this morning was overcast. A few breaks in the clouds to the west and north make me hope that the clouds will end at the top of the Malahat. Of course, good company would make it worth the trip even without the weather.

The family friends in question belong to the group I refer to as CCM Gen 1.0 (and I’m not sure, but parts of Gen 2.0 and 3.0 may be up there as well).  Sadly, due to a lingering winter head/chest cold during the annual Christmas party rounds, I haven’t seen any of them since our CCM picnic last August. All the more reason to accept my parent’s offer of a drive over the Malahat regardless of the weather.

For last year's picnic, Gen 2.0 sets up the table that Gen 1.0 used to take on camping trips.

(And I’m hoping that they bring their camera so I can play with it and then upload some photos. This whole no-camera thing blows.)

I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately. And by ‘lately’, I mean ‘since I lost my free Internet access at home a week ago and have been forced to frequenting the coffee shop when I want to post’. (Yup, ‘lately’ sums it much more succinctly.) Also, it’s amazing how much easier it is to get the stories from my head to word document when I don’t keep checking facebook every 10 minutes.

There’s a few I was debating about sharing on here when I decided to make it a regular feature. A regular feature deserves a regular name. I was going to go with Fiction Friday. Alliteration for the win! Then I started to think that some of my travel stories should be written down but they’re not fiction (no matter how much I wish some of them were). Sadly, with no day of the week starting with ‘n’, I can’t just create another regular feature like Non-fiction Nonday. (My calls to the offices of the Oxford English Dictionary promising the payout of bribes should they add ‘Nonday’ to the dictionary have not been returned.)

Writing Wednesday? But aren’t all blog posts writing?

Thoughtless Thoughtful Thursday? But that’s not really about writing and sometimes my writing isn’t thoughtful. Actually, it usually isn’t.

Story Saturday? Or Sunday?

Maybe staring at the lake will help me figure it out.

Any suggestions?

Monty Python Fixes Everything

I came up with this awesome idea for a series of posts I wanted to do. It is educational, it is relevant (to me at least), and it is a topic I love to talk about.

No, not me. History! Although I do enjoy talking about me. 

In my mind, I laid out a tentative idea for a four part series. I was hoping (because I forgot how much time research can take) to have the first part up almost two weeks ago. Then I started researching and writing. I have spent almost 50 hours on this series. I'm not even done part one and it's clocking in at a three page word document.

Part one got too long so I was going to break it up into two parts. Part Three is so much information (which I haven't even gotten to yet), I could easily make it an entire four part series on its own. In short, I bit of way more than I could chew and now I have to do a little re-think.

I'm still doing this multi-part post but it's time to step back for a moment, scratch my head, make a fresh cuppa, and actually think about what I think people actually need to know about this topic. I've also decided that myself imposed deadline of RIGHTNOW! was a little stupid. Perhaps not flip-a-car-set-it-on-fire-stupid, but still stupid. I was stressing myself out about something that's 500 years in the making... it can wait a few more weeks/months to make sure I do a good job.

In the meantime, nothing helps me regroup like a little Monty Python watching break so here it is, my favourite MP scene:

It's all about the "where's the fetus gonna gestate?" line for me. Gets me every time.

Sloppy Dismount,You Only Get a 6.9

After a gloriously sunny weekend and ensuing week, winter decided to poke its head out for one last hurrah today. It was overcast and down right chilly. I had to put on pants and a jacket just to go the coffee shop... in June... I KNOW!! Anyway, the clouds lifted a little this evening so now I'm enjoying a beautiful pink and orange sunset.

The upside to the less-than-stellar-weather is that I took my laptop to the coffee shop (jaunty beret and black skinny jeans not included) and actually did research for something I want to write. I momentarily felt like a student again until I remembered that I would never have spent eight straight hours researching anything in university. Hmm, maybe that was my problem. The research I was doing? Well, you'll soon see it on here.

The Canucks lost last night. I don't want to talk about it. Instead, I watched my sleeping cat roll of the back of her favourite chair and giggled. She jumped back up like she hadn't just displayed the grace and dexterity of a wired chihuahua and promptly returned to sleeping. I tried to sneak up to take some adorable photos but she was having none of that. I did, however, managed to talk her into some glamour shots.

"That's it, baby! Work the camera. Fierce. Give me fierce!"*

"The camera loves you, darling. Don't forget to smize!"*

As for the rest of this evening, I have some crafts I have to do in conjunction with the research I did today. I bet that piqued your interest!

Good night!

*These make a lot more sense if you've ever sat through America's Next Top Model.

The Dreaded Lurgy

About two weeks ago, I thought I was on the verge of getting the flu. I had that achy, sore, lethargic feeling so I took a night off dancing and pampered myself with a hot bedtime bevvy and an early bed time. It seemed to do the trick.

By the time last Friday rolled around, I couldn't concentrate on some writing I was working on. The weekend consisted of making myself go out for previously planned social commitments and staring at the same writing trying to will itself to fix what I perceived was wrong with it. "Write yourself better," I moaned repeatedly at it to no avail.

After a busy but very low-key Sunday, I crashed at 9:30. I had to accept defeat to the chest/head/throat thing that had been festering in me for two weeks. I slathered myself with Vicks VapoRub and crawled into bed.

Tonight is going to be a repeat. Hopefully I'll be back to semi-interesting posts in the near future.

From the Vault

This is another piece of writing I did for a class. It was entitled 'Soundtrack' and we had to write about one song that would be included on the soundtrack to the movie of our lives.

Soundtrack

I hear the phone ringing in my mom's room. A quick glance at the clock shows that I still have an hour before I have to be up for school so I roll over and being the process of falling back to sleep. I am interrupted by a knock on the door.

"It's your dad," my mom says as she walks the phone over to me. "He wants to wish you a happy birthday."

I take the phone and mumble some sort of greeting that vaguely passes for 'hello'. My dad had moved back to Ireland for a year with my stepmom and Baby Bro. I had last seen him seven months earlier when we said good bye in Belfast. We had gone for a pint and then to a Christy Moore concert, just the two of us. It was the best send off I could have asked for.

"Good morning, Claire," came the response. Claire. I haven't heard my name since his Christmas phone call. His time in the old country as he called it has strengthen his previously mild accent and I can hear the accent my friends had always commented on growing up. "I wanted to make sure I was the first to wish you a happy birthday and of course..." He starts to sing.

When first I saw the love light in your eyes, I thought the world held nought but joy for me,

I sit up and smile. It's a song I've heard so many times in my life, I don't recall not knowing it. My dad had always said he was going to sing it to me on my sixteenth birthday.

And even though we've drifted far apart, I never dream but what I dream of thee.

My knowledge of this song comes from my dad blasting his tapes of The Furey's through the house on Saturday mornings. Name a Furey's song, and I have a memory to go with it. Green Fields of France is my Remembrance Day song of choice. From Clare to Here reminds me of driving the length of Ireland many times over to visit family when I was six. The Old Man made me break down in tears after my dad fell ill for the first time. I Will Love You takes me to the day when I learned my aunt Eileen had finally died of cancer. The list is endless and it runs the gamut of every emotion I have ever felt.

I love you as I never loved before since first I saw you on the village green,

I had heard him sing this song many times--along with the recording, when driving in the car, with his musicians friends (usually fellow immigrants) at his parties--and now here I sat, alone in the dark, with my dad thousands of kilometres away while he sang it to me. My dad is not a great singer but in that moment it was the most beautiful rendition I had ever heard.

Come to me e'er my dreams of love are o'er

I am my dad's only daughter and I was also the only child who really took to music. Long before the explosion of Celtic music occurred in North America, I knew more Irish folk songs than I did popular songs. I got that love of the Furey's, the Chieftains, Christy Moore, the Dubliners and countless others from my dad and I got my pride in being Irish from those songs.

I love you as I loved you when you were sweet, when you were sweet sixteen.

The last note hangs in the air for a moment before slipping into the darkness along with my anger at having been woken up so early.

"I love you, dad."

"I love you, too."

"But, dad?"

"Yes."

"It's my seventeenth birthday today."

A Social Weekend

For some reason, I thought I might get some writing done this weekend. I have a few topics rattling around the old noggin which I've been meaning to put down on paper. On Tuesday of last week, I laid some ground work on them with the hope that I'd be able to finish them up by today.

Instead, I supported a friend as he performed an acoustic set at the Bard and Banker. I cheered a hockey team on as they won after a wonderful Thai dinner with a friend. I devoured black pudding over brunch with a friend who I met on exchange to Germany 10 years ago. I celebrated a friend's birthday with sushi and a discussion about the awesomeness which is Back To the Future III. I drank too much coffee with a friend while wasting away two hours. I enjoyed my last day with my mom before she leaves for Peru by attending a matinee of The King's Speech and then letting her make dinner for me.

You'll excuse me then, if I barely found time to write my grocery list for tomorrow. But I will leave you with two things: 1) Go see The King's Speech because it is fantastic; you will laugh, you will cry, you will probably sit beside someone twice as old as you and 2) Justin Hewitt is playing again at the Bard and Banker on February 3rd; it will be a mix of cover songs and originals but it will all be awesome.

(I don't know why blogger always makes my videos so much darker than they actually are. Also, please excuse my singing in the background and then the idle chatter about Ireland.)

Ode to the Hot Water Bottle

As if the small dump of snow this morning wasn't enough, it is howling in Victoria tonight. My deck chairs are no where near where they were this morning and my windows are rattling so hard I keep thinking they're going to break. I know that a few people will probably throw a couple of curses my way for saying this, perhaps even burn an effigy from some leftover hair in their bath tub, but I like snow. I'm not a huge fan of the negative temperatures that come with it, but I like snow.

Given the dip in the temperature, I got out my hot water bottle a few nights ago. My dad lives in an old house with an old furnace and just-as-old radiators. My friends referred to it as 'the cold house'. Two fire places at either end of the building supplied most of the heat which left the bedrooms in the middle of the house with a mean winter temperature of about 5 degrees... on the Kelvin scale. Hot water bottles were a must in my childhood.

I no longer need a hot water bottle but it's a ritual that I can't break. The return of the hot water bottle heralds Christmas for me in a way that TV, radio and print ads never will. It is winter, I must have a hot water bottle. As I filled it up last night, I remembered a writing project from last year. Our professor would give us a topic once a week and we had to write 100 words on it. No more, no less. On the topic of 'winter', this is what I wrote:

The hot water bottle creates a small area of warmth at the end of my bed. I creep my feet towards it until I hit that spot where it gets too hot and I pull them back just a little bit. I don’t need a hot water bottle but it wouldn’t be a winter night without it. My feet dance to find that perfect location. I find it; my stillness signals my cats and they jostle each other for the best position on this heat source.  Tomorrow morning it will be cold, but tonight it is a comfort to us.

Oh, hot water bottle, thank you for holding not just heat but so many wonderful memories.

Getting Creative

The weekend is finally here!! YAY!! I'm especially excited because in just over an hour, I'm going to see my Baby Bro for the first time in 7 months. He took off to Europe last April to travel and spend some time with our family in Ireland. We're going for Thai food because the only Asian food he could find in Europe was "crap Chinese" (his words, not mine).

It's been a very busy week for me and this weekend isn't going to be any different. The only change is that I've been busy being creative and that's much better than being busy cleaning the house. My employer is going to be showcasing various employee's artwork or other visual art. At the suggestion of a friend, I put my name forward for my photographs and received a very positive response back. On one hand, that's really flattering. On the other, I've never actually shown my photos as works of art (other than on my wall) so I'm now trying to narrow done my thousands of pictures into 10 which I will post on here and ask you to help me narrow it down to 5. So far I've narrowed it down to 49 possible photos. Getting closer...

The other creative thing I've been doing is writing. I submitted the following for a "What Does Dance Mean To You" competition at MoonDance. Your submission could be writing, drawing, photo, sculpture, any creative medium you wanted but it had to capture the love of dance. The song I'm talking about is Beethoven's Peasant Dance in Eflat major.

I take my place on the stage as she sits at the piano. I love dancing to live music--so much better than pre-taped in my opinion--and I hope my joy and excitement about it transfers to the audience. She looks at me as she places her hands on the keyboard. It begins. It's a song I've heard so many times I could hum it backwards in my sleep. I have lived this music; every note, every nuance, speaks to me and directs me across the stage, long and flowing with the legato, quick and lively with the staccato. I give my all to the audience and when the final chord plays I have no regrets. Every emotion in the music was transformed into a physical manifestation through my body and I became the dance; it is the best performance not just of this piece but of my life.

She gets up from the piano and moves to the kitchen for a cup of tea. I pick up my audience, my beloved bear Pola, and follow her.

"Perhaps it's time we enroll you in some dance classes."

It is the happiest day of my eight year old life.