Fall

I seem to have been lacking motivation to take the time to blog since my rant against Facebook. I won’t pretend to catch up on my life here but I will say that after an intense but memorable summer it’s been a relatively relaxed and calm autumn. Sh. and I held a commitment ceremony in July at a retreat centre in Ontario, which was a lot of work but well worth it. It was quite an experience to be surrounded by so many friends and family members expressing their support for us and it certainly made us feel grateful for the community we’ve built around us.

More recent weekend activities have involved rather less preparation. We have thus far gone on our first bicycle camping trip (to Oka, just outside the city, but hey), and last weekend we preserved our first round of food for the winter — 1½ bushels tomatoes (36 litres when canned), ½ bushel red peppers (roasted, skinned, then frozen), and a flat of raspberries (frozen in small containers for use in smoothies). Other plans include pasta sauce, salsa, and perhaps dried apples. There have been multiple visits to Ontario to see friends, including a beach wedding which lasted less than five minutes (but they were a great five minutes) and of course trips to visit Sh.‘s family in Ottawa.

In other news, my position with Koumbit has been recently made permanent, meaning that for the first time in my life I’ll be taking some paid holidays in the coming year. Working for a non-profit, non-hierarchical collective that uses free software continues to bring me much happiness, and the actual work is interesting too (I’m currently helping put a library’s catalogue online, for example).

We’re still dealing with having moved in late June (for those keeping score, yes, this was just before our ceremony) and while the boxes are mostly opened up we have shelves to put up and doors to weatherstrip. Earlier this evening I hooked up the dryer, this not having been necessary earlier what with it having been summer and all. Eventually it will all get done, and perhaps we’ll even manage to find the 2010 calendar before the year is up. Actually, that calendar I can live without; it’s the birthday calendar (a Dutch tradition, it has no days of the week, so you can use it perpetually) which I would miss. But I’m sure it’s around here somewhere.

With the ongoing unpacking, it’s easy to feel like there’s far too much to do, but to keep from being overwhelmed, I’ve been trying to do at least one proactive task daily. So far I’ve accomplished such life-changing projects as renewing my passport (last Monday), sending off a somewhat overdue baby gift (today), or finally picking up a composter for the new apartment (scheduled for tomorrow). There’s nothing like modest goals to make one feel like one’s accomplished something; if nothing else, it makes it easier at the end of the day to accept that none of one’s other tasks have been finished if at least something else got done.

And with that said, I’ve written about enough. Good night.