I want to start this post with two initial thoughts:

1. To my Kiwi buddies, or any random Kiwi readers: your country is lovely, it’s pretty and filled with interesting things to see and do. The people here are lovely. Many of your buildings are lovely (pity about the lack of heat and insulation). There is much to recomend your country to visitors and immigrants. Your stable (if confusing) democracy and it’s system, your laid back attitude towards much that is going on around you… it’s all lovely and wonderful. It’s just not my home.
2. When I am at home I kind of treat Canada Day as a bit of bunk. As a joke. Something to be mocked and ridiculed.

Ok, so that’s out of the way…

Where I am it’s already the afternoon of July 2nd, so for me Canada Day has come and gone and right now, I have to tell you, I’m feeling every cm of the distance between Montreal and Dunedin, all 1,516,900,000 of them.

To give a sense of how far that is, take a peek at this:
(this image is from Wolframalpha.com)

At the best of times, I miss home, but true homesickness comes in waves and is mostly managable. The pattern of day to day life (take Lucas to school, make dinner, clean the house, do the dishes, shop for food, job hunt - yes, still) tends to blot it out for the most part… but periodically, birthdays of family members, holidays, elections (yes, I’m a geek - sue me) etc, it just washes over me. For the last 2 days I’ve been basically engaging in the interwebs version of self-flagellation. I’ve been reading blog posts, looking at youtube videos, reading articles… like some kind of Canada junkie looking to score just one more hit of that Mapley-goodness.. it’s been a touch unseemly.. I’ll admit that I’m misty, and a bit maudlin and when I think about the fireworks and the crappy hotdogs and the mildly offputting flag waving etc I realize that I would give almost anything to have been at home today.

I think Christine put it best “Based on this experience, I think everybody should leave their country for an extended period of time in their lives to really appreciate what they have.”

There are some posts that I’ve read that I thought were really awesome, that showed what my Canada is like, if you follow me on twitter or are friends via FB you’ve seen them, but here goes anyway:

Galloping Beavers thoughts are those of an expat as well.

Dr Dawg has worked tirelessly to help bring a fellow-Canadian’s plight to the fore (others deserve credit as well, but I like this post the best.

This was a good whomp on the old heart strings.

From 2002, from the Sunday Telegraph.

This tickled me muchly, from the NY Times

This made me laugh.

And finally, this tweet was just lovely: @Rawnsley: “Pardon me for saying so, but I fucking love this country.”

O Canada! This native son misses you so.

Right, so it’s a month since I posted. This makes me sort of lame. Or busy. Or lamely busy. Or just forgetful. 

So, anyway:

Christmas vacations finished up and were grand. We were happy be there, but in the end I think we were probably as happy to get going. A month is a long time to camp in your half empty house and stay with relatives. Also, as much as we have issues with Dunedin, it’s now home and all of our stuff is here.

Part of the problem is that we had a ton of stuff that we didn’t get sorted before we left to deal with. So we finished moving stuff out of the house and got Metro all ready for shipping (NZ animal import rules are pretty strict). 

On the way home we went to San Francisco for a few days. As usual SF is like a tonic for our collective souls, we always seem to be happier and calmer there. For the last two visits there we have used my travel points to stay at the Hotel Kabuki in Japantown. Japantown is cool because it’s a bit calmer and quieter than the main downtown areas but is close enough to a lot of cool stuff that it’s walkable. Cow Hollow, Hayes Valley etc are all aboug 15 - 20 minutes away. This time we got our act together and hooked with our buddy Andrew and had dinner with him at an Italian place he recommended… 

After this sort of vacationy fun we got on the plane for Auckland, and then Dunedin and back to reality. I’ve been hard at the job search, with some luck, since we got back. Lucas has started his first real year of school and can suddenly write in nice even letters and has fully deployed his “how?” “why?” phase… (A sample: Papa? How does electricity work? Me: how the hell would I know, I failed physics…). Chris is working away at PhD stuff: proposals, lit review, reading reading always reading… 

So life’s rhythms are back to normal and, as much as it’s not really home yet, it is good to be back.

I never knew my maternal grandmother, she died way before I was born. She was a Scottish immigrant to Canada and brought with her many traditions from the old country.

One of them was shortbread at Christmas. Not the fancy English shortbread cookies, or fancy things that were jammed out of a cookie gun or some crap like that. No. Shortbread, thick slabs baked in a baking pan. The average piece being about an inch or so squared. It’s shortbread that you have a few pieces of with over tea or whiskey or Eggnog. It’s muscular shortbread.

My grandmother taught my mother to make the shortbread and my sister and I were taught by Bev. The only instructions were hand written by my grandmother on a index card that was nearly translucent with years of handling by buttery hands. The temperature was listed as “Moderate oven”. After years of experiments we’ve hit on 300 degrees. At some point Bev rewrote the recipe on another index card. It to is now nearly translucent.

Now that Bev is dead as well, the shortbread is now one of the connections that’s left between she and I.

Today I was making two more batches for gifts and Lucas wanted to help. So the circle remains unbroken because I started to show him how to make it. He’s still too little to knead the dough (taking it from crumbly to nearly like playdoh is tough sledding, even when you cheat like I do and soften the butter in the microwave) but he helped measure.

It will be years before the recipe is like a muscle memory, but it’s a start.