Wednesday, August 22, 2012

In Years Gone By

Maybe you've done this: One day you take a look at your closet and decide it's time to clear out some junk. Maybe it's Spring Cleaning time. And in the process of throwing out the pants you'll never fit into again, the single socks, the utterly-beyond-redemption underwear and out-of-style shirts, you trip over an old, dusty cardboard box. And in that box are some faded family photos that have followed you on every move from your first apartment, gathering dust, never looked at.

So you take them out and spend an emotional half-hour (or maybe a whole day) going over them, your original task forgotten, drifting in a timeless universe of your own creation, remembering things that you should never have forgotten, and other things that you wish you could forget.

Maybe there is a bottle of wine involved.

So anyways, I recently re-discovered this blog thingy. Covered in dust, the Blogger UI completely unrecognizable from the last time I visited here, but still here, and so I thought I would reward that stubborn continuity with a splinter of attention, and, I dunno, blog something.

Here are some things:

About 2.5 years ago, Wife gave birth to a beautiful baby, who changed our lives. Again. Thing 2 is a hilarious character, who daily challenges us to be the better versions of ourselves. He loves to watch Top Gear, and can identify about a dozen car brands on sight. He's bossy, opinionated, loud and hilarious. Everything I love about my wife, in a convenient pocket-sized format.

About 1.5 years ago, PerpetualStartup finally disintegrated into its component molecules. When the dust settled, I was out of a job. Just in time for Christmas.

About a year ago, I got a job offer from Amazon. I decided, on a lark, that it would be fun to pick up the wife and kids and move across the country to Seattle, which is in the United States. As with any life change of this magnitude, there have been some growing pains. But we have grown, which is also important.

We don't have any family here, and all our old friends are three timezones away, which casts a sort of dark cloud over the whole move (Seattle readers will pause here to roll their eyes. "Another comment on the weather!"), but I now regularly see IronMan, who flies down to Seattle from Victoria occasionally on business. So there's a silver lining (for me, anyway).

Seattle, on the sunniest day of the year.
Seattle, on the sunniest day of the year.

About three months ago, Thing 1, who is now 9 years old, (OH-EM-GEE), learned to ride a two-wheeler without training wheels. It is only due to my own parental negligence that this has taken as long as it has, but basically, it went like this:
  1. We bought him a bike
  2. He rode around with training wheels for about a day, then we took them off.
And now we go on semi-regular bike rides along the canal, down to the lake to watch the sailboats and sea-planes, and feed the geese and whatnot. He's super proud of his new bike-riding skills, and so are we!

About a month ago, I took the family back to Montreal, which had attained a sort of mythic status in all our minds that Seattle was having a hard time living up to. Many things were as we remembered them (friends, family, horrible construction delays and crumbling infrastructure). Some things were not-quite-as-mythic as we remembered them (the food, the weather). We had a wonderful, relaxing time, and I got to see The Boxer and The Directrix, along with a smattering of the PerpetualStartup crew of old. I think this mini-vacation gave us a dose of medicine for our homesickness, while at the same time somehow making us appreciate Seattle a little more. Maybe that's just me, though.

About a week ago, Thing 2 told me "Daddy, I want a BMW."

0 uninformed opinions: