Found this flitting around YouTube – is there any band that doesn’t love The Beatles? (Okay, Michael Stipe famously dissed The Beatles as “elevator music” but I think he later admitted he only meant they weren’t the music he listened to but often heard in the background.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY79GHDhiew
Bonus: Once we moved in, I noticed our neighbours had their house very decorated including a sign that said “J&Y” which I thought was weird since their first names begin with “R” and “L”. Since they had some angel decorations as well, my very advanced brain figured this was some sort of coded religious message (“Jesus and Yahweh”?) until Shea pointed out that what I was reading as an ampersand was actually a stylized “O” and the “coded” message was “Joy”. 🙂
…one of the best things you get as a “Christmas gift” is a literature organizer you pick up off Kijiji from an accounting office on your way home from work Christmas Eve at a fraction of what a new one would’ve cost!
Plus you get to be *really* excited about organizing all your various papers – regular paper! Scrap paper! Coloured paper! Hole-punched paper! Notepads! Construction paper!
If it looks like we have a lot of gifts under the tree, you have to remember that in the month of December, I basically wrap anything I would’ve bought anyhow – dish soap, shampoo, the empty box for the slippers I bought because I needed them in September – and use those things to fill out the tree so it looks more impressive than it actually is.
Usually the kids are so focused on what they’re getting (where we also use tricks like wrapping gifts that might normally go together in separate packages – a PJ set of tops and bottoms? Two gifts! A two-pack of storage containers for your room? Lucky you – two more gifts!), that they don’t notice that dad is getting a lot of toiletries (or they just interpret it as “They don’t get toys so now they get toothpaste?” adult weirdness they don’t understand.)
Anyhow, Merry Christmas from our house to yours!
“Lover” – Taylor Swift
Friday turned into an even more emotional housing-news related day then we expected.
In addition to being the possession day of our old house for the new owners, we heard that the condo complex where we lived for a couple years during our time in Calgary was engulfed in flames displacing numerous residents only a few days before Christmas including a couple who were our neighbours at the time and still lived in the same complex nearly twenty years later.
I’ve written before about the condo we bought when we lived in Calgary.
It was a pretty iconic building – right on the busy 14th St, just a few blocks up from the infamous “Red Mile”, our condo building had a peaked blue roof that made it visible from numerous places downtown and around the city with its unique design which made it quite memorable for anyone who went by.
So you can imagine the horror Shea and I felt when we saw the news on Twitter (while randomly scrolling, from of all people, W. Brett Wilson who posted that he saw a fire from wherever he was in Lower Mount Royal along with a pic and I remember thinking “that looks close to where our old condo was.” Then, when I did some further searching, realising that indeed our old blue-roofed castle was engulfed in flames!)
We immediately began scouring social media and turned to Calgary local networks for more info (including seeing that same former next-door neighbour I mentioned earlier as one of the people being interviewed in multiple media stories.)
Fortunately, it sounds like no humans were harmed but a few pets may not have made it.
It was already a day of mixed emotions but seeing this horrible news from Calgary put the sad feelings we had into perspective – yes, we were handing over the keys to what had been “our house” for fifteen years. But compared to the reasons someone could be leaving their home, our reason wasn’t really that sad.
And if we focused on the fact that not only are we now living in a nicer, newer home but that we also suspect we’ve sold to a young couple who are likely buying their own first home, possibly as new or recent Canadians, that makes it even more special and something to celebrate instead of be sad about.
Shea had a very long day and Pace is both pretty introverted and a stereotypical teenager so it’s hard to get him out of the house at the best of times. That meant Sasha and I had a daddy-daughter date to The Artesian’s “Holiday Sing-a-long” Thursday night which was great fun.
I’ve made reference in past posts to some of the upgrades and renovations we’ve done at our house over the past 15 years (and when I say “we”, I’m seriously indebted to Shea’s parents and my parents who helped many of these projects happen saving us *thousands* in labour costs if we’d had to hire contractors or making sure it was done a lot better than if we’d attempted some of these projects ourselves.)
I thought it might be fun to try to list them in no particular order…
Possession day for our old house is Friday so Shea and I spent a few hours tonight making sure we had completely cleared it out of all our stuff, did a final bit of cleaning, and having a few tears as we locked the door for the final time.
I’m usually pretty sentimental about stuff in general but I’ve been surprisingly unsentimental about this move.
I think a big part of that is this move feels right – the starter house we bought fifteen years ago served us well but it was also a house we bought before I ever went back to school and started earning the “medium librarian bucks”, before we had family, before our life circumstances had changed enough from a couple who were just starting to find our place in the world to a couple that feels fairly comfortable where we are.
There are so many fond memories in our old house of course – watching our kids grow up, completing so many home improvement projects over the years, birthdays and Christmases, standing at the window watching for a taxi to take us to the airport for holidays, BBQ’s and other parties with family and friends, Grey Cup watch parties, endless nights watching movies or hockey games in the basement on and on and on.
But also going into our empty house makes me realise how much of a starter house it was – the accumulated dings in the walls, that cupboard that never closed properly, that wine stain on the carpet even carpet cleaners couldn’t get out, the mismatched light switch, the tangle of unknown wires in the furnace room. Also on and on and on.
So yeah, I had a few tears when we locked that door for the final time. But I’m excited for the next phase of our life and also happy for the young couple who are buying our house and starting out on the same journey we’ve further ahead in following but traveling the same path.
