Dispatches from a happy Hullian

Going to the air-conditioned office and sending the kids to air-conditioned other place and the pool today for obvious reasons... stay cool out there if you're in this heat wave!

I did a flurry of picture-hanging and putting boxes a bit out of sight here. As we're settling in, my cousin is preparing to move north of Montreal, I brought the kids to a going-away street party by his place. It was fun to see some family, familiar faces and random strangers with the kids. Some knew about my separation and had supportive things to say, and some were just nice people to chat with. Found a union guy (now in LR) and talked shop, watched the younger ones sing their hearts out at the karaoke tent, and had a nice time.

Still feeling a mix of lightness and "what have I done?" on the separation front. Hoping the money actually works and the house I'm renting is good to us. Oscar asked if I was going to own a house again sometime and I didn't have a lot of answer — explained the benefits of renting and that we're living here for a year in any case. I didn't use the words "in this economy?" but they crossed my mind...

Have been booking things for Newfoundland with Ada — looks like we're going Economy on the train, all the berths were booked up. But we benefit from the Canada Strong pass! We'll sleep on soft beds in Halifax. I think it's going to be a blast of a trip.

Union-wise I am recently off 3.5 days of meetings — they were different levels of dense but we were meeting at the same time as basic training for 100 new stewards; we got to spend time with them in the evening and I got added to a few LinkedIns. In the meetings themselves we took a stronger stand on something than I was expecting. It's inside baseball and I should probably wait for the minutes to come out but it's stronger than I was expecting!

I'm writing this from the kitchen table in my new place — I am in the process of moving out from the home I shared with Elizabeth since 2008. We got to a place where we had a big gulf between what each of us thought our relationship should be and I decided I needed some space and concordance between what our relationship had become and what the infrastructure looked like. So here I am, a kilometer and a half away in a little 1940s house with a bedroom for me and each kid, a woodstove (landlords promise to inspect and clean it before it gets cold) and a certain amount of distance. The kids seem pretty positive and practical about moving in; they'll be in on a supply run on the weekend to kit out their rooms while Elizabeth and Doug go to Toronto for a gig. Unless things go terribly, they'll have their first night here then, and then I'll get Vivien to the bus really early for her school trip to Quebec City.

What this all looks like emotionally going forward... is still up in the air. I was pretty unhappy with where things were going. Elizabeth seems to want to go straight to friends and I'm feeling more like getting the practicalities of co-parenting down, being fair while standing up for myself, setting some clear boundaries. I'm lucky to have a broad circle of support and some really good people close to me. Andrea says I'm brave, and has been there for me all through this. My parents are understanding. My peer group is proud I'm taking concrete action. Lots of people are offering help, even the kids (I'll make sure they get some choices about their space and also carry some boxes). It feels weird but maybe I do need to assemble some kind of separation registry and insist that people only contribute things they have doubles of or don't use -- partly to help get over the hump of expenses (and in to paying rents of the current era and child support) and partly so I don't just say "come to the housewarming" when they ask what they can do.

But the year turned over.

I filled out a YearCompass which prompted me to look over my paper journal. I did and got through a lot; I think the less-obvious things I'm happy about are a pinecone maze while camping, delivering some training last winter to lay the ground for a returning employee post-transition, and inserting a couple of long bike rides into a camping trip.

I signed up for the Ottawa Marathon this year. It'll be a feat, and it also lets me develop a little network of running friends at work. I can use that kind of community and I like who I've found. I've also been going to a masculine-folk peer group all year more or less, which has been really good practice on talking and thinking about feelings. And a little odd being the lone parent in the group while not being the lone polyamorous person (in a group not targeted at queer/polyamorous folks).

After all fall getting ready and trying to get a date, we might see the employer's bargaining team at the end of this month. I'm looking forward to the central table process (and know it's going to be full of solidarity and exasperation)!

It's been a little while since I've posted; I won't try to catch up now, but here are a few tidbits.

I think I have all my tax stuff together — receipts, earnings, account set up. But the doing-my-taxes time horizon feels long. I'm going to do them, but I wish the world would slow down a bit so that taxes feel pointful.

I was bringing the car back after a museum adventure with the kids yesterday, and a grey-haired lady in a colourful sweater flagged me down and asked if Communauto needed you to have a cell phone to book and return cars (you don't — you can use a bus pass or a little plastic RFID dongle they issue). She chatted me up about language, puppetry, my kids, the neighbourhood — she's been close to that car drop in the same apartment since 1989. It was nice to have a neighbour chat. Maybe she'll come and listen to Libby and Cal at a farmer's market this summer.

I won an agency-level award for Inclusion on the strength of my work with Positive Space last month. I have the framed certificate up in my bedroom right now and used the purse to have a nice lunch with Elizabeth. The work I do feels like a lot of keeping the lights on but I'm recognizing that the keeping it alive is important, and every once in a while someone tells me that they're just heartened that the Positive Space Initiative exists and tries. I'll take that.

There's been some sort of screw-up with an issue ticket and my new team member. I got confirmation that I did click submit (the next person got the request — I'd been worried I'd been the missing link), but I'll be helping fix up the mess now that I'm back from March break.

Lastly, I read Wild Seed by Octavia Butler earlier this year and am reading The Parable of the Sower now. Some folks might say her genre is "science fiction" (I think she resisted the category) but as far as I'm concerned, it's "harrowing" and she is scarily good at it. Go read her stuff if it's your kind of thing.

It's been a bit of a challenging winter and spring here, as everywhere. We're all still healthy here, employed, eating eggs from the backyard hens, so not as challenging as it could be, but still.

One of my union colleagues died last weekend. Mehran was quick to welcome me aboard when I got elected to the national Research Group executive, and quick to be friendly and to do what needed doing in general. He was also curious and open and talked happily of his love of food, dance and life in between matters of helping members and being good unionists. I'll miss him; there'll be a very empty virtual chair next weekend at the Group meeting.

Work is a bit of a slog... getting traction and coordinating people is hard and tiring sometimes, and there's a lot of staff movement and random requests going around. I might be able to make some good changes in an upcoming Lean process review, which would help me feel like I'm leaving things in good shape when I find an opportunity somewhere that fits me better. The return to virtual school for the kids, extended one week at a time since Easter, has thrown my routine and energy out of wack, even though Elizabeth has been taking the brunt of the daytime parenting. I have a fair amount of extracurricular stuff going on — Positive Space is getting more active again, union work continues with consultation and a stewarding case that might have legs. Those extras are work but they help make work more meaningful. In good pandemic news, our age slices are up for registering for a first shot next week... I'm hoping for Johnson and Johnson just so I'll be done (and apparently there are 300k doses of J&J coming into Canada now, but there are some possible bumps), but any shot in my arm is a good shot.

I've been mixing running and biking for my mental health/exercise time. I'm still shooting to run and now also bike every public street with asphalt and a name — I'm over half done on the bike and nearly two-thirds on feet. I've been varying it partly because if I run long distances too many days in a row my muscles have some concerns. But overall I'm getting pretty good at this, and seeing everywhere in the Hull sector at least twice, sometimes in different seasons, has been pretty cool. I know where our favourite tofu burgers come from because I've run past the factory in an industrial park. I can see new streets and developments go up, moving the goalposts for this whole silly game.

I'm missing seeing my Vanier loves in person — we've got our stopgaps — virtual D&D, grove rituals (happy Beltaine!), video storytime (Heather has finished the first book of Lord of the Rings with the kids) and various one-on-one chats. I used to do walk-and-talk after the kids were in bed by phone, but the 8 PM curfew has made that harder. Once the restrictions are loosened maybe walking and talking in person will be a thing again.

I turned forty yesterday… sometime before March I threw out that my fortieth birthday would be nice if it was anchored in beer and board games — get a bunch of people who like one or more of those things and want to celebrate with me and make a day of it.

We had a scale down a bit but both of those things happened (not all at the same time) — Elizabeth and the kids had gotten Gaïa and I played a couple of rounds with Oscar and Ada after breakfast. The standard game feels like it's a bit to draw-dependent with few interesting decisions or back-and-forth opportunities, but the advanced version (especially minus the mean cards — volcanoes and thunderbolts in our game made it so that you kind of had to ride out the violence and then play in earnest once everyone was out of ammunition) is a nicely-balanced short game.

The kids gifted me with many supervillain-themed pictures, a felt medal and a hat made from a pop bottle with an antenna and googly eyes.

In the middle of the day we had a backyard party. Elizabeth had made lime meringue tarts, we barbecued some veggie sausages, we took cover when it rained :) Heather, Andrea and Morgen came for the first while until Morgen needed her own bed for a nap, and my folks turned up as they were heading out. It was the first time this year I've seen my parents in person. I hope we can figure out a visit down there; either a day trip on a nice day or a weekend if we can tinker with our bubble configuration or get to a better place in the pandemic.

Turning forty has been kind of overshadowed by the circumstances. I'm no longer young in the terms of my union, I guess when it seems prudent I'm due for a medical check-up. Ten years ago Oscar was still in utero and I was a young and promising Methodologist, more I'm more established and shifting to be a manager and Oscar's going to be a teenager before long. I'm more readily out as bi and polyamorous and organizing workplace things for Pubic Service Pride (which wasn't really a thing in the Federal Public Service ten years ago). I'm trying to be a bit more conscious of taking care of my body — choosier about food and letting there be leftovers, morning walks, an actual ergonomic chair in my basement lair. I feel like negotiation is a theme of the last little while: bargaining, working out pandemic safety measures in our bubble, trying to line up a working like that's as good as possible. Stabilizing the wobbly bits of my life, too.

Maybe I'll have a bigger party for 41 or 42, but I liked being celebrated yesterday. It's a nice round number, but it feels like a kind of transitional time for me.

It's a nice day today, we've got plans to hit the annual opening party for our neighborhood garden box project. Vivien has somehow managed to lose her bike helmet, which is a big hit to our family mobility. I've been wandering around looking for it to no avail.

I got that promotion… true to form this was the time I had figured it wasn't going to happen and that I should just plan for another couple of years in my old post. The new team (I'm leading a team of six) seems like a nice one and I've got a good 2IC who knows the work very well. I've got a lot of the subject-independent skills and I probably know more of the statistical nuts and bolts than I feel like I do now. I'm going to a new office on a floor with the open "2.0" plan; so far I think it'll work out okay.

I went on TV on TV and talked about polyamory and how I do it… you can only pack so much into 22 minutes or whatever, and I was on (in the second half) with a counsellor who had her views and a program to promote, but I think I did okay for my first time on live TV.

Next week is going to involve a lot of bargaining… once an election writ is dropped we have to wait until the next Parliament is good and settled before negotiating again… probably 2020. But we'll be working hard (and staying late) to get it done.

We're starting to plan the summer a bit — Elizabeth is making musical plans, we've signed the older kids up for a week of climbing camp, we'll probably festival with the pagans a couple of times… and in what I hope is the start of a series of adventures with individual kids, I'm going with Oscar to visit Heather, Andrea and Morgen in Banff for a week in July: his first passenger air experience and sight of what Albertans call real mountains :) I'm pretty excited and hour it will be wonderful bonding and relaxing time.

The rest of August went by quickly, but left some evidence behind. With the help of Oscar and the neighbour kid, I built some garden boxes out front. We still need some dirt and then to transplant a few things in, but the boxes look good.

I've been taking the older two out to bang in campaign signs for our local MP, who we'd like to keep. We've ring doorbells and knocked on doors, learned about politeness, chatted with friendly Hullians, been fed and watered, tried a stair elevator and talked nicely with dubious landlords — along with learning how to watch and march in political marches, I feel we're starting their civics lessons early. Oscar and Vivien also like hammering stuff and tightening zip ties, so it's interdisciplinary learning. In other learning activities, Oscar isn't totally reliable on spotting house numbers yet, but he's keen to try.

Elizabeth and I (and Ada) got out on a date to Les Promenades de Gatineau, where we ate food court food and acquired nice underthings at the newly-opened Simons. Shameless fun in getting things is okay sometimes, I hope :)

We had some fun park time with lady_phi and her family, swapped tomatoes and had tea and scones. She also brought some baby stuff for us to rifle through — yay, less-ratty cloth diapers!

Oscar had his last library story time — Dominique looked a little weepy wishing him well in kindergarten. Oscar has been going since before Vivien was born, so she's seen him grow up quite a bit. The fall is going to see a lot of me getting Viv alone to activities. I think she's ready to graduate to star attraction at kid activities!

Tomorrow Oscar hits Kindergarten — just an hour and with Elizabeth hanging out in the background, but whoa, our firstborn just made it to school! We're grappling with the fact of it, and the list of stuff, all labelled, and the un-Waldorfy discipline and pedagogy, and will he learn French and will he decide to play the game by getting along or with all his rogue skills… well, we made it and he made it and school and Oscar will happen to each other starting tomorrow at nine.

Ada is ten days old today. She's 10% heavier than at birth, doing all the infant things, looking around a bunch, and has completely skipped "newborn" as a clothing size. I think I have the transition to parental leave more or less down this time — a few days of leave before the birth were a nice ease-in, and now I'm definitely coffee-powered but I've more or less hit my stride. I've been getting out on errands and park adventures with the kids and look forward to hanging out with lovely people (and their kids where applicable) in local parks. The older kids are having some adjustment pains — Viv is angling for mama cuddles and frustrated when there's a baby in the way, and both of them require a long wind down to sleep at the end of the day.

We have a nice steel roof! We had our moments when we thought we'd get a baby first, but the contractors pulled through and got it done. We had a stressful week or so where work had disrupted electricity to most of the upstairs including our phone and Internet plug — we had a solution involving an extension cord to the kids' room, but we weren't going to leave it plugged in while they slept, so we had greatly reduced communications — in a situation where we might've wanted to round up midwives and child care on short notice, it wasn't the best time for forced simplification, but in the end the contractors' electrician got things working before we really needed them.

The garden delay due to workers was actually a boon to us as the tomato plants weren't in the ground on those chilly nights after Victoria Day. Now we have a nice variety in (thanks for the swaps, wisewomanjudith!) as well as some fancy peppers and eggplant and some humdrum-but-tasty squash (bought from Sarah's new outfit, Beat Greens Gardens).

One small downer is that my allergies are pretty wild lately, even with desloratadine and drops. Maybe it's time to switch meds. What're people finding good these days? Drowsiness hasn't been a side effect I get; Reactine kept me up.

In general, I'm in a groove — a tired one but a good one — and life is pretty good and full of possibilities.

- Bicycling weather. Buses are good for reading, but I miss fast and flexible.

- An upcoming night with Elizabeth… with the kids off with my parents! It has been years since we'll be off-duty together for a whole night.

Yay! Spring! Good things, times and people!