The Bushrod Chronicles

today we had our offer accepted on a swingin’-uber-cool house… conveniently located in the toronto area… where we’re gonna live now…

love-of-my-life karen and i are ecstatic…

now we just have to clear the inspection and stuff and we’re good to go… move in date is scheduled for august 31st… this is a good thing… i hope karen’s mum doesn’t off me before then because i’m really looking forward to living in the new place… hah…

In public anyhow…

I’m a simple fellow… in more ways than one some would argue… bah dum pum… but I refer specifically to my drinking habits when out for delicious adult-type beverages… for the past decade or so I have been rather boringly plodding along ordering miller lite beer and jim beam whiskey as my intoxicants o’ choice… sure, I’ll pretty much drink anything someone puts in front of me… I’d hate to offend… but if you were to walk up to me and ask what I’d have you’d hear either a lite or the beam… or… uh… a lite and the beam depending on the circumstances…

Alas.. it has come to my attention that the bars/clubs/pubs of the mother country are less apt to stock the delicious miller lite than I would hope for… a dilemma has been created…

the beer store (the happiest place on earth next to guitar center) stocks my glorious little blue friends so in-home availability and consumption is not a problem… and speaking of the beer store… what a groovy place… they sell beer… lotsa beer… you walk in and there’s a wall of labels with prices underneath… a big wall… a very big wall… I shall count ‘em next time I’m in but I’d have to estimate there’s maybe three hundred brand options available to the drinker every time he/she sets foot into one of these places… not bad…

anyway… the game is afoot… a perusal of readily pub-stocked brews is underway for a suitable replacement…

Today was a kinda stressful but ultimately good day on a couple of levels…

First of all… it was love-of-my-life Karen’s first day at her new job… seems like it went ok overall… her first-day jitters gave way relatively quickly to first-day blurry vision as she sat and read a myriad of reports and whatnot about her new position and projects underway… etc… first-day reading schedule aside it sounds to me like she’s gone to work for a stylin’ company with a bunch of cool folks… so I think that’s good… actually, as that was extremely high on the list of reasons for our recent international move I’d say that’s really good…

And speaking of recent international moves… today I received our house worth o’ stuff into the country… a two step process – clearing customs & putting it all in storage…

Step one… customs… after much stress and worrying about how the whole thing was gonna go I appeared as requested at the warehouse in Toronto where I was to clear customs… all sorts of forms and lists and manifests in hand… sphincter semi a-pucker… and met a couple of really nice customs agents who whisked (relatively) me through the whole process and got me on my way to step number two…

Step number two was a little more taxing… as today was the hottest day of the year in Toronto thus far… I think the temp was 37 degrees celsius with a heat index of something on the order of 45… that translates into… ungodly friggin’ hot is what that translates into…

So me and the semi show up at the storage space where this stuff will sit until we’ve managed to buy a house here… I pay an outlandish sum to rent what’s essentially a low-grade garage (note to self: start a self-storage company… there’s money to be made… lots of it)… and the next five hours are spent moving stuff from the sweltering hot truck across the sweltering hot pavement into the sweltering hot garage… err… it was sweet…

yes, we paid ‘em a lot to move the stuff and no, I didn’t have to help ‘em unload it… but I wanted it done and the way I see it it probably got done and I got to go home and see les chilluns an hour or two earlier than it would have otherwise… and to top it off I got a free workout out of the deal… (this previous sentence should be proof positive once and for all that I’m a half-full look-on-the-bright-side silver-lining kind of feller… or an idiot… I reckon a case could be made either way)… having said that there were a few times during the proceedings where I thought it’d be pretty humorous (for me at least) if I had showed up with a lawn chair, an umbrella, and a cooler full of delicious miller lite and watched these guys move our stuff and want to kill me for six or seven hours whilst I tied one on… hah…

So anyway… a decent Monday…

well it’s been over two months since i last blogged… crazy…

we’ve had a bunch of stuff going on that pushed any entries back for a little bit and after a couple of weeks i got strangely disconnected from it and decided, i guess, to take a break…

but now i reckon it’s time to commit some more thoughts to the ages… and as it’s been way too long i’ve got quite a few thoughts to share…

which shall be delivered over the next few days in detail… but for now, a snopsis…

big changes have indeed occurred… first and foremost… we’ve moved… back to whence we came… karen and i anyway… to toronto… ontario… canada…

the family came in stages with me bringing up the rear… i got in a week and a half ago… yep… we’re here…

our house in seattle has sold… we’re just waiting for the closing date…

we’ve found some groovy abodes in toronto… one of which i’m sure we’ll buy soon…

love-of-my-life karen has a new job that she’s starting next week… i’m super proud of her… after a long time with her previous firm she decided that there were a few areas where she could be happier… so she just went out and got herself a new job that addressed all of her concerns… you kick ass honey…

i’m currently still a stay-at-home-dad but i think that’s about to change in some fashion… a big part our reasoning that a move to toronto was a good thing involved relatives nearby… one of which (karen’s mum) has expressed the desire to look after les chilluns a couple of days a week… thus freeing me up to pursue employment once more… i’m pretty excited about that… i’ll miss my time with the kiddos but the whole business world and interaction with the big people looks pretty fine after a year-plus without it…

our stuff is en route from seattle to toronto as i write this… i’ve got an appointment with customs on monday morning to get it all cleared and then get it moved into storage while we’re waiting on a house purchase… hope that all goes smoothly… i think it will but there’s a beaurocracy-fueled potential for headaches…

the kiddos are having the time of their lives staying at omi’s (karen’s mum’s) house… it’s an awesome summer here and every day’s a party… as it should be when you’re little…

i miss our peeps in seattle a lot… we have an amazing group o’ amigos there who have been our family for the past several years… that’d be the one (major) downside of this move… being far away from them folks…

so there’s the quick version update… glad to be back… glad to be at the beginning of a grand adventure… glad there’s lotsa air conditioning in toronto… i kinda forgot how friggin’ hot it gets here…