To Fear or Not To Fear...

During the summer of 2000, I spent thirteen weeks traveling out West. A group of six of us drove from Vancouver to Winnipeg and back on the road trip of a lifetime (with many tears along the way!). Our last three weeks of the summer was spent working at the Pacific National Exhibition in Vancouver. Every morning, we would leave our swanky hotel near Robson Avenue in downtown Vancouver and make our way to the PNE grounds via the infamous stretch of Vancouver’s East Side known as Hastings.

For those of you who aren’t entirely familiar with East Hastings, it’s one of the most run-down and dangerous places that you may find in the entire city. East Hastings, at one point in time, was known for having the highest rate of HIV infection in the Western World. Drug addiction, homelessness, prostitution and violent crime are all too familiar in this part of town and for a fairly sheltered girl from South Western Ontario, it was a sight that I had never seen before.

Every day we spent hours stuck in rush hour traffic driving through this alternate world and every day, as I peered through the windows of our SUV, I witnessed people having sex on the street, injecting drugs on the sidewalk and poverty unlike anything I ever want to see again. Oddly enough though, none of the people living in these conditions seemed to care that we were there. Much to my own surprise, I found the fact that our presence went completely unnoticed to really upset me. Somehow, my inability to look at any of these people in the eye (because they never looked at us), made us seem different. And we weren’t really...I knew that. Every day, I felt awful driving through their neighborhood because it felt like they had been put on display. Kind of like the freak show at the local fair, I felt like someone could have been standing on the corner shouting “come one…come all…come see the most apathetic people in the world”. It was heartbreaking.

One day, motivated by my desire for someone, anyone, to care about the desolation that existed in the midst of such wealth, I decided to take the bus home from work. In order to do so, I had to transfer buses three times, which meant that I would have to stand at the corner of pure terror and complete vulnerability until I found my way home (in broad daylight, of course). Sure enough, I made my way and I soaked in every moment of witnessing what felt like another dimension of humanity. The more time I spent walking among them, the more I realized that this could have happened to any one of us. The roads through life do lead in many various directions and one wrong turn could have just as easily brought me here under different circumstances. It’s so easy to see the obvious things that make us different but we all started with the purity of life before the fork in the road came along.

Anyways, as I stood waiting for the last sequence of buses to take me back to the marble floors and crystal chandeliers of my hotel lobby just blocks away (but what seemed like a world away), I overheard two girls sitting on the pavement just next to me. They were leaning up against a shelter wall, smoking cigarettes. Each one couldn’t have been more than ninety pounds and you could easily see the track marks along their inner arms. Their eyes were dark, their cheeks were sunken in and their souls looked tired. The one girl was crying to the other about some guy that she had been with. As she sobbed to her friend, she frustratingly shouted out “WHY DOESN'T HE LOVE ME?”

I couldn’t help but turn around and look at her as the words came out of her mouth. My bus came at that very same moment and it was soon time for me to leave the land of the neglected. While people pushed and shoved their way on to the bus around me…I just stood and looked at her. She eventually looked back at me…straight into my eyes. I gave her a shy smile and eventually turned to walk onto the bus. She didn’t smile back but she knew. She knew what I was trying to say to her...

...That I too, had just asked that very same question the day before and in turn, we quickly realized just how similar we really were. I appeared that regardless of where we were from or how we spent our days, we seemed to share a common trail of thought that consumed our mind...a common rush desire to understand the incomprehensible...a common ache to finally get to the bottom of the million dollar question...BOYS!

Even now, almost a decade later, I can't help but wonder if maybe, just maybe, she's figured out the answer? Because I know that I certainly haven't!

Canada Day was a blast…as always!
Ottawa really knows how to throw a good party!

For more pictures from Canada Day, click here.

The Art of Negotiating Sleep...

Steve and I rose with the sun this morning having shared a very good night last night. We had such a great night because, low and behold, we got to sleep through the entire night!!

At the risk of sounding too much like “real parents”…we woke up rested, excited and proud because for what is possibly the first time…our little Tugger slept through the night!!! Or, at the very least, he didn’t feel the need to wake us up to share in his nocturnal prowlings!

Ever since we got Tugger, almost two and a half months ago, we’ve found ourselves routinely getting up anywhere between 2am and 6am to kick the little guy out of our room because he either purrs, plays or is just outright stubborn about this cherished time that we so call “sleep”. Even he is pretty used to it by now as he no longer tries to race back into our bedroom before we close the door. Instead, he just gives us this defeated look and walks away as if to say “fine…then I’ll hunt without you…but don’t think for a second that I’m sharing any of my winnings with YOU!”

I think it’s worth mentioning though that even Tugger has developed his own little ground rules regarding our sleeping time; even if we do kick him out…the moment our alarm clock goes off…he patiently sits outside our door and meows pathetically until we let him back in. As far as he’s concerned, this is non-negotiable! We’ve accepted his terms thus far and our system seems to be working quite effectively!

This morning though…I woke up to the alarm and as my eyes opened, I had a brief moment of panic because I realized that I hadn’t gotten up at all to remove our fur ball from the bedroom. I tried frantically to think of where he could be or what could be wrong that kept him from waking us, as per our agreement! Sure enough though, as the split second passed, I looked over to find my purring little guy lying right next to me, curled up by my pillow, one eye peeking open at me and the other is a slight daze of his own! It was heavenly…our kitty let us sleep! They really do grow up so fast!!!

Before we give him too much credit though, here’s the look he gave me on Sunday when I woke him up from his eighteen hour afternoon nap!!!!!

For more pictures of Tugger (not sleeping!), click here.

A Cure for the 21st Century...

Why is it so easy to feel trapped and cornered in this huge world of possibility? As I often sit in my office, I become overwhelmed with this feeling of having taken a wrong turn somewhere and suddenly finding myself in unfamiliar territory. The more lost I get, the more I fear that I can no longer find my way out.

Sometimes I wonder if I was born during the wrong time in history. Women in the 21st century seem to lack so much balance and more so, they seem to consistently pursue further imbalance by taking on more and more that inevitably continues to tip the scale. I often feel like I don’t know how to live in this state of disregard for our well-beings and it frightens me how surrounded I already am by the influence of ambition. I spend all day surrounded by women who scramble relentlessly to climb the corporate ladder and all the while, are watching their marriages, their families and their sanity dissolve before their very eyes.

I long for days of horse-drawn carriages and isolated convents…days of simplicity and mental equilibrium…days when having red hair was the worst of our problems! This place, these walls, this computer screen has chained me to feelings of driving in a fast lane that I accidently merged into, sadly enough though, I don’t exactly feel like I’m in the driver’s seat anymore.

I want out. I want to break free of this crippling feeling of being held captive against my will…held hostage for all to judge and criticize for my lack of desire to work sixty hours a week. I feel like a pack of wolves is keeping watch while the blackberry gets forcefully glued to my hand. How do we end up like this? How do we find our way out?

I find it incredible how so many of us have spent our whole lives going to school in order to live a life pursuing careers. I, myself, never thought to do otherwise. At the age of ten we’re asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?”, only to find ourselves at the age of twenty, thirty or forty still asking the same question.

When I sit on the front steps of my new house, the world seems vast and full of possibility. I am reminded that I’ve travelled to the corners of the world and read history in the palm of my hands. When I sit here, in my office, I feel like my world is reduced to this time and this place…with no where else to go. Even more tragically is that I overlook a spectacular scene of creation and a miracle that should bring serenity at its very sight. But it doesn’t. It brings heart palpitations and a depletion of my hope.

Two summers ago looked much the same way. My beautiful view was blurred by tears and anxiety that perpetually seemed to have brought me to my knees asking for mercy. Time did bring clearer skies and a more optimistic forecast…but I spent forty minutes this afternoon at the foot of the Lord begging for Him not to make me endure that storm again.

One of my favourite writers once said that when days like this fall upon us, we are to try and find comfort in that which soothes our soul; a good book, a beloved pet, a warm bath, the embrace of a loved one, a good dose of chocolate…whatever it takes to makes the rumbling, dark clouds a little easier to bear. In the end…if all that fails…we’re to take two Tylenol, go to bed and give her a call in the morning!

The fact that I have the book, the pet, the bath (a rather large one!), the loved one (lots of them), the chocolate AND the Tylenol leaves me feeling a little selfish for being sad at all…but maybe the best remedy to sad days is just that…counting all the ways that could make it better. Fur balls and loving arms are indeed very hard to frown at.

But still, just for today…anyone got any Tylenol?!?!?

Easter in July!

I think that I need Lent again! Or rather, I think that I need Lent to begin with!! As I mentioned back in March, Lent wasn’t an overly successful time for us this past year. Between the move and our trip, we found ourselves being less than disciplined and “reflection” was one of the last things that we ended up having time for. Though the summer months are usually fairly hectic for us, all things considering…so far, it’s actually proving to be a time of a bit more consistency than the past six months. So, I figure that perhaps God wouldn’t mind if I jumped on the Lenten band wagon a bit late this year. Better late than never, right?!?!

My beautiful cousin, Dawn, is getting married this coming fall and for the past few months, we’ve been passing emails back and forth about the time leading up to her wedding. Having been there myself three years ago, it’s still rather fresh in my memory what the summer was like filled with anticipation. A good friend of mine had mentioned to me to try and use that time to reflect a bit as I entered this new and very exciting phase of my life. It was great advice and I really made a conscious effort to soak up everything I could before the big day. I took the liberty of passing on the same advice to Dawn because before she knows it, the wedding will be here and life will never be the same!

That being said though, I don’t think that weddings are necessary in order to “allot” time for reflection. The season of Lent is all about re-evaluating our life and our commitments…counting our blessings and filling ourselves with gratitude. It’s about trying to observe the bigger picture and realizing that, as children of God, we are expected to hold ourselves (and our lives) to a higher standard. This too, doesn’t need to happen only at Easter.

A lot of amazing changes have happened to us this year and I think that this summer, I would like some solitary time to push the pause button! Things are quieting down at work for the first time in nine months and now that life is settling a bit, I feel it’s time to take a little breather from it all. I would like to recommit myself to a couple of things and spend some time being a bit more disciplined than I have been as of late. At the very least, in order to purge myself of all the decadent food I’ve been eating!

So, from now until the weekend of Dawn’s wedding (I can’t wait!), I am going to set aside two lunch hours a week to spend on my own however I please. This is just one of many goals to follow this summer that will help to re-establish my sense of balance and continue to anchor me as I move ahead with the rest of the year. Once I’ve figured out the rest of my goals, I’ll let you know. I have a tendency to be a bit ambitious with my motivation…so I need to think this through properly so that I don’t fall flat on my face before I’ve even crossed the start line!!!! I do know though that one of them will be to cut back on my Starbucks consumption (sad but true…it’s necessary to test our limits sometimes!)…I’m anticipating that their shares will plummet significantly as a result!!

In the meantime though, wish me luck! I’ll likely need your encouraging words when I find myself, peppermint mocha in hand, slowly moving against the grain of righteousness!!! Father Joe would be so proud!

Happy Birthday Canada!
We love you!!

Another One Bites the Dust...

I simply can’t believe that it’s July tomorrow! How did this happen? How did I blink my eyes only to find that half of the year has gone by already? It’s a bit scary when that happens, isn’t it?!?!

I can remember being really little and having the summers off from school. That two months seemed like an eternity and by the end, I couldn’t wait to get back to school to see my friends. I never thought it could happen but, when you’re young…two months is a long time! Long enough even (wait for it…) to get bored!

It’s striking me a bit more this year because I will be turning thirty this July. THIRTY! And I haven’t yet decided how I feel about that. Better yet, I haven’t yet figured out how three decades went by so fast. I will officially be an adult soon and looking back, it seems like just yesterday, I was coming home from summer camp or starting high school. We complain often throughout our lives about the lack of consistency and the lack of solid foundations to rely on…and yet, time is always there…ticking away at the very same pace that is was when we were first born. Time is the constant in our life while we discover that we’re actually the ones that have stepped out of pace.

It’s the age old tale of wishing your life away. When I was young I couldn’t wait to be older and when I was older, I couldn’t wait to “get out” of it (really, adolescence was just eight years of trying to avoid embarrassment!) and then as I got a little bit older again, I started to long for the days of being young; free of obligation and the knowledge that comes with understanding.

For the first time though, I feel like my feelings have caught up with my age. Yes, there is a slight tinge of panic that is coming with this new decade but, I’m also pleased with the idea of leaving my twenties. My twenties were the best of times and the worst of times. My twenties shaped me in a way that no other time in my life has…but I’m ready to say goodbye. I’m ready to face the maturity that comes with the thirties. As far as I’m concerned, our twenties are a little bit like the Bermuda Triangle of adulthood…neither here nor there…just a dark hole in the middle somewhere that unfortunately, some people never find their way out of. I’m hoping that the thirties will provide a certain sophistication that can’t be found in keg parties and university apartments!!

I’m taken aback sometimes by how quickly my twenties seemed to have passed me by. Granted, there were moments when the agony felt like it would never end but, all in all, I’m just hoping that this pattern of rapid fire birthdays doesn’t continue! There’s got to be a pause button somewhere and a bed of roses to smell along the way!

Otherwise, that means that forty is just around the corner and I definitely know that I’m not quite ready for that one just yet!

Adieu...

Our good friend Julie left today for Montreal. She is about to spend the next year travelling around the world and somehow, with the slightest of time passing us by, we realize that our world is a little bit lonelier without her.

Julie and I have spent five days a week together for the past year when she came to the Gallery to take over a colleague’s maternity leave. We became fast friends and later that fall, Jamie joined us and the three of us have seldom been apart since.

Watching her drive away with all of her things in the back seat of her car while Jamie and I stood on the curb crying really made me rethink the role that our workplace plays within our lives. Most of my very closest friends are people that I have worked with and in a world of being told to “leave your luggage at home”, I have found an entire family worth of friendships through my work. Some of my nearest and dearest are those that I spend almost every day with. We fight like family, we love like family and in the end, they become very much like family. We’ve endured deaths in the family, new additions to each other’s family, marriage, divorce and everything in between. It makes me recognize just how little salary really matters to me when making my career moves.

There has been more than one opportunity for me to leave this place but I just can’t do it. I simply can’t bear the thought of not seeing some of these faces every day and being a part of each other’s day to day lives. I’ll be the first to admit that it isn’t always the case and that there have been many growing pains throughout my career but these challenges have resulted in remarkable friendships that I wouldn’t change for anything. While we are slowing finding ourselves in various places around the world (parting is such sweet sorrow), I now have this collection of incredible people in my life that are above and beyond anything I could have hoped for in colleagues.

We laugh, we cry and damn it all…we can stuff press kits like nobody’s business!

We miss you already Julie!

I Wonder...

...when and if I get to call myself a writer?!?!

Ground Me If You Can...

I read the most disturbing article this past weekend in the National Post.

Allow me to summarize if you haven’t already read it for yourselves; a twelve year old girl from Québec got into a dispute with her parents which resulted in her father grounding her from going on her year end school trip. This young girl then decides to find herself a lawyer, take the issue to court and believe it or not…the judge actually ruled in her favour which, in turn, allowed her to go on her trip.

This blows my mind and rips apart my confidence in our justice system.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much this whole thing upsets me and more so, there simply isn’t a list long enough to accommodate all the questions I have regarding this complete misuse of anyone’s tax dollars. If I had to sum it up though, I would want to know one thing…how was this allowed to happen? How was a judge actually permitted to listen to such a ridiculous waste of time and how did this actually manage to find its way into the court system? Something is terribly wrong here.

When I was a little girl, I always wanted to grow up to be a judge. Even now, I believe that I have somehow gained an over developed sense of justice and fairness…even much to my own demise at times. I always remember a high school teacher once telling me that “fair” does not mean giving everyone the same thing…it means giving everyone what they need. I found this statement very thought provoking as I’ve grown up and watched fairness unravel in various ways around me and in turn, I’ve never seen justice the same way again. The big challenge I had though with becoming a judge was that I never wanted to become a lawyer. I never wanted to have to work for someone that I didn’t truly believe to be genuine. How do you defend someone that you know is guilty or how do you prosecute something that you do believe warrants compassion? I know that the profession of upholding the law is not quite that black and white but my feelings towards justice are so strong that I never found myself able to pursue it in a way that wouldn’t turn my life upside down.

The law, for all of its flaws, is there to prevent anarchy and to determine what the rest of us cannot. But this system is also a very intricate web of common sense that should (easier said than done perhaps) know its limits. This system is not in place so that teenagers can overrule what they consider to be their parent’s harsh discipline. The fact that this case was even permitted to be heard really disappoints me.

How does a twelve year old even go about making this happen? Are lawyers so eager to have their voices heard that they will defend such extremes? This sort of case creates a mockery out of something that should be upheld with the utmost respect in a country that has done a great deal of work to keep the lines of justice very clear.

How can people’s time, effort and money be put into such ridiculous issues? I believe that the judge mentioned that the child’s parent’s divorce played a role in his ruling which, as far as I’m concerned, seems completely irrelevant (especially given that the parent who grounded her was her legal guardian). Does this now mean that children of divorced parents are suddenly entitled to third party intervention while parents that have remained married are still permitted to call the shots? Does it really require the resources of the justice system to figure these things out now?

We complain time and time again about how our young people are all turning down the wrong paths. They are getting pregnant younger, there is more violence in our schools, they are less concerned with their health and they are becoming independent in ways that calls for some very serious measures to be taken, and yet, as I write this, a twelve year old is celebrating victory over her parent’s authority…for a three day school trip.

I should have become a judge and if I had…you better believe that I would have sent this kid to the middle of the Congo so she could see how her “rites of passage” would have treated there. Perhaps then she would stop feeling sorry for herself long enough to let our justice system do what it was actually created to do.

Oh, and one more thing…that judge should be fired! Clearly, he was grounded one too many times when he was young!

Holy Water...

The clouds have parted and I’m feeling so much better today! Thank goodness for that because yesterday was feeling rather toxic. Quite a few people suggested to me that perhaps it’s been all of the rain we’ve received lately that has been contributing to my doom and gloom. While I wasn’t really in the mood to argue with them about it…I know they’re wrong! I actually love the rain and cool, wet days bring me great opportunities for reflection and solitude, which never fails to bring a sense of balance to my life. I know that a lot of people suffer from seasonal mood changes but, it was a cold, rainy, autumn day that changed my life and I’ve never experienced a rainy day the same way ever again.

I don’t know if I’ve ever told any of you this story before but, the year that I graduated university was the beginning of a very difficult time for me. I graduated in the spring of 2001 and really had no idea what I was going to do with my life from here on in. It was the first time that I wouldn’t be in school since I was five years old and the thought of not having my goals outlined for me in a curriculum was overwhelming to say the least. I had also just had my heart broken in the worst way and endured days in which I wondered if it would just stop beating all together. I slept for four months that summer. I honestly spend countless hours in bed and the time that wasn’t spent in bed was spent walking in a haze of semi-consciousness drifting between work and home.

Later that summer, when I eventually “woke up”, the world seemed very big and scary, and I hardly even recognized my self in the mirror. While I really had no idea what to do next, I knew that I had to do something. So, in the grand tradition that is me, I took the most extreme measure I could think of; I changed everything about my life (even though I had no idea what I wanted my life to be). I moved to another province, changed jobs, changed friends and found myself becoming someone that hardly resembled the person that I had ever hoped to become. As I dated a string of completely unsuitable men and spent time with completely superficial friends, I found myself immersed in the very distraction that I thought I needed to turn things around. But that’s all they really were…distractions.

One thing that always struck me as strange was that, for the very emotional person that I am, I really hadn’t cried very much over the course of those eighteen months. I walked about (or slept) in a cloud of very apathetic indifference to my circumstances. While my emotions had apparently shut down though, something else had started to happen; Twenty years of worry, anxiety and perfectionism were starting to manifest themselves in extremely unfamiliar ways. In fact, they started to manifest themselves as amplified versions of what already existed. Not only would I worry now…but I would physically make myself ill with worry. Not only was I anxious now…but I would throw myself into complete panic attacks. Not only did I still remain a perfectionist…but now I would even get out of bed at all hours of the night to complete things that I hadn’t finished during the day because the very thought of them would leave me lying awake at night. But I still didn’t cry. That is…until a wet, cold, autumn day in 2002…

It was just after work and I was meeting a friend in another part of town about an hour and a half later. I was desperately trying to figure out what I could fit into that small window of time that I hadn’t managed to fit in earlier but, every time I started heading in one direction (bank or grocery shopping?), I would panic and think of something else that I thought was more important. This hysteria continued for about fifteen minutes while I walked back and forth on the same block trying to decide what had to be done first…until a cab drove by through a big puddle and soaked me from head to toe! I stood there, on the sidewalk in downtown Ottawa during rush hour and had nothing left to do but cry. I put my bags down next to me and simply stood there in the pouring rain with years worth of tears streaming down my face. I don’t remember anyone around me and I don’t know how long I stood there but, I know that eventually, I picked up my bags and headed to the first place I could find where I could sit down. Sure enough, on the next block over, was a quiet little Starbucks with only a few people sitting in it. I went in, put down my stuff, ordered a drink (for the first time!) and just sat looking out the window at the world going by. My clothes were soaked through, my hair was dripping wet and I didn’t even know what time it was…but I had finally stopped. I didn’t do anything but stare out the window and cry. Finally, I cried. That’s the great thing about the rain…no one has to know that it’s really you crying and not the heavens.

I did eventually meet my friend and I never mentioned a word about what had just happened! Even I hadn’t really come down from it yet but I was certain that something had changed in that moment and things would thankfully never be the same again. A little while later, I read a quote by British travel writer, Freya Stark, that said “There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different than the things we do.” These words startled me so much as it suddenly occurred to me that for most of my life, I didn’t really know what I believed. I knew what others wanted me to believe and I knew what the world thought I should believe…but I didn’t know what I truly believed as a unique individual walking through this life. It’s a frightening realization to come to but a necessary one nonetheless. That evening, the rain had finally eroded a hole through the solid shell I had created to protect me from reality and at long last, I could breathe again. Chipping away at the remaining pieces was often sharp and painful, and my soul ached from being compressed for so long but, the end result finally set me free.

Don’t get me wrong, by no means were things “easy” after this but things were different. Slowly (and with many more tears), I took the time to discover and learn what it is that I truly believe and, in turn, how to live my life accordingly. Even now, there are days when I struggle not to get pulled in countless directions on the whim of other people’s expectations but they are fewer and farther between than they’ve ever been before. And anytime it rains, I stop and remember…

I’ve come to believe a lot of things over the course of the past six years. The very fundamentals that make up who I am are anchored in these things I believe and truthfully, I still confuse my own beliefs with those that I’ve been embedded with in my early years from time to time. During my more vulnerable days, I even find myself wondering if I even have the strength to stand alone on the pillars of my own beliefs. For all its simplicity, living a truly authentic life isn’t always as easy as it sounds, at least not for me. On my good days though (which are now the rule and not the exception), I find great comfort in knowing that my roots are solid for perhaps the first time in my life. Buried deep within me, I believe in health, love, balance, growth, fulfillment, and no matter what my day is looking like at the time…I always believe that the rain, heaven’s tears, washes away more than we’ll ever know.

I’m not very happy today. I just woke up feeling so unable to the make the best of this rainy, cold day. We’ve been busy for so long and the concept of feeling rested is lost on me right now. I went to check Heidi’s blog this morning and was pleased to see two new posts on her site. She hasn’t posted anything since the birth of her son (understandably so) and now, four months later, tiny little baby in hand, she still manages to blow me away with her writing and insight on life. When I read Heidi’s words, I am always in awe of her understanding of what it means to be a Child of God. Her faith, trust and pure devotion to the Lord is so beautiful. I do long to be that mature in my faith one day and better yet, I long to be able to write about it one day with even a fraction of the eloquence and clarity that she expresses her commitment.

I haven’t had much ability to keep perspective these days. I’ve been swept up in one daily mood or another and even as my head hits the pillow at the end of the night, my depleted self falls asleep before I can even wish our good Lord goodnight. I’ve always been one to make a very conscious effort to count my blessings all the time, every day, in order to remind myself of the Glory that comes with even the most tumultuous of days. I try. I try very hard and some days it comes to me easier than others. As I sat in my bathtub last night in a mad attempt to sooth my soul, I asked God if He would mind speaking to me for a little while. I need advice and don’t feel the energy to read between the lines or search for the burning bush. I’m still waiting to hear back from Him!

I’ve been reading the Book of Joshua lately and can’t help but admire Joshua’s determination and stamina. Page after page seems to describe a never-ending stream of battles that he must tackle and have faith that it will turn out as the Lord intended (that is, of course, if I’m understanding the Old Testament correctly…which is certainly hit or miss!). He must take the commands that were given to Moses, that have now been passed on to him and conquer a legacy worth of promises and commitments. I wonder if Joshua ever felt discouragement or frustration at following such a path only to be faced with armies worth of men ready to fight back. Did he ever want to take the easy road? Did he ever just want to throw his hands up and throw righteousness to the winds? I think that I would feel a lot better if someone told me that he did, at least once.

I’m almost embarrassed by my self-centeredness as I read about Joshua or even as I read about Heidi. Joshua was taking the commands of God on his shoulders and Heidi is putting the needs of a brand new life in front of her own (and still managing to blog!). Meanwhile, there’s me…feeling sorry for myself as though it’s me against the world and forgetting that to be a Child of God means that my life isn’t about me to begin with; It’s about being the hands, eyes and heart of God for others. It’s about helping Joshua fight the battle and helping Heidi raise another Child of God.

I still wouldn’t mind receiving a word or two from the Big Guy though! Surrendering is a little bit easier with some words of encouragement. It’s a long way down from the nest with these little wings of mine.

Do you ever have one of those days when you wake up and you just know that something is different? Yes, the sun still rose just the same and yes, your eyes still opened like they always do…but something is different; the world seems better and brighter than it was the day before?

That happened to me this weekend. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but something, unbeknownst to me, had happened that I could feel in my bones. Steve and I were driving along the 417 on Saturday afternoon and I felt like everything looked different. A miracle had happened that I was simply waiting to hear about.

Sure enough, come Monday morning, I got a phone call from my good friend to tell me that the world had indeed changed on Saturday morning when their little man finally came into the world. Safely and healthy, their son was born.

I wish that I could express the relief that I have over his arrival. It hasn’t been an easy journey for this little one and even less so for his parents. His entry into the world is the result of great faith, patience and love for a little boy that nobody had yet met. His entry into the world was God’s hand at work in the most beautiful of ways.

I can’t wait to watch him to grow up and I can’t wait to watch my dear friends grow as parents (they are going to be INCREDIBLE parents!). I think it’s a rare gift to be able to watch people you love go through this process from the very beginning and Steve and I have been very blessed to share in this with them from very early on. So I can assure that, while Marie and Craig’s world will forever be bigger, brighter and a little more sleep deprived, our world too was made so much more wonderful by their tiny little creation.

Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the newest addition to one of my most favourite families…

~ Tobin James Pierre Beckett ~
June 14th, 2008

When my husband and I first met, we spent a lot of time dreaming about all of the things that we wanted to do together in the future. The trips we wanted to take, the things we wanted to see, the people we wanted to meet…the world was our oyster and we were the pearls. One of the things on our list was that we both wanted to learn how to surf. Neither one of us had ever lived in a coastal city before hence the culture of surfing was never something that either of us were exposed to. With that fantasy tucked away in our back pockets, we decided that our honeymoon was as good a time as any to check surfing off our list of dreams to live.

So, we got married, packed our bags and headed for the Hawaiian Islands, home to some of the most famous surfing beaches in the world. As you can imagine, one of the first things we did after arriving in Hawaii was to find ourselves a surf instructor. Sure enough, we stumbled upon this guy who must have been about two hundred years old (or at least resembled a two hundred year old hand bag!) and had been surfing long before he was even walking. With a slight nudge in the ribs to wake him up, we had found the guy that was going to help us ride the waves!

I’ll be the first to admit that I was quite confident in my abilities as a surfer. So much so in fact that I was positive that once I had started, not only were my feet going to be forever glued to a surf board but, I was also sure that MTV was going to be hunting me down to play in the next Blue Crush movie! Believe me…I had a plan and that plan included a tanned, chiseled, bikini wearing version of the self I currently was!

Of course, every plan has a few holes in it and my surfing plan simply didn’t account for the fact that surfing is an incredibly humbling sport!!! From the moment that we hit the water we understood our first challenge; that fitness in one sport doesn’t necessarily translate into another sport!! Obviously, being fit makes any sport a bit easier but, just because I could stand in running shoes or stand in skates, did not mean that I could stand on a fiberglass board in the middle of the ocean!

Steve, on the other hand, could do so. Apparently, being able to stand on a fiberglass board on frozen water is quite similar to standing on a fiberglass board on unfrozen water! There is the slight issue of movement but, more or less, knowing how to snowboarding definitely puts the odds in your favour. So while my brand new husband proceeded to show the Hawaiians what a snowboarding kid from the Great White North could really do, I began to learn the fine art of balance for what seemed like the first time in my life.


As I come down from a rather junky week of feeling overwhelmed and under nourished (emotionally that is), I caught myself thinking about this story over and over again because I’m finding that, much to my surprise, balance in surfing is really not that different than balance in life. Lose your balance, and you’re in over your head in ocean deep water…keep your balance, and the shore is never more than a wave away.

Let’s stop for a moment and consider what it is that keeps us upright? What is it that helps us to maintain our balance? As just about any athlete knows, stability and balance comes from having a strong core. Your core centers you and enables everything else to function as you need it to. The giant muscles that make up your core holds you steady and keeps you grounded. Without it, you find yourself relying on stability that just isn’t there. You are relying on pillars of limbs to hold you in place and in turn, doesn’t allow for much flexibility because one quick movement…and you’ll likely find yourself stumbling and grasping to anything that can help keep you in place. Let’s be honest, life, like our bodies, is full of unexpected turns and sudden, abrupt stops. Life requires the same muscle strengthening as our bodies do to keep us stable. Our values and morals make up the very core of who we are and with a strong understanding of them, we can continue to stand strong in the face of any wave. Without them, nothing else will hold up when the tides turn. The ocean may be strong…but we can be even stronger.

I think it’s worth mentioning though that even in the water with your surfboard floating in front of you…all is not lost. Our cores take time to develop and the balance often comes when we aren’t even looking. In the meantime though, while you’re learning to stand upright and figuring out where your balance actually is, you might find yourself catching a glimpse of the shore and ocean around you…and remembering that you’re in Hawaii…on your honeymoon…with the most handsome man you’ve ever met. You wake up to brunch under the palms trees and watch the sun go down to champagne and the sand between your toes. Life is good where the waves roll in and yes, it’s true, I wouldn’t want to spend forever on a surfboard without my balance but damn, if I’m going to have to stumble once or twice…there is no better place than this beach, this ocean and this life…to do it in.

Have you ever felt like you’ve fallen off the bandwagon of life sometimes??

I spent yesterday at home because the night before I pulled a muscle in my neck and felt it go all the way down to the bottom of my spine. Not good! The worst part is that I kind of knew it was coming. For a few weeks now, I’ve felt the slight tweaks when I would turn my head a certain way and quickly realized that my body was rebelling against me.

I’ve been pushing myself pretty hard for the last little while. Actually, I’d say that all of 2008 so far has been one endurance race after another. I try so hard to balance everything; to juggle all the balls and balance all the plates. I try so hard to play as hard as I work and to rest as much as I exercise. I try so hard in fact, that when a ball gets dropped and my head turns the wrong way, the disappointment of having failed to manage it all ends up surpassing the pain in the neck (no pun intended!) of an injury I got as a result. As I sit here writing this, I feel depleted, defeated and as though my entire body is put together wrong.

I’m starting to notice that many of my girlfriends and I are being challenged with the same thing right now; the desire to manage our lives and all that it encompasses without losing ourselves in the midst of the chaos. It sounds like such a typical “woman” thing to say but, I think that there’s something to be said for women trying to find their place in the world (or anyone else for that matter). I can’t even tell you how long I’ve been trying to figure out how I can play my various roles without letting the most important of them all slip between my fingers. I most definitely know that the questions are more important than the answers and I even pride myself on taking the time to ask the questions but, is it too much to ask for even a little bit of an answer from time to time?!?!

I think that as the years go on, women become very intricate hybrids of themselves. They play the role of Mothers, Daughters, Wives, Colleagues, Sisters, Philanthropists, Role Models, Chef…you name it! But with that, it becomes that much harder to play the role of “themselves” and I fear that my poor weary soul is producing physical manifestations of the one role I haven’t been doing much of lately.

Many years ago, I was talking with a priest about my completely irrational fear of cancer. He ended up looking at me in the wise way that priests often do and telling me that he thought I was so convinced I had cancer because I was looking for a reason to give myself a break. When you’re sick, he said, you’re only expected to take care of yourself…something that you seldom do. While I still don’t know if I agree with this statement or not, I did find it incredibly insightful. I thought about it quite a bit at the time but, as the years passed by, the irrational fear continued and the wisdom faded. It wasn’t until yesterday afternoon, during my crippled day at home, that I was reminded of this compelling thought.

While I’m not a huge fan of Oprah anymore (she lost me after the whole attack on James Frey), I still like to watch some of her interviews and yesterday was a rerun of an interview she did with two people that were dying of cancer (great…just what an overly anxious person with an almost obsessive fear of cancer needs!). The one woman who had been living with cancer felt that she was actually healthier now than before she got cancer. Though I imagine that she likely wouldn’t have chosen to have cancer if she had to do it all again, she found that cancer had altered her life and her priorities in such a transformative way. When Oprah asked why she thought this transformation occurred, she responded by saying that “we all, in some way, wait for that great permission to live.” Obviously, this sounded all too familiar to me and immediately caught my attention. When the gentleman with pancreatic cancer was asked if he had any regrets, he simply stated that his only regret was that he hadn’t “figured it all out” sooner.

Gosh, this made me sad. Despite how inspiring these two people were, all I could think about was how I didn’t want to be that person. I didn’t want to be the person that had to get cancer before I “figured it all out” and opened my eyes. Really, what has to happen before we decide that it’s okay to take some time to stretch at the end of the day? Or what has to happen before we decide to shut down the computer and pick up that book we’ve been dying to read? Or what has to happen before we give ourselves permission to come home? There really has to be an easier answer to all of this than terminal illness. Even as I blog through the eyes of a sore neck, I just know that all of us can do it; that we can find that fine balance between being ourselves and being Wonder Woman. But in the vintage fashion that is me…I just don’t have the answer! I never do.

Questions I can do. Answers…not so much!
But I’m determined to remain hopeful.

Any day now…any day.

Michael Jackson meets Vanilla Ice meets Bollywood!
"Bloody Brilliant!"

Britain really does have talent!!

I went for a walk by myself at lunch today. I haven’t done that in a really long time. I used to commit myself to at least two lunch hours a week in order to get away a bit and decompress but when you have so many great friends nearby, it’s very hard to resist the temptation to spend time with them any chance you get.

I did manage to escape on my own today though so, I went and grabbed a cold drink and slowly roamed the streets of my daytime stomping grounds. While enjoying the warm summer air, I quickly found myself thinking back to the Sex & the City Movie that some of the girls and I had seen last night. Without giving anything away, the movie basically revolves around the topic of marriage and the various “places” that people can be within it. As the only married girl among us, I’m quite sure that I went away from the movie with a different appreciation and understanding of it then my single friends did but nonetheless, the truthful reality of topic was a life size reminder of just how big a decision marriage really is!

This past weekend, Steve and I went home to celebrate my in-laws 40th wedding anniversary. Forty years! Isn’t that incredible? In this day and age, that’s a very rare accomplishment to witness and I can only imagine the many different things that they’ve seen and done together as a couple. I’m sure that there must have been times when it wasn’t always easy and times when a lifetime together seemed easier said than done. I wonder this myself sometimes even as I reach the tail end of my third year of marriage; will there be enough love, enough patience, enough desire to make it work? While there are no guarantees in any relationships…I truly believe that, yes, there will be enough of everything we need.

A friend once asked me how I knew wanted to marry Steve and when I stopped to really think about it, I realized that my relationship with Steve was the first time I truly understood that there was a difference between loving someone and committing to someone. Many people love each other without really committing to each other and many people commit to each other without really loving each other but, there is a significant difference between the two. It’s very true that the love that exist throughout a lifetime together will endure different phases; the love that you share when you first get married will likely be very different than the love that you share forty years later. The real test is whether or not you can commit to those changes. Can you commit to sticking it out when that love transforms? Can you commit when there’s a chance that it won’t even exist anymore? Can you commit to remembering that there’s a reason why you fell in love in the first place? That was how I knew I wanted to marry Steve…because no matter what, I was committed to sticking it out with him…regardless of the changes that our love could endure and with the understanding that it most likely would have to.

As I walked down Sussex Drive glimpsing at all of the beautiful designer dresses in the window, I had to chuckle at the brilliance of this movie. We are drawn to these four New York women for their Manolo Blahniks and string of cute men but, really…there is an entire method to their madness that I was barely even aware of until their shining moment on the big screen; there is also a very significant difference between a wedding and a marriage! The most beautiful wedding dress in the world won’t keep you together if you can’t commit to each other in sweatpants. Not even the Manhattan stylings of Carrie Bradshaw can pull that one off!

So here I am, just when I thought these girls couldn’t get any better…they go ahead and give even us non-single girls a reason to try and follow in their footsteps. The real challenge though is to try and do so with lovely two inch heeled footsteps to make the journey a bit prettier! I think I’m up for it and I even have the perfect black stilettos with which to do so!

Fabulous!

Ten things I love about you...

1.) I love your eyes. They are endearing and calming and always manage to say all the things you can’t seem to find the words for.

2.) I love the way you always find the good in people…even people who have been mean to you.

3.) I love how every morning, when our alarm goes off, you roll over and put your arm around me. It’s always the best part of my day.

4.) I love how I’m the only person who gets to see how silly you really are!

5.) I love your faith. It’s so pure and honest and embraces the very essence of what faith should be.

6.) I love how amazing you look in ripped jeans and a t-shirt.

7.) I love how much you truly believe I will be a writer one day. Most days you even believe in me enough for both of us.

8.) I love how incredibly patient you are with our kitty…especially when he’s being a little brat (which is most of the time)!

9.) I love how tanned your arms get in the summer!

10.) I love that I can be stuck on a plane with you for fifteen hours and still not get tired of you (even though you bug me about playing Tetris too much!)!

Happy Birthday to my incredible husband! The day that you were born made me the luckiest girl in the world!

Me me me me me me me...

1.) Given Name:
-- Genevieve Victoria (Genevieve is gaelic for White Wave and Victoria was my grandmother’s name)

2.) Childhood Nickname:
-- Gen with a "G", Genygirl, YaYa (don't ask!!!)

3.) Home:
-- Our new house in Ottawa. It was love at first sight!!!

4.) Height:
-- Five foot eight (with the majority of that being legs!)

5.) Eyes:
-- Someone once told me that they are the mirror of the soul. In that
case, mine have a hazel tinge to them!!

6.) Hair colour and style:
-- Dark, thick and often falls victim to people’s fetishes!

7.) Anything that you’re especially self-conscious of?
-- My smile! In grade ten a guy made a comment about my smile and I’ve been very self-conscious of it ever since.

8.) Favorite fictional character:
-- Carrie Bradshaw from “Sex & the City” and Richard Parker from “The Life of Pi” (both of which have rather “feline” qualities!!!)

9.) What do you remember most about this year?
-- April 4th, 2008; Waking up to watch the sunrise over the Sydney Opera House on our first morning in Australia.

10.) What do you think about Ouija boards?
-- People search for answers in the most random of places--this is no
exception (but I’m thinking that it’s probably more interesting to converse with the living instead of the dead!!!)

11.) Favorite T.V. show:
-- Sex & the City (I’m a Charlotte!)

12.) What's on your mouse pad?
-- A mouse! (is that a trick question?!?)

13.) Do you believe in yourself?
--That’s really a matter of timing in my world! Anyone who has ever experienced a truly bad hair day should understand!!!!!

14.) What are you most determined to accomplish:
-- I’m going to finish and publish my book one day. It may not be good and there may not be another soul who ever reads it…but I am determined to make a contribution to the literary world.

15.) Favorite game:
--Monopoly--best played at the cottage!

16.) What would be your list of “Top 5 makeout songs”
-- (in no particular order!) 1. I’ll Keep Your Memory Vague by Finger Eleven 2. Disarm by Smashing Pumpkins 3. Creep by Stone Temple Pilots 4. It’s Been a While by Staind 5. The Red by Chevelle 6. With or Without You by U2 7. Save Yourself by Sense Field 8. Destiny by Zero 7 9.Witness by Sarah McLachlan 10. Fine Again by Seether…I could probably go on for quite a while here, so we’ll just call it quits with my top ten songs!! Anyone else got any good ones?

17.) Favorite drink:
-- H2O and Starbucks’ Peppermint Mochas

18.) Favorite smell:
-- Steve!

19.) Favorite sound:
-- Music. Any music. I need music like I need oxygen. And I love the sound of my shoes hitting the pavement when I’m running (usually because it means that I’m still moving!!!).

20.) What's the worst feeling in the world?
-- Feeling lonely (a broken heart is a pretty close second though).

21.) What's the best feeling in the world?
-- Being in love and feeling inspired.

22.) Favorite thing to do on the weekend?
-- Take my time.

23.) Favorite band:
-- David Usher, Our Lady Peace, Three Doors Down, Coldplay, Linkin Park, Finger Eleven…and the musical stylings of my husband when he decides that breakfast just can’t be made in silence!!!

24.) Where do you see yourself in ten years?
-- Having learned a lot more about myself.

25.) What's the first thing you thought of when you woke up this
morning?
-- “Seriously…how long can a cat really purr for?!?!”

26.) Boxers, briefs, bikinis, thongs or other?
-- Hmmm...that would be for me to know...and maybe a few others!!

27.) Do you get motion sickness?
-- Depends on the night before!!

28.) The nicest thing anyone's ever done for me was...
-- Missed me.

29.) Thunderstorms--cool or scary?
-- I used to think that they were incredibly romantic however, in my old age, I have come to not like them so much anymore! I mean really…what’s so romantic about getting struck down by lightning anyway?!?!

30.) Name one thing that you’re really good at.
-- Eating chocolate fondue!!! And rumour has it that I’m a fairly good writer too!

31.) What is your zodiac sign?
-- Cancer (the only zodiac lucky enough to be named after a terminal illness!)

32.) What do you wear to bed?
-- A smile!!

33.) What’s playing on your iPod:
-- What isn’t playing on my iPod?!?!

34.) What never fails to cheer you up?
-- Being with Steve…Starbucks with the girls…buying a new book…chocolate pudding…writing…being told how cute I am (!!)…Sunday mornings on the run!

35.) If you could have a tattoo, what and where would it be?
-- It took me eighteen years to get my ears pierced! A tattoo seems like a long way away!!

36.) Three most influencial books:
-- In the Meantime by Iyanla Vanzant
A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren

37.) What's your favorite quote?
-- “Hope has two beautiful daughters; anger and courage. Anger at the way things are, and courage to change them.” - St. Augustine of Hippo
-- “There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different than the things we do.” - Freya Stark

38.) Have you ever been in love?
-- Absolutely!

39.) What's on the walls in your bedroom?
-- An awesome green paint…one of our wedding pictures and a beautiful housewarming gift from Craig and Marie.

40.) Is the glass half empty or half full?
-- If the glass were filled with the finest Chilean red wine…then would it really matter?

41.) Pick a song that best describes you or that you can relate to:
-- “Wonderwall” by Oasis, “St. Lawrence River” by David Usher and “Numb” by Linkin Park

42.) What's your favorite movie?
--Contact, Playing By Heart, High Fidelity

43.) What is your biggest pet peeve?
-- Weak hand shakes, automated voice messaging and wisdom teeth!

44.) What’s under you bed?
-- A fur ball named Tugger!

45.) When you first look at a guy/girl, you notice...
-- Whether or not it’s Steve!!

46.) You'd most like to be remembered as...
-- A great wife, daughter, friend and writer…

47.) If you could do anything to the person you hated most, what would it be?
-- Have them love me like crazy!

48.) Your dream guy/girl would...
-- …is not in my dreams!

49.) What's the single thing you would want if you were a stranded on a desert island?
-- Umm…a boat!!! (and perhaps the complete series of “Lost” just to keep things interesting!!!)

50.) What could you never live without?
-- Love, hope, faith, charity and my flattening iron!

51.) What would you prefer to live without?
-- The U.S. government!!

52.) What do you hate most when arguing with someone?
-- I hate it when someone attacks my character instead of my actions.

53.) What is your addiction of choice?
-- The York Street Spa, Starbucks, strawberry season and Gap commercials!

54.) What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?
-- A second chance.

55.) What’s the one thing you know to be true?
-- “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” –Cor. 13:4

56.) What’s the most frustrating thing ever?
-- Hearing fireworks but not being able to see them…

57.) When the going gets tough…?
-- The tough gets reminded that I’m a marathon runner…and after 42.2 kilometres…everything else is easy!!!

58.) What’s more important…that the spirit runs quick or that the spirit runs deep?
-- As a runner, what matters most to me is that the spirit runs!

59.) What does the world really need more of?
--runners!

60.) What is the biggest lesson that you’ve learned?
-- Over the past few years, through different situations, I’ve learned just how much of our lives are shaped by those who love us and by those who refuse to love us. However, more importantly, I also learned that those who do love us more than make up for those who don’t.

I’m desperately in love with the world today!

It’s the most gorgeous day…the sun is warm and the wind is calm. I had a terrific, unhurried morning with Steve and Tugger (complete with hash browns and orange juice…yummy!). I rode my bike into work this morning during the calmness of pre-rush hour traffic. I received the most wonderful email from an adored friend who I miss already. One of my favourite colleagues and I shared coffee and conversation while everyone else was still making their way into the office. I previewed the most fantastic and breathtaking photography exhibit that I’ve ever seen.

And it’s only 1pm!

HEAVENLY!

I finally finished A Complicated Kindness last night. It's the third time that I've tried to read it. The first two times I would just consistently find myself drifting off a couple of pages into it and eventually, I just found myself drifting into a different book! So I guess the third time really is a charm, though for some reason, I would hesitate to call this book charming. Strange, yes. Charming...not so much!

Interestingly enough though, almost the entire time that I was reading it, it made me think of Lesley's blog! The style of writing is so similar except that Lesley's stories are so much better!

So there you have it...it's a good book if you are patient enough to even get into it. But it would be an even better book if it were Lesley's!

The best weekend of the year has come and gone once again! And once again, I’ve been walking around as though I fell asleep with a hanger in my mouth because I can’t stop smiling!

For the past two days, we’ve been participating in the Ottawa Race Weekend; one of the premiere running events in the country. For five years now, I’ve stood at various start lines for different races throughout the weekend and every time, I find myself overwhelmed with the excitement of the experience. I’m always so moved by the other runners around me and how determined they are to accomplish their goals. Even when I finished my own marathon, I still caught myself captured with everyone else’s stories.

This year was the first year that I didn’t actually run. Between the move and our trip, I just didn’t have a whole lot of time to train for a specific goal and I also thought that every runner, at some point in time, should be a spectator. We value the encouragement of spectators so much while we’re running and I figured that it was time for me to return the favour!!

An added excitement for this year was that Russell and his gorgeous girlfriend, Maureen, were coming to town from New Brunswick to run their own respective races. I hadn’t seen Russ in nearly ten years and the anticipation of seeing him again, in addition to the usual excitement, just made the wait for the weekend simply unbearable! But alas, it arrived and it didn’t disappoint!

Being a spectator, I sort of expected to come out of the weekend feeling a little bit sad that I hadn’t run at all but, much to my own surprise, I found encouraging other runners so fulfilling that I really wouldn’t have had it any other way. For four hours, Steve and I stood at Pretoria Bridge cheering on marathoners and half-marathoners. We watched them pass in huge masses as they initially found their way along the canal and then we watched them trickle in, slowly but surely, as they finished along the other side. We stayed well beyond the five hour mark, which meant that some runners needed more encouragement than others! Another spectator actually approached me and asked if I knew some of the runners or if I was just an “enthusiastic citizen”?!?! I answered him by saying that I just knew how hard this part of the race could be. I’ve been there and done that…more than once! Kilometer 40/19 simply has no prejudices and will take down anyone it can!

One “less inspiring” thing that I always experience during the race weekend though is a pet peeve that I have among other runners; the willingness to use the term “marathon” interchangeably to describe any distance run over the course of the weekend. I don’t say this to undermine the significance of all other races because running any distance is an accomplishment but, only one distance is truly the marathon! And for anyone who has endured running that distance, they know that it requires an unbelievable amount of determination to earn the right to say that you’ve run it. I can’t tell you how many times I heard people say that they ran the marathon when really, they ran the 10km race (yes, incredible…no, not the marathon! Let’s be clear about this!). I’ve read before that less than 1% of the population has ever finished a marathon…so with that being said, other runners should have the decency not to take that away from them!

Misuse of terminology aside though…everyone was amazing! They hung in there, they smiled, they lavished in the gorgeous weather and they realized that respect had just been earned. Russ finished with a terrific time, Maureen completed her first half-marathon, Jesper uttered the words “pace bunny” on his way by and everyone really showed the course who’s boss! There are, of course, the elite runners as well, which are just incredible to watch. They never cease to blow my mind with their gift of running. I always see them fly by and find myself saying “uh…so that’s what 90 pounds of Kenyan looks like! It’s a good thing I didn’t blink or I might have missed them”!!!

Don’t get me wrong though…one sight of the ten kilometer race sent my heart racing as well and I couldn’t wait to get back in my running shoes. If there are ever times when I question why I started the madness of running in the first place, I question no more when this weekend comes. The inspiration of 30,000 runners of all shapes and sizes leaves me wide-eyed (usually crying) and aching to be on the run again.

Running rocks my world!

Happy 5th birthday my beautiful Priya!

While I know you may think that grass will never be seen in the world again (though I do hope that you have a new green marker by now!!), know that your smiling face is all the world will ever need anyways!

Bonne Fête ma belle!

Love,
Auntie Gen xoxo

Okay…I’m a delinquent blogger right now…my apologies! But rest assured that it’s not for a lack of trying!!!

Here’s a brief summary of life on our little corner of the world…

* Colin and Sandra came to visit us for the long weekend! We had loads of fun (like always!) and found that Tugger already has quite the affection for Baby Alexander.

*I’m working on the opening of the photography exhibit of Geoffrey James right now, opening next week.

*I’m also working on the opening of The 1930s: “The Making of the New Man” our much anticipated summer exhibition opening the first week in June.

*The girls and I are in the midst of planning our Sex & the City Movie night. Every girl deserves a night of dinner and cosmos, followed by sex…(ummm… & the City that is!!)

*Steve and I are going home to celebrate his parents’ 40th wedding anniversary next weekend…amazing!

*Russell and Maureen are on their way to Ottawa RIGHT NOW for the big Ottawa Race Weekend. I can hardly wait…I haven’t seen Russ in over ten years and it will be so fun than watching him qualify for Boston!

*Steve’s birthday is coming up…the big 3-1!!! Such an old man!

*I’m VERY behind on my personal emails…bad Gen :(

*And finally…I’m up to my ears in heart-wrenching season finales!! Grey’s Anatomy, Criminal Minds, Lost…the writers have had months to come up with the most outrageous cliff hangers and it’s going to put me into therapy very soon! I watch too much t.v.!!

So, as you can see…my hamster hasn’t fallen off the wheel yet…but it shouldn’t be long!!! Bear with me as I send cyber sympathies!!

I keep forgetting that summer is upon us.

Having been out of the country for a month and been oblivious to all sense of date and time, I keep waiting for Easter weekend to show up and then suddenly remembering that it’s already come and gone. It’s truly a weird feeling. But sure enough, we are, in fact, in our last weeks of May and soon, it will be summer (or so I'm told!). Why does this seem so strange to me?!?!

I’ve always been really envious of those people that return after Labour Day weekend having raved about the best summer of their lives. They’ve apparently spent three months on the beach, in love and without a care in the world. It’s as though their entire life is an episode of The O.C. The summer has never really been kind to me. Maybe it’s because I’ve worked almost every summer of my life so the idea of being “off” never really existed. Frankly, sometimes school was the real break. But even now, I approach the summer months with a sense of apprehension because for some reason or another, I usually agonize my way through it. For the past many years, I’ve either been heart broken, sick, bored or involved in some melodramatic episode between friends and/or family. And let’s not forget the summers spent without air conditioning…those are the real winners! In fact, it even comes as a surprise to me now that Steve and I ever survived as long as we did without some reprieve from the Valley’s soul sucking humidity.

The first summer that Steve and I started dating, neither one of us had an air conditioner at our respective homes. Much to my surprise, we somehow made it through the hot, sticky, sleep deprived months even though we made many attempts at scratching each other’s eyes out! When we lived in the apartment, we had a window air conditioner that enabled us to sleep at night and on more than one occasion (when just sitting in front of the television in the dark would make you sweat!) we would move our entire life into this one room. It was like being caged between four walls with a roaring machine sticking out of your window that, while certainly annoying, was the only thing that enabled you to keep your sanity. Really, what’s not to love about summers like that?!?!

When Steve and I first landed in the middle of the Australian Outback, one of the tour guides there was giving us a quick run down on how to get to the resort and to the National Park. In her cute little Aussie accent, she looked at Steve and I and said “you know, your husband and yourself are both fairly light skinned and it can get upwards of 30 degrees here in the Northern Territory. Perhaps you two should consider doing most of your excursions at night or early in the morning”. I couldn’t help but give her my cutest Canadian smile and reply with “thanks sweetheart, I think that we can handle it…but the real question is…can you handle 30 degree temperatures with 70% humidity?!?!” And that was the end of that conversation!

Somehow though, despite all this, I still love the idea of summer…and the anticipation of summer is usually worth it in and of itself. I love the thought of painted toe nails and tanned skin…BBQs and fruity drinks on a patio somewhere. I love the thought of long summer nights and weekends away with friends. It’s all so romantic in its own way…but it just never turns out like it does on T.V. Maybe it’s because I don’t have music accompanying me through all of my dramatic moments or the disposable income to spend $30 a day on margaritas on my lunch hour. Maybe it’s because I’m not seventeen anymore or I still haven’t figured out how to go swimming without messing up my hair! Who knows?!?!

Fear not though, my summer spirit is not entirely lost because this year…I have CENTRAL AIR!!! That’s right folks…this means that I have three floors to enjoy in the cool comfort of my home, which I expect will reduce the amount of summer crabbiness significantly! Not to mention that I am still determined to have the best summer of my life soon, even if it does mean carrying around an appropriate soundtrack to play for every time I enter a room (any suggestions?)!

Besides, I think that I’m due and I simply refuse to turn 30 without it!

So this past weekend, Steve and I went on a reconnaissance mission to see how long and how feasible it would be for us to ride our bikes to work from our new house. Living in the Glebe, it was always very easy for us to ride our bikes in the nice weather but, being out in the east end, we had yet to scope out our new bike trails to and from downtown.

With Steve having changed jobs, we now currently both take the bus, as taking our car is just nonsense when trying to cross the provincial bridges. So currently, it takes us each about an hour, door to door, to take the bus to work. It’s not all bad actually. It’s a fairly pleasant route, our bus passes are tax deductible and it’s nice to let someone else doing the driving for a change (especially through rush hour traffic). But as nice as it is, the marathon runner in me finds it an absolute waste of time to go anywhere within 15km without getting in a workout!!

So, our mission proved to be quite successful! Much to our surprise, it turns out that if we bike to work, it actually takes half of the time that the bus would!! Granted, it requires 20km of biking a day but hey…hello bikini season!!!! We also discovered that we actually have either bike trails or bike lanes almost the entire way. Kudos to Ottawa’s urban planners!!

Upon completing our mission, we sat in the grass at Dairy Queen, chocolate extreme blizzard in hand, and tallied our list of pros and cons for the upcoming summer season of commuting. Pros: it takes half of the time as the bus (hence, I get to sleep in a bit longer); we save money of bus passes and bus tickets; we get a fantastic workout every day; we save on the potential wear and tear of our car as well as avoiding soaring gas prices and; we make our family a little greener by being environmentally friendly. Cons: I have to have everything ready the night before…which really becomes a pro because it requires me to be a bit more organized. So really, there is no con.

This clearly seems like a no-brainer to me.

That being said…watch for our bicycle fit bodies coming to a bike path near you!!!!

It’s Mother’s Day; the day of tulips and brunch and hand-drawn pictures for all of the mothers in our life.

Two or three years ago, I would have encountered this holiday with much trepidation. For the last number of years, my relationship with my mother has been tumultuous at best and during the last year or two, it’s been nothing short of non-existent. Much to my surprise though, this year, I was okay. This year, I was able to look back on my mother with the same fondness I did as a little girl and remember what it was like to be her daughter again.

While the last decade hasn’t been easy between the two of us, it wasn’t always like that. There once was a time when we shared a very unique and special relationship that only comes from a single parent raising an only daughter. We were a team. We were in it all together. Before things started to fall apart between us, there was no place in the world that was safer than being with my mother.

When I think of my mother’s very best qualities as a parent, they are numerous and plenty but, my favourite quality of hers was her unwavering support and belief that I could do anything. I could have walked up to my mother and said “I want to fly to the moon” and she would have said “well, you’re going to need better shoes than that”!!!! And that was how she was about everything. She believed…and she believed with every fiber of her being that I would change the world one day. This enabled me to grow up as someone with very big dreams and more importantly, someone who loved to dream.

Having a mother who unconditionally supports you and believes in you is one of the greatest gifts that I could have ever received as a child because things weren’t always easy for my mother and I. We endured financial challenges and social challenges and health challenges but, we seldom ever saw our world as limited by our present circumstances. Life may have been difficult at the time, but there was so much more to do and so many more dreams to live out.

Mother’s Day isn’t just about taking Mom out for brunch and thanking her for all that she “does”…but it’s about looking at the person that you have become and acknowledging that your life, right now, was likely her dream. The person that you have come to be and the qualities that you share with the world are a product of someone loving you and believing in you and wanting you to see the world differently than they may have seen it.

And so, we raise a glass to our mothers for a job well done.

Happy Mother’s day Mom…wherever you may be…

Today is a really big day for Steve and I…

Five years ago today, Steve and I had our first date!! It was two days before my first half-marathon and we went to the Royal Oak along the canal. We spent the evening on the patio eating nachos and drinking beer and when the cool night air rolled in, we moved inside and spent another couple of hours talking the night away in there.

(The following week, we had our second, third and fourth date!!!)

I remember exactly what Steve was wearing and the weather and the exact table that we sat at…and yet, I had no idea at the time that from that day forward, my life would change forever.

It’s always humbling to me to look back on how dramatically life can change sometimes. My old friend, Chris, and I once had a very interesting conversation about the concept of happiness. Chris now lives in Victoria but, shortly before he left…he taught me how to drive!!!! And as everyone knows, all of the best conversations happen either with wine or behind the wheel of a car (but hopefully not both at once!). Anyways, we were discussing his future move to Victoria and how happiness is really something that you seldom experience at the time. Instead, it seems to be more something that you look back on and notice in retrospect. You suddenly wake up one day and think “geez…I was really happy when I was [insert location/person/occupation here]…I should have paid more attention!” I think that it’s a natural flaw of being human to overlook the moment but, it’s also a gift to have such an ignorant understanding of time. Imagine how long our work days would be without it?!?!

All this to say that, prior to meeting Steve, I always thought I was happy. And I probably was. But really, the happiness that I have with Steve is unlike any other happiness that I’ve known in my whole life. I know it sounds cheesy but, few things compare to loving someone so much that you are willing to stand before God and commit your life to them…no matter what!

It’s amazing to me to think of all that we’ve done in our five years together. The holidays spent together, the very large life changes that we endured to together, the dramatics that we’ve lived through together (who hasn’t?!?!) and of course, the glorious moments of simply living life together.

If I knew then what I know now…I wouldn’t change a thing!

A tribute to the legacy of the most successful first date ever…

Our first dance at our wedding ~ "Wonderwall" by Ryan Adams

Heather & Roberta's Wedding

Calabogie triathlon with Christina

"Down Under" on our latest adventure!

I think that our bathroom at work is haunted!!

For nearly four years now, I’ve been working at the Gallery and for nearly four years now, I’ve been quite certain that Moaning Myrtle actually lives in the 5th floor bathroom of the Director’s Wing.

Our small little department is very fortunate to actually have our own bathroom. Given that there’s only seven of us, it’s quite an indulgence, especially given that we have a shower as well. Every now and then though, when I feel the need to go for a little walk and stretch my legs (usually at least once a day), I’ll walk down the hall and use the washroom in the Director’s Wing. It’s tucked away along the side of the Boardroom in this little unknown hallway. There are two stalls in the washroom and during my entire (nearly) four years here, I’ve seen another person in there maybe only a handful of times. However, every single time that I walk into that washroom, I’m always very sure that I hear another person in there. Every time!

It never fails that I whenever I walk in there, I’m positive that I hear someone walking. I’ve even gone so far as to check for feet under the door once or twice to confirm that I’m not crazy. Sure enough though, I apparently am! I’ve even checked to see if there was a meeting happening in the adjacent Boardroom in which the sound might be carrying over, but no…nothing! There is never anyone there. The toilets randomly flush and the door to the washroom always opens all by itself. It’s kind of disturbing actually!

And most recently, I’ve started noticing little puddles of water in places that don’t have water anywhere near them. So strange! I don’t know of any mysterious deaths that have happened that may have provoked a ghost to live there but, who am I to say where they should or shouldn’t live?!?!

Anyways, all this to say that, the more validation I receive that this washroom is indeed haunted, the less compelled I feel to stretch my legs in that direction!! I’m more than happy to stick with our own quaint little corner of the Gallery that is not yet inhabited by spirits of the dead!

If anyone has any idea how to rid ourselves of this little inconvenience…please do let me know…I’m open to suggestions. Going pee in peace is high on my list of priorities!

Every morning, I receive a daily devotional by email from The Purpose Driven Life, a book written by Rick Warren who is also the founding pastor of Saddleback Church in California.

This was my devotional this morning and I found it so thought provoking that it compelled me to share it…

How Do You Develop Self-Control? by Rick Warren
God did not give us a spirit that makes us afraid but a spirit of power and love and self-control. 2 Timothy 1:7 (NCV)
*** *** *** ***
Successful people have one obvious trait in common: personal discipline. They are willing to do things that average people are unwilling to do.
It’s my observation that successful people express their self-discipline in six ways:

· Successful people master their moods – They live by their commitments, not their emotions. They do the right thing, even when they don’t feel like it. “A person without self-control is as defenseless as a city with broken-down walls” (Proverbs 25:28 NLT).

· Successful people watch their words – They put their minds in gear before opening their mouths: “Those who control their tongue will have a long life ….” (Proverbs 13:3 NLT).

· Successful people restrain their reactions – How much can you take before you lose your cool? “People with good sense restrain their anger; they earn esteem by overlooking wrongs” (Proverbs 19:11 NLT).

· Successful people stick to their schedule – If you don’t determine how you will spend your time, you can be sure that others will decide for you! “So be careful how you live, not as fools but as those who are wise. Make the most of every opportunity for doing good in these evil days” (Ephesians 5:15-16, NLT).

· Successful people manage their money – They learn to live on less than what they make, and they invest the difference. The value of a budget is that it tells your money where you want it to go rather than wondering where it went: “The wise have wealth and luxury, but fools spend whatever they get” (Proverbs 21:20 NLT).

· Successful people maintain their health – That way they can accomplish more and enjoy their achievements: “… control your body and live in holiness and honor” (1 Thessalonians 4:4 NLT).

Now, where do you need to develop self-control?

The disciplines you establish today will determine your success tomorrow. But it takes more than just willpower for lasting self-control. It takes a power greater than yourself. Think about this promise from the Bible: “For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline” (2 Timothy 1:7 NLT).

The more I accept God’s control over my life, the more self-control he gives me!

*** *** *** ***

Any thoughts...??

Every morning during the week, I wake up and rely upon a very well planned out routine to start off my day; I read my book on the way into downtown, I stop at Starbucks and get my morning coffee, I usually run into co-workers along the way for a chat and when I get into work, I always give myself enough time to check my email, check the paper and read through my favourite blogs. This gives me an opportunity to catch up with some of my favourite people who are too far away for me to catch up with in person.

Lately though, I’ve started to branch out from my usual blogging suspects and have begun reading some different blogs that I don’t usually commit as much time to. I have to admit that there’s some pretty terrible stuff out there in cyberspace but, there’s also some really fantastic blogs that I’ve really enjoyed reading. One of them, forgetful.ca, is by some old friends of ours from when Steve and I just started dating. While time and history has managed to come between us, every now and then, I’ll check in and catch up on where their road has taken them. It’s been beautiful watching the blessings of their life unfold and seeing how we’ve all changed.

When I read about our past friends though, I can’t help but reflect on the different turns that we’ve all taken. It’s certainly unfortunate that fate wasn’t kinder to all of us but, I have to believe everything took the course that they needed to take. All the while though, I’ve loved seeing so many wonderful things happen to them.

Five years ago, we were all in our twenties, dating and working and meeting up for beers. Now, we’ve experienced marriage, children, new homes, new jobs and so many other things. It makes me wonder what kind of friends we would have been had we met at this point in our lives instead of five years ago. Unanswered questions aside though, their blog is great! Shannen does most of the contributing but, she does it well and her pictures are fabulous! It’s so great that it might even become part of my regular morning routine if I can get over the feeling that I might be an “unwanted lurker”!!

Also, they have a friend living in Bermuda whose blog is HYSTERICAL!!! I don’t know who this girl is but, I often find myself laughing out loud at her humour!! I always have to be careful though not to succumb to the temptation of reading it while at work…because once I start, an hour easily goes by getting caught up on the latest happenings of her life.

I just love cyberspace!

It's A Boy...!!!!

Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the newest addition to the Smyth family...

Baby Tugger!

He needed a home...we needed a fur ball...and just like that, we fell in love!

Sixteen hours is a long time. In sixteen hours, you could drive from Ottawa to Tilbury and back. You could watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. You could work two full days in the office. You could listen to our iPod and never hear the same song twice. Sixteen hours is a long time.

Sixteen hours is how long Steve and I slept the night that we returned to Canada from Australia. Sixteen hours!! And I’m not talking with a few wake up calls in between or even a pee break for that matter…I mean that Steve and I went to bed at 11pm one night and woke up at 3pm the next afternoon. Do you even realize how much work that takes?!?! Even back in my teenage days, I’d never slept that long!

Both of us were caught quite off guard by our bodies’ sudden need to such extreme amounts of rest but, when we began to talk about it a bit, we both felt like we weren’t just coming home from a month’s vacation…we were coming home from a three month whirlwind. This is would actually be the first time in almost four months in which we weren’t packing or moving or travelling or changing jobs (this is Steve’s last week at the NRC), and at the risk of sounding too much like a mental health ad, for the first time in 2008, we get to come home and just “be”. We get to come home and enjoy our new house, enjoy the nice weather, settle into new jobs and take a breath.

For all the moments in which we wish we had more vacation time, nothing reminds me of how much I love home more than being away from it.