Holidays

Today is a special day–one that honors not just Fathers, but one that also honors my mom and my gramma (who have birthdays today). Sounds like a lot? My late grandfather’s birthday would be tomorrow. The O’Neals are an efficient bunch…we like to knock our holidays out all at once.

I can’t laugh and cook and eat with my family this Holidays, but I can tell stories at basically any time (a trait learned from my father’s father and my father).

This is the only time you’ll ever see my Dad, a die-hard Aggie, in orange.

Things My Dad Taught Me That I’m Thankful For:

-How to shoot. Also, my kick-ass dad once gave me a rifle for my birthday, in preparation for the upcoming hunting season. We spent weeks customizing the rifle to my not-so-typical-of-a-rifle-owner frame, and more weeks practicing at the local shooting range. My father-daughter dates were cooler and louder than your father-daughter dates.

-How to clean a fish. He also taught me how to cook up a rainbow trout on a campstove, which is, I swear to everything remotely special, the best breakfast ever. He also gave me a fillet knife (again, for a birthday) which was a gift he got growing up from his father. It was a great gift because it was useful, but also because I’m the first girl to own it, and I really like that my dad didn’t see my gender as a barrier to using or having it.

-How to smile in photos so your eyes scrunch up (he didn’t actually have to teach me this…but it’s all his fault that my face does that).

-That you can’t grow up too fast, or all at once. This is one of the few lessons in life he spelled out explicitly…he’d just come home from taking my brother to football practice when my mom was in the hospital when I was 14 to discover that I had done every piece of laundry in the house, meticulously set the table, and promptly burned dinner. It was a good thing to remember, then and now.

-How to make Bachelor Pie and Sink Salad, both of which he made up back when he was a bachelor. I’d tell you the secret recipes, but then I’d have to kill you. Both dishes are like, super-elegant.

—–

Reasons I Am Grateful My Mother Was Born:

-She’s sort of the textbook example of an independent woman: she put herself through school (on the 9-year bachelor’s degree plan–and I thought 4 years was long!), deliberately chose a career she knew she’d be able to support herself in, and spent most of my boy-crazy middle school years demonstrating all the reasons I didn’t need a man in my life to be worth something  (which I mostly ignored at the time…but it stuck, mom! I promise!)

-My mom was born with excellent genetics, and even more excellent wrinkle-resistant skin…which, as her daughter, I’m looking forward to enjoying when I’m much older than she is now (which is 29…as of today, she’s totally 29). She totally held out on me with the dimples and dark hair…but that’s beside the point.

-She’s been around to (try to) teach me how to not sweat the small stuff…which she acts like she needs to work on, but I think she’s totally got it down more than most people. One of her favorite mottos is “everything washes”. And it totally does. And if it doesn’t, it’s probably not that big of a deal. Stains happen.

-She’s always been supportive of me, even when I was doing things she didn’t like…maybe because one day, a really long time ago, she did things people in her life didn’t like? I don’t know where she got the perpetually-supportive role model…but I do know that she’s really good at it, and that I’m super-glad she’s always been there for me, even when we both know I was being a big dumb idiot.

-She had me! I like being alive–and I like that I was born to my mom. I’m totally biased, but objectively, I think she’s the best mom (objectively. With some bias). The best.

—–

Reasons I Am Grateful My Gramma Was Born:

-She raised my dad to have good manners, which undoubtedly helped him woo my mother, who likes good manners.

-When I was younger, she definitely gave me cookies every doggone time I came over, and taught me words like “embellish”, which made me sound smarter than all the other 6-year-olds (this may also have been for entertainment value…but I totally didn’t know that at the time). She also let me watch TV, which was kind of a really big deal, because I otherwise didn’t have cable, and cable TV is AMAZING when you don’t have cable.

-For every summer, from age 8 to age 15, she and my grampa took me to Colorado for 1-2 months…and I know I wasn’t always fun to put up with. Goodness, that woman has been patient–and she’s given me a good example of patience to look up to. Also, without this, I wouldn’t know anything about running a campground…and now I’m pretty sure I could do a decent job.

-She is such a great example of never being to old to learn new things–at 78, she started a jewelry business, selling out of a salon, and sold out nearly every week. She’s still taking custom orders. What are YOU planning on doing at 78?

-Without her, I wouldn’t have had the social finesse I did at 10 (which I’m pretty sure was my peak…I’m much more awkward now). She and grampa carted me all over the country and made me speak to all sorts of people I was shy about speaking to. It was a good thing.

—–

And so, oh my family: Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday, and Happy Father’s Day! You guys are a better family than I would ever hope to ask for. I’m so lucky to have yall in my life…wish I were there to celebrate.

 

Pizza goes in the oven

This story will focus on 2 things: the events that happened last night, and my crazy-intense anxiety response. We’ll start with the second first:

When my fight/flight/panic mode gets triggered, it tends to be a little overtriggered for a given situation, and it generally tends to get triggered over things that are small and irrelevant. Mom has a stroke (which actually happened when I was 14, and we were the only ones home)? I’m cool (upset and scared, but cool). Dana walks into the room when I’m not expecting it? Total meltdown. I’m breathing so hard I’m about to be thrown into respiratory alkalosis. Zombie movies are not good for me. Loud, unexpected noises are not good for me.

…not that there are any of those in this story.

Anyway.

Remember how Dana’s here to better the country? And I’m here to study and eat? Well, that was happening–he was at a late dinner/work session, and I was wrapping up my flashcards for the day and preparing to throw a pizza in the oven.

We’re staying in the student residences of Ryerson University for this visit. It’s managed like a hotel during the summer, but it’s still set up like a student dorm–there are rooms for the residents/guests, and 1 kitchenette/common lounging space per floor. The kitchenette is nice, and my frozen pizza is precooked, so all I need to do is throw it into the oven to warm it up for 12 minutes. I am 12 minutes away from mozarella-smothered crispy-spinach goodness. It’s gonna be totes delish.

I put it into the oven, sit down with the book I brought with me, and wait for dinner. Delicious, pizza-shaped dinner. It occurs to me that the oven smells funny and that my book is more boring than anticipated and also that I don’t have a pizza cutter. But you know what? I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.

And then it occurs to me that the room smells really funny. A bad kind of funny. I look up and smoke is pouring out of the top of the oven. I turn it off and stare at the oven for a brief moment–I really shouldn’t open the door, because more smoke will come out and it would be stupid to set off the fire alarm for a pizza, but it’s only been 3-4 minutes, so what’s going on in there? And also that is a lot of smoke. My head feels funny. The oven’s off…so this is the part where we open windows! I can take the pizza out later?

[Panic level: moderate]

I open all the windows in the room, and turn fans on high, and then, about 10 seconds after seeing the smoke, I realize that this isn’t going to cut it. Like, at all. That stupid smoking pizza needs to come out NOW, because that smoke is going to take over the world and that needs to STOP.

So out it goes. Into the trash. And the oven is still smoking (though less so).

[Panic level: Maximum]

At this point I flee to my room to call the lobby to tell them what’s going on, but the line is busy. By the time I flee back to the common room the alarm has sounded and the entire 11-story building is being evacuated. Because of my stupid need to eat pizza while my boyfriend is off bettering the country. All 11 flights of stairs have morphed into stairs of shame. I feel like a walking tower of awkward American, and a siren is blasting my eardrums.

[Panic level: INFINITY]

As soon as I make it into the clean air, I tearfully tell the building manager and front-desk guy what happened: I put in a pizza, the oven smoked, I pulled out the pizza, the oven kept smoking, I tried to make the situation better, I tried to call, and then I failed miserably. And loudly. The end. I feel about 2 inches tall, and the other building guests are annoyed about the “fire drill”. They are annoyed in multiple languages that I can’t speak, because when I should be off bettering the country or learning languages, I am apparently eating pizza. Like an awkward American.

When the building is cleared (that is, the ultra-fast fire truck has left and security has opened the doors), and I find my way back up to the third floor, I am dead-set on cleaning that oven. After all, my pizza apparently smoked it to oblivion. I should clean it up. What will happen to the next person who uses the oven, with my toxic pizza-mess in it? Nothing smokeless.

The security guard waiting at the entrance to the kitchenette does not share my opinion, and would really rather me go back to my room and curl into a ball and pretend I don’t exist–until I mention the pizza. Then he’s just really confused…which is confusing to me. What caused the smoke, if not my pizza?

Lipstick.

When the guard figured out what had happened, he told me a lot of things: he told me that the call was a “mischief case” (PANIC LEVEL APPROACHING DEATH because I never intended to cook my pizza mischievously), and that it was not my fault–someone before me had put a tube of lipstick in the oven as a prank, and anyone who used the oven after that super-hilarious (not) prank would have been “smoked out”. I did nothing wrong because (and I quote) “pizza goes in the oven.”

[Panic level: Deflating]

I was interviewed by another security guard, and gave my information to the security staff and the local authorities. Throughout the ordeal I was a total mess held together by a determination to remain coherent and “set things right”. Throughout the ordeal they were wonderful–quick to find out what had happened, quick to ensure I didn’t feel blamed for being the next one to turn on the oven, and professional to a fault.

So, some lessons:

1. Sometimes when you’re embarrassed and feel 2 inches tall and have to walk down the stairs of shame, it’s not actually your fault.

2. I need to calm down.

3. Always check the oven before you bake…you never know when someone’s decided it’s a good place to stash some lipstick.

Exploring Toronto

Big cities are fascinating.

I’ve mentioned my (one-sided, unrequited) love affair with Montreal numerous times here, but I’m originally, perpetually, proudly, a country girl. I’ve lived in Austin for 4 years now, and while I’ve adjusted well and have learned to love the convenience of being so close to everything, going home to my parent’s house always feels like a breath of fresh air (literally and figuratively). I hope I don’t ever lose that.

But the hustle! And bustle! And language! And style! And districts! Big cities are fascinating.

Toronto is the biggest city in Canada, with just over 5.5 million people in it. While Montreal (which is significantly smaller) has a more cohesive (and French) feel to it, Toronto is like one big mosaic of time and culture. Let me explain.

This is the old City Hall:

Oh, wow, that’s a badly taken photo! What’s that shadow there? Surely the silly photographer could have taken that distracting feature out of the photo by shooting from a different angle!

Nope. That shadow is the new City Hall.

It’s very modern.

Toronto features the Bixi system that Montreal has, but it’s not a widespread (that I’ve seen)…but that’s ok, because they commissioned Spiderman to help out their public transit system.

Oh wait. Those are just lines for streetcars.

Toronto also has an underground metro, but most people hate it for reasons I can’t really fathom.

Final walking tour feature: while on a 3-hour walk that covered half of downtown (give or take a few blocks), Dana and I saw a stage being built. Dana informed me that the stage was for the MuchMusic Awards, which I shrugged at, until I saw the poster featuring LMFAO, and then I just wanted to shuffle.

I really shouldn’t have shrugged. The MuchMusic awards are like the MTV music awards, and there are many super-important celebrities (like Mr. & Mr. Shuffle themselves) who will be converging on Toronto just in time for Father’s Day. Here’s to hoping they bring their dads!

Bricks that Work

We made it! Dana and I arrived in Toronto at about 2 pm yesterday. He’s here to create a National Student Food Charter–that is, he’s here to unite the stated culinary desires and sustainability preferences of students from across this great nation into a single unified, cohesive document, which will be used as a reference for students at about 1/3 of Canada’s universities (to start) as they take names, rock the boat, and change food purchasing standards.

I’m mainly just here to eat…and watch TV…and blog…and study for the NCLEX. It’s not as exciting.

Full disclosure: I’ve been aching for a roadtrip for quite a while. It’s only 5 hours from Ottawa to Toronto, but it was a great way to scratch that itch. I may have gone a little picture-crazy when we made our first sightseeing stop in Toronto.

Our first sightseeing stop was not at the Home Depot.

The Don Valley Brickworks is a building/historical site with a loooooong history. As the name cleverly suggests, it began as a brick factory, and bricks from this fine institution can be seen in 68 current Toronto buildings.

In the factory days, there were 4 “chimneys” that piped smoke into the sky and clearly identified the name of the factory…just in case anyone forgot. The chimney towers read “Don” “Valley” “Brick” “Works”, but nowadays people just think this place is called “Valley”.

Just kidding. They don’t think that.

After the brickworks stopped working bricks, it was abandoned. This would be a tragic loss of history, but not everyone forgot this place…ravers (is that a word? Rave-attendees sounds less appropriate) , rebellious teenagers, and other youthfully indiscreet Torontians remembered. They HARDCORE remembered. If the graffiti and old stories are any indication, these walls have seen some killer parties. I think this place would be super-spooky at night, but maybe that makes a good rave? Clearly I’ve been to so many.

It’s a good thing that flower on the window’s a new renovation…the graffiti-taggers would have had a field day (see what I did there?)!

After the Rave Days, the place fell in to more and more serious disrepair…until now.

Now, this place is a living art/educational/economical/ecological center.

While the “bones” of the place have remained the same (see above), there have clearly been some updates–the space now houses several gardens, a pizza oven (!!!!), a store, a cafe, and a project center (where the old kilns used to be).

There are weekly tours and events for all ages, and the back of the campus (where the chimney tower is) opens to a few condensation ponds and myriad hiking trails. There’s ice skating in the winter, ecological exhibits year-round (the above photo is a living wall that depicts Toronto’s 5 main rivers and explains watersheds), and a hefty plant sale in the summer.

Which is where, in an amazing show of self-control, I didn’t buy this Bay Laurel.

I really enjoyed this place. It felt a bit “disrepaired”, but that’s part of the history/point/charm. I don’t see this feeling going away when it’s completely finished, either (there are a million future plans in the work). The materials for the reconstruction have mostly been donated, and as a result, there’s a permanent throw-in-the-kitchen-sink-and-we’ll-make-it-work vibe. The bricks for the new walkways, for example, were donated from other construction projects in Toronto…and so they don’t really go together.

But the people standing on the bricks totally do.

5 Things I never realize I’ve been missing about Quebec until I’m back in Quebec

It has been a remarkably eventful 6 months in the states. I

• Finished my nursing degree
• Started a very stressful 3-month long job search
• Came super-close to having some sort of anxiety-ridden breakdown related to said job search
• Ended the job search by lucking into an awesome interview for my dream job…which I was then hired for
• Moved

I did not move to Quebec (they’d hear one word of my French and kick me out of every hospital from Hull to Sept-Iles), but I’m vacationing here now–one last month-long journey before I forevermore measure my vacations in week-long PTO blocks.

That thought’s depressing…so here! Have a happy list! It lacks pictures because my current computer is horrific for photo-editing. I’ll have a solution by my next update! The [bracketed] notes give you an idea of what photos I’d like to put in…

5 Things I never realize I’ve been missing about Quebec until I’m back in Quebec

1. Dana’s stairs

Dana resides on the top floor of his apartment building, but even if he lived in the lowest apartment, he’d still have to cautiously creep up at least one flight of stairs to gain entrance–because the architect wanted to ensure no one missed out on staring death in the face. The architect also wanted to kill the local coffee shops–who needs coffee, when you have to teeter down the brink of death every morning to exit the building?

[insert picture of Dana's stairs, which resemble the narrow, chiseled steps of Mayan ruins]

Friends, I face imminent peril on a daily basis. Oh, how I’ve missed the adrenaline rush. It’s a love/hate kind of thing.

2. Green stuff everywhere

Let’s face it: by this time of the year, Texas is beginning to fade into a beautiful shade of sepia–and unless there’s a flash flood in the near future, by the time I hit southern soil the landscape will be a veritable study of the color brown. And the last time I was here, everything in Quebec was gray and full of frostbite.

No more.

[insert picture of Don & Yvonne's garden, which is full of 6 types of tomatoes and ambitiously large grapes]

P.s. When green stuff is pulled out of the ground and taken to a farmer’s market here, the prices are not nearly so outrageous as those in Austin. Yay!

3. Eating outside

Hull/Ottawa this time of year is like a Texas spring, or what I imagine the weather in LA to be year-round: generally sunny, temperatures in the 70-80s, with a wind that carries hope and happiness and smells like rainbows. It’s exciting. Since this weather is not present year-round, because this isn’t LA, people tend to do everything possible outside in the summer: restaurants open windows and patios, stores set up racks/booths, festivals abound, and buskers play corners.

[insert photo of street performer spinning fire]

Who are we to buck the trend? We’ve eaten outside for almost every meal, and I think it’s something we’ll continue.

[insert photo of delicious dinner]

4. Canadian change.

A handful of coins in the US could be anything from $.30-$5. A handful of coins in Canada is likely to be at least $15. How exciting! Loonies and toonies ($1 and $2 coins, respectively) are the best.

5. French

Full disclosure: Some days I don’t miss French…at all. I like reading road signs, and understanding the radio, and while I never have any trouble getting around, my lack of linguistic proficiency is a constant reminder that I’m an outsider, and probably always will be.

But. It is humbling. And funny, sometimes–and it makes me wax poetic about language and knowledge in general, and it’s a beautiful language to listen to.

[insert picture of Dana making fun of my French]

 

It’s good to be back! Dana and I spent today walking all around Ottawa’s annual WestFest, where we talked with street vendors and listened to a band and window-shopped. Tomorrow we’ll road-trip it to Toronto, where Dana will be attending a conference and I’ll be studying for the NCLEX.

May the road rise to meet you,

Shauna

Oops

I never uploaded the canoe-camping pictures, or wrote an update to my last post, which clearly promised an update. Oops.

Forgive me?

I made it back to Austin safe and sound, in the company of a great friend I met up with in Michigan. On the way I got to meet Ethan (Julie’s little boy) and experienced my first ever true Canadian traffic jam. There were no car problems, the hotel room in Missouri was clean, and I discovered that US gas prices are now lower than they were at the beginning of the summer. Yay!

Here are the pictures I so sincerely promised (and so rudely didn’t deliver). Some of them are taken by me, quite a few were taken by Dana or his dad, Don. All were promised over 2 weeks ago… oops.

First off, we camped in beautiful places.

Canoe-camping isn’t something I was at all familiar with before this trip. I’ll assume that your level of ignorance is similar. You canoe across lakes:

Unpack all your stuff…

 

And haul it to the next lake.

Including the canoe.

Rinse and repeat. It was a lot of fun.

On a very hot day, we hiked up to a place called Silver Peak.

On Silver Peak, we sat and absorbed the view and ate incredible snacks. Which reminds me…Yvonne (Dana’s stepmom) was in charge of the food that kept us energized enough to do all these crazy hikes/portages/paddles. She did an incredible job. In the seat of civility, when I have access to electricity and a kitchen, I don’t eat food as well-prepared as what she pulled out of those food barrels.

She and Don make a pretty good team.

Dana and I made a pretty good team; we just tended to excel at different things. For example, Dana really excelled at looking effortlessly windswept.

And I really excelled at realizing that I was going to miss Canada, and French, and a certain windswept redhead.

Niagara Falls, on our way back to Montreal, looked like this:

And the road, on the way back to Texas, looked the way roads leading home always do: long, familiar, bittersweet, and empty enough to be filled with whatever nostalgia and hope you’ve got lurking in your luggage.

Au revoir, l’ete.

——

Final notes:

This is my last post for a while (though I may continue with Wordless Wednesdays. Perhaps the pictures will even improve!). My final year of nursing school begins tomorrow morning, and so I’m putting the blog to rest for the academic year. Thank you so much for reading and following my travels this summer–all the correspondence I’ve received via emails and comments makes me feel incredibly blessed, and made some of the lonelier, “I’m-so-awful-at-French-and-even-the-dogs-in-this-city-know-I’m-a-foreigner” days much, much easier. You guys made me smile so much–and from a distance of 2000 miles, that’s no small feat!

So thanks for reading. It mattered to me.

Love,

Shauna

 

 

 

We survived!

The canoe didn’t tip, and the adventure was leech-free, and I only acted like a total fool once (special thanks to my camp-mates for the times when I acted like a partial fool)–and so I’m willing to call the trip a brilliant success.

I’m writing this from Burlington, Ontario, which is close to Hamilton, Ontario, which is close to Niagara, and not close to Killarney, which is where Dana, Dana’s dad, Dana’s stepmom and I have been canoe camping for the last 5 days. We covered roughly 10 km by land, and paddled on almost a dozen lakes. I’ll post more details (and pictures!) in the coming days, but I’m off now to camp in Niagara, and then stay in Toronto. Here are some highlights to look forward to:

• That time when we were feeding turtles, only to find that food was not at all what they were interested in
• That time I found a frog and was super-happy it wasn’t a spider
• That time we went to that beautiful place on that super-hot day
• That time when Dana stole the camera
• That time when we got caught in a freak windstorm and thought we were going to drown (we didn’t), but instead found the prettiest campsite ever
• That time when that puppy tried to get in the canoe with me and then ate my sock

Unfortunately, some of these highlights are sans-pictures, because I was busy living life when I obviously should have been recording it. I’ll tell you all about it when I’m done appreciating modern amenities (like already-drinkable water, and microwaves!).

Until then,

Shauna

Canoe Camping

That’s what I’ll be doing for the next 5 days. After that I’ll spend 3 days car-camping, and then 3 days staying with friends, just to run the full spectrum of possible accommodations. I’m not sure when I’ll have internet, but for sure, I’ll be out of touch for about a week.

Why is all this traveling happening?

The canoe camping is a family trip with Dana’s dad and stepmom. I’ve never canoe-camped before, and so there are a few things I’m feeling a little paranoid about:

• leeches
• tipping the canoe over
• tipping the canoe over into a bed of leeches
• acting like a baby after the canoe tips into a bed of leeches

But other than that, it’s great.

The rest of our journey (3 days camping in Niagara, and 3 days staying in Toronto) is because Dana’s speaking at his first conference! All his work at McGill has garnered him quite the fan club, and he’s the closing speaker of a 3 day conference, attended by sustainability-minded delegates sent from various universities in Canada. And then he’ll go back to his awesome job before starting another awesome job. Oh, to be a 20-something…

I’ll let you know how our travels go!

Love,

Shauna and Lady and Juliette and Dana

P.s. the cats do great things when they’re with their babysitter. Here’s a shot from last time:

Hunter does backflips, Atlanta's unimpressed.

Wordless Wednesday–7/27/11

Heels and Wheels

In a scene in Date Night, Tina Fey is clambering up a fire escape with her pretend-husband, Steve Carrell, and as she falls farther behind and gets more and more out of breath, she calls out, as cutely as only Tina Fey can, “Everything you’re doing, I’m doing in heels! I just want you to know that.”

It’s a good point.

Dana and I went on a date. I was told to meet him at work “dressed to the nines”, and so I did, figuring out what formal hairstyle I could fit under my bike helmet and what shorts I could wear under my dress. I put on make-up and heels and pretty earrings and tried to smell like something better than discount deodorant (I failed). I biked downtown and met him at work, where a coworker was kind enough to snap a picture of us looking all snazzy.

The date was wonderful, but I think I’m done biking in heels.