Possibly penultimate update from Toronto
30 May 2002Thursday morning. The housework is finished (kitchen, laundry, floors, shave legs, change skate wheels) and I have a couple of hours to kill before I go to collect Maddy from day care so I thought it was time I made an update of sorts. In the background I'm listening to live audio coverage of the Giro d'Italia from Eurosport - not quite the same as watching it on TV, but what can you do, living in North America.
I think this might be my last or certainly second-last entry from Toronto. There hasn't been much to report of late, life is pleasant but not hugely varied. There are lots of things going on with Maddy, of course, but I long ago swore not to bore people with a journal dedicated to the development of my (astonishing, wonderful) child. Though it's mighty cute when she points to the neighbours' dogs and says "Hi bas-set hounds!" She has no trouble switching between English and German, which we are quite pleased about. Humorous photo sequence: the episode with the horse.
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We're leaving Toronto in early July. Annette & Maddy will probably go first, I'll follow a week later, partly because I have some skating races here, partly because I haven't spent a night apart from my daughter in over a year (unlike her mother) and I could use a short holiday. We are quite keen to get to Calgary. It's not like leaving Berlin, where I savoured every last day. Toronto has been fun but it was not an easy place to be penniless with a child. We didn't see too much of the city, nor did we try too hard to develop a social network once we knew we were going, though we do have friends here.
Unlike last time, the move is fully paid for. They even do the packing. God, finally.
The plan is that we'll buy a small house shortly after arriving. There isn't much to rent in Calgary, everybody owns and the prices are still reasonable. Close to the university and downtown there are lots of tiny 800 sq. ft. houses built between 1910 and 1930. Many have been nicely restored (see picture below). We'll try to buy something old and in need of repair, then I will work full time on the renovations. The little bungalows are probably too small if left in the original condition but you can finish off the basement and add a loft or partial second floor, which gives you two bedrooms and an office above ground, plus a guest room/dungeon downstairs. It might be quite an undertaking, but Annette's father is a retired contractor and I have a cousin there who's been in the house-building business for 20 years so I'm sure he can lend me some tools and advice. We'll live with Annette's sister during this period.
We are also looking for a car, and will probably buy a new or barely-used Ford Focus wagon. How very breeder of us. But I've always liked wagons, might even have bought one without having a kid. Anything but the minivan.
Longer term there are quite a number of things I might do in Calgary, besides and skating and cycling. Taking care of Maddy until we get day care lined up is of course the first job, and I might be nanny to both daughter and nephew when Annette's sister goes back to work. That and house renovations could keep me busy for most of this year, or longer. After that I could go back to school as well, finish my Ph.D. and make enough money from teaching and research grants to give us a bit of a cushion. (Annette is the breadwinner, but as I like to say, I'll be expected to provide the odd loaf now and then). Or I could sit at home and write a spy novel, set in Berlin of course. (I know, I know, I've been saying this for years, but maybe I'm serious this time.) The really radical idea we had, though, would be to buy an old commercial/residential property (a small storefront with living quarters in back) and renovate it so that we had both a cool place to live and a café in front. We were thinking particularly of duplicating a place near our Friedrichshain apartment that was a very, very kid-friendly café (basically a huge play space with toys and stuff where kids could go nuts while the parents drank coffee and ignored them) that also sold second-hand kids' clothing on consignment. Rather than do the clothing thing we'd import German kid stuff that you can't get here and sell it on the side (I've been stopped about a dozen times here by people wanting to buy a Fußsack, the little sleeping bag thing in Maddy's jogger, which are all over Germany but not available here). It sounds a bit loopy but with the right location (in particular, we're thinking of Inglewood, a funkyish "inner city" neighbourhood with the right demographic that is also close to the zoo) it could do well and the costs wouldn't be too high if you owned the property. Serious tax advantages to writing off a percentage of your housing and travel costs, too. This is not something I would have predicted I'd be doing, five years ago, but life is full of little surprises.
In other news, we drove up to Ottawa a few weeks ago for a race weekend and then stayed through the week to play tourist and visit friends. It was a pleasant enough stay, hitting one museum per day (carefully timed for Maddy's nap) and socializing in the evening. It's actually quite a nice town, our nation's capitol, and I had some regrets that Annette never landed the job there a few years back, particularly given that the intelligence services are on a post-9/11 hiring binge. The Madster travels well, thank goodness, and makes new friends wherever she goes.
My races didn't go terribly well. I had very bad legs for the 10 km race on Saturday evening (newspaper picture of the start below) and struggled to hold the leaders until half-distance. After a hectic morning collecting the rental car and packing up the family for a week's holiday we then had to cope with delays enroute - Maddy threw up in the car - and bad traffic on arrival. (Vita, very put-out, stayed at a cat hotel.) I was much too stressed, and warmed up poorly. The next morning I was supposed to start the marathon at 6:50, an ungodly hour, but somehow failed to set the alarm correctly and woke up at 6:38. I was six or seven minutes late arriving at the start and skated 40 of 42 km alone before latching onto a group and finishing with a disgracefully slow time. I had terrible legs and probably would have had a disappointing race anyway, so maybe it was a blessing in disguise. These things happen.
Coming up I have provincials (boring races on a 400 m track) next weekend, then nationals (more boring races on the same 400 m track plus a 20-times-round-the-parking-lot marathon) four weeks later, and finally a criterium in Buffalo, NY. Once I get to Calgary I'm going to hang the skates up for a while and do some proper cycling, maybe even start racing on the track again. The plan is to get myself back into decent aerobic fitness with lots of cycling and cross-country skiing, skate long-track ice on the Olympic oval in the winter, then train inline for a month every spring before heading over to Berlin for the summer. I'll get more and better racing in two months in Germany than I will all year in Canada, so it doesn't matter that Calgary doesn't really have an asphalt scene.
Finally, the question remains, what should I do with these sites? I haven't been inspired to write much in Toronto. It's not that things haven't happened, big things even, but I just couldn't see much variation day-to-day. More importantly, I'm not sitting bored in an office, wondering how to kill time every afternoon. I don't know how much time or opportunity I will have in Calgary. Perhaps I should just maintain a page where I can post the occasional update, as opportunities arise, for those who retain an interest in our lives. I also need to think about whether it's time to take down the old journals, Words and U9. They are several years old, interesting to me as a record of a time in my past, but of no potential interest to anyone except perhaps a student who might by chance search on my name and discover things that really ought not to be discovered. At the very least a few of the nastier photos should be sanitized.
