One Week Down, 23 to Go . . .
Well it has been a week since Bruce left and I can't believe how fast, yet how slowly, it all went by. This past week seemed really busy but when I think about the fact that only one week (just 7 days) has passed and that there will be 23 more (a total of 161 days) until he's back it makes me feel pretty sad. On the other hand though, 23 weeks or 161 days seems totally manageable and I know in a way that it will fly by.
So what have we been up to? Well for Bruce's update, you'll have to ask him. When I signed us up for this blog Bruce was completely into it but I wasn't sure if it would be more of me writing than him. I think that will be the case and that's okay. We'll just have to get him to write a bit now and then as well, because really he's the one who's away looking for a bit of adventure!
I've received a few email messages from Bruce each day this week and it seems like things have been pretty busy (okay VERY busy) on board. Basically they have just finished up sea training (lots of warfare exercises at all hours of the day and night) and now are out shooting missiles off of Hawaii. Yesterday they were in port and Bruce and his co-worker Mario were able to jump into the van that was making a run to the local Navy Exchange Store for supplies and they were both able to get phone cards so Bruce called me from a pay phone! I wasn't home though but I did get a nice phone message that I have saved to listen to every now and then. (Aside: I much prefer phone calls from a land line over the satellite phone on the ship - they get a phone card for the ship phone with so many minutes each week which is great, but it sounds incredibly tinny and there is usually a huge delay so most of the time you end up saying "what was that?" and catching the end of weird laughter more than you get to actually 'talk' about anything and add to that the fact that Bruce usually calls me at 3am since there are line-ups around the phone during 'normal' hours when most people call home to talk to their kids during times when they will be awake - lucky me I get the middle of the night phone calls!) So, from all accounts it has been a busy week for him and it sounds like he is looking forward to a schedule, starting next week, that will allow for sleep (yay!) and exercise. But before that they'll be in Hawaii for a few days and Bruce and his friend Keven are hoping to rent a car and check out one or more of the islands. I can't wait to see the pictures!
As for me well it has been a busy week - on Monday I had lunch with Jen and Tanya and generally just tried to get through 'the first day' - they were a great help!
Tuesday was a day of catching up and cleaning and our landlord stopped by to check in about the washroom renovations he's going to have done to replace our sinks in both washrooms and the tub and shower surround as well. More importantly though, on Tuesday we got official word about the birth of Baby #3 for Richard (Bruce's brother) and his wife Isabelle. Isabelle was scheduled for an early morning Caesarean Section so we knew when the birth date would be - the anticipation was all in the waiting to hear, boy or girl? It is Girl #3, Alexandra Moneca Cayford - 6lb 1 1/2 oz - apparently she has a mass of dark red curly hair! We can't wait to get a look at some photos of her with the rest of the 'A Team', big sisters Angelina and Anabel. Later on Tuesday I headed out to take in our first meeting of our Victoria Stitch n' Bitch group and enjoyed a night of knitting and great conversation (even if I did have to rip out about 1 1/2 inches of sock knitting cause I wasn't paying attention).
Wednesday I headed to work and entered some data - exciting, I know! However I did meet with my supervisor and he apologized for the fact that I had yet to be paid for work I started to do in August and said he would bring a cheque for me ASAP and would pay me considerably more this term (very exciting!) which makes the job slightly less boring. Basically I'm back to doing 1.5-2 days a week entering data like I was last fall, for the history prof that is on my thesis committee. He studies women's property ownership and business practices around the early 1900s and is interested in comparing these patterns among women in Victoria, Hamilton and also Perth County in Ontario. So, I have been working for his Perth County project entering data from the 1911 Census manuscripts into a computer database. Basically I look at digital images scanned from the original hand written census takers book and type it into a database.
To see an image of the census pages I am working with click here - this is an example of a page I entered data from today - zoom in and scroll down to Lines 14-17 and scroll over to Column 39 at the end of the page - here you see a young man who lived with one aunt and two uncles, all three of which were enumerated as Deaf & Dumb (you can't make out the heading on the column at the top but that is what it says) which is something you rarely see noted and it is very interesting that all three of these people were given that label and that they lived with their nephew. However I wonder how 'Dumb' they were considering they could all read and write English. Looking back on these documents can be very interesting indeed. In any case, I would encourage anyone interested in family history to look up their relatives who would have been alive in 1911 to see if they can find them among these records - it is really interesting stuff! You can find census page images, organized by geographic region, here here it is a bit of a needle in a haystack kind of search though since the images aren't searchable.
Anyway later Wednesday night I had hoped to head out to a local pub for wings with our friends but I didn't get there because our neighbour's new freezer was delivered that day and so I had to shuffle stuff around to fit their old one into our place (their good karma vibes told them to pass the old one on to us for free!). The first step was to measure the power cord for the dryer to make sure it would reach if I moved it out of the corner into the place of the washer so the freezer could sit in front of the washer rather than the dryer - luckily it appeared to be long enough and the other hoses from the washer seemed easy enough to replace with longer hoses so I gave them the final 'okay' and said yes, we will take it, thank you! However I have not had a chance to go to the hardware store and get new hoses so nothing has been properly arranged yet and so now the free freezer sits right in front of our dryer and so you can't open the dryer door - tomorrow I'll try to get some longer hoses for the washer and get everything all set up.
[I'm realizing I should have made a point of posting each day last week cause this is getting to be long ... oh well, if you're still reading, bear with me, here's the rest of the week:]
Thursday, more data entry and also a meeting about another job. This past spring I worked for the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab as a Conference Assistant for the Digital Humanities Summer Institute - they were happy with my work and so they have asked me back to assist with the upcoming Text Encoding Initiative Meeting later this fall. I'll get a full 7 days of work which I'm excited about and more experience in event planning and coordination which is good for the resume. I'm mostly looking forward to it though since it will be held at the Hotel Grand Pacific downtown. This means I will be able to ask the hotel staff to deal with most of the big messy issues and I'll get to attend a reception or two as well. After work on Thursday I met up with my friend Jeanie and we headed to her house where she treated me to a yummy pasta and garlic bread dinner before our first fall meeting of the Victoria CF Chapter. The meeting went well and it was great to see everyone after our summer break - also I really didn't take on too much in the way of new tasks so that is a good thing since more CF volunteer work = less thesis work.
Friday I was signed up to being a weekend of babysitting for my cousin Nancy while she and Eddie were off to Vancouver for a wedding. She picked me up around 9:15 and we drove her to the float plane dock in the inner harbour - she got on a flight and I was off to their place with Danielle (almost 4 yrs) and 11 month old twins Matthew and Jacob. Things went pretty smoothly really and Danielle and I did fun stuff like playing soccer in the backyard, picking some of their backyard blackberries and baking a dessert while the boys were sleeping. Then Eddie came home from his golf tournament (not this tournament, but this is still pretty cool!) and took over care duties - then I stayed up too late watching too much TV (always happens since we don't have cable and they have digital cable - excitement!) and was up not too early the next day before Eddie headed off to join Nancy in Vancouver for the wedding. The rest of Saturday went pretty well and I think I was pretty successful in getting all three kids out the door on time for a birthday party Danielle had to attend at 2pm. Then it was me and boys for the rest of the night since Danielle was off to a sleep over that night too. Again too much TV, too late and an early morning awaited since the boys wake up at 6:30am. Around 6:30 (an I'm fuzzy here) I groggily got them their bottles and promptly fell back asleep. Later that morning Nancy and Eddie arrived home and then my friend Jen (who's boyfriend is on the same ship as Bruce) picked me up for some rainy blackberry picking - we headed back into town so I could change my clothes for the weather and the prickles (gotta wear a long shirt when you pick blackberries and I'd wear gloves too if I had some!) and get some supplies to make a batch of jam or two. We headed out of town towards Metchosin and made a stop at the Super Store - I was completely overwhelmed cause we usually only shop at little ol' Thrifty's which really isn't that small but they don't sell everything under the sun like at Super Store and they don't have a kid on roller blades with a helmet and elbow pads to zoom around the store and answer customer questions and run cashier errands - it was weird! After that over stimulation, we headed out to a park in Metchosin near Jen's place and picked and picked in the rain. We came back with 25-30 cups of blackberries! We swiftly made 3 batches of 'barely any sugar needed' jam (or more accurately fruit spread) and Tanya came out to visit and enjoy dinner with us. She brought a fabulous bottle of wine she brought back from Australia not long ago and we ate a bunch of cheese and crackers and barely had room for the mountain of roasted veggies I had cut up or the delicious, locally made buffalo sausages and yogurt marinated chicken Jen (the sausage queen!) prepared and REALLY had no room for the blackberry pie Jen had made the day before (I couldn't even finish it!). We were stuffed and boy was I ready for a good night's sleep after the weekend full of kids and berries!
And that brings us to today - I spent the morning preparing the berries for the freezer (a whole ziplock bag so far!) then headed to work for a few hours. On my way home, I picked more berries on campus - it was a bit rainy but I picked about 3 cups in my lunch containers and they are now in the freezer as well. I'm not sure what my compulsion is with freezing pounds and pounds of berries but really I think it might have to do with filling our new freezer ... I'll just keep telling myself that!
Well this post is ridiculously long and so I think I just figured out the purpose of this blog for me, I think it will serve nicely as a distraction from Bruce's absence since I really spent a whole lot of time typing this out and really didn't think about his not being here during that whole time. So if no one reads this terribly long and detailed description of my seemingly somewhat (who and I kidding, pretty) boring life for the next 6 months, all will not be for not, (is that even a saying??) if Bruce suddenly shows up at the door and turns his key in the lock to find me staring bleary eyed at the screen, suffering from acute carpal tunnel in my mouse hand I'll probably say:
"Hey what are you doing home so early??"
"Really, has it has been 6 months already?"
"What's that? Oh you want a proper kiss and hug hello after 6 long months?"
"Just wait, I've gotta finish typing my blog post ..."
The scary thing is that that's really not all that out there, is it Bruce???
Okay really time for bed now! Goodnight!
[PS Thanks for reading if you made it to the end of this post!]
So what have we been up to? Well for Bruce's update, you'll have to ask him. When I signed us up for this blog Bruce was completely into it but I wasn't sure if it would be more of me writing than him. I think that will be the case and that's okay. We'll just have to get him to write a bit now and then as well, because really he's the one who's away looking for a bit of adventure!
I've received a few email messages from Bruce each day this week and it seems like things have been pretty busy (okay VERY busy) on board. Basically they have just finished up sea training (lots of warfare exercises at all hours of the day and night) and now are out shooting missiles off of Hawaii. Yesterday they were in port and Bruce and his co-worker Mario were able to jump into the van that was making a run to the local Navy Exchange Store for supplies and they were both able to get phone cards so Bruce called me from a pay phone! I wasn't home though but I did get a nice phone message that I have saved to listen to every now and then. (Aside: I much prefer phone calls from a land line over the satellite phone on the ship - they get a phone card for the ship phone with so many minutes each week which is great, but it sounds incredibly tinny and there is usually a huge delay so most of the time you end up saying "what was that?" and catching the end of weird laughter more than you get to actually 'talk' about anything and add to that the fact that Bruce usually calls me at 3am since there are line-ups around the phone during 'normal' hours when most people call home to talk to their kids during times when they will be awake - lucky me I get the middle of the night phone calls!) So, from all accounts it has been a busy week for him and it sounds like he is looking forward to a schedule, starting next week, that will allow for sleep (yay!) and exercise. But before that they'll be in Hawaii for a few days and Bruce and his friend Keven are hoping to rent a car and check out one or more of the islands. I can't wait to see the pictures!
As for me well it has been a busy week - on Monday I had lunch with Jen and Tanya and generally just tried to get through 'the first day' - they were a great help!
Tuesday was a day of catching up and cleaning and our landlord stopped by to check in about the washroom renovations he's going to have done to replace our sinks in both washrooms and the tub and shower surround as well. More importantly though, on Tuesday we got official word about the birth of Baby #3 for Richard (Bruce's brother) and his wife Isabelle. Isabelle was scheduled for an early morning Caesarean Section so we knew when the birth date would be - the anticipation was all in the waiting to hear, boy or girl? It is Girl #3, Alexandra Moneca Cayford - 6lb 1 1/2 oz - apparently she has a mass of dark red curly hair! We can't wait to get a look at some photos of her with the rest of the 'A Team', big sisters Angelina and Anabel. Later on Tuesday I headed out to take in our first meeting of our Victoria Stitch n' Bitch group and enjoyed a night of knitting and great conversation (even if I did have to rip out about 1 1/2 inches of sock knitting cause I wasn't paying attention).
Wednesday I headed to work and entered some data - exciting, I know! However I did meet with my supervisor and he apologized for the fact that I had yet to be paid for work I started to do in August and said he would bring a cheque for me ASAP and would pay me considerably more this term (very exciting!) which makes the job slightly less boring. Basically I'm back to doing 1.5-2 days a week entering data like I was last fall, for the history prof that is on my thesis committee. He studies women's property ownership and business practices around the early 1900s and is interested in comparing these patterns among women in Victoria, Hamilton and also Perth County in Ontario. So, I have been working for his Perth County project entering data from the 1911 Census manuscripts into a computer database. Basically I look at digital images scanned from the original hand written census takers book and type it into a database.
To see an image of the census pages I am working with click here - this is an example of a page I entered data from today - zoom in and scroll down to Lines 14-17 and scroll over to Column 39 at the end of the page - here you see a young man who lived with one aunt and two uncles, all three of which were enumerated as Deaf & Dumb (you can't make out the heading on the column at the top but that is what it says) which is something you rarely see noted and it is very interesting that all three of these people were given that label and that they lived with their nephew. However I wonder how 'Dumb' they were considering they could all read and write English. Looking back on these documents can be very interesting indeed. In any case, I would encourage anyone interested in family history to look up their relatives who would have been alive in 1911 to see if they can find them among these records - it is really interesting stuff! You can find census page images, organized by geographic region, here here it is a bit of a needle in a haystack kind of search though since the images aren't searchable.
Anyway later Wednesday night I had hoped to head out to a local pub for wings with our friends but I didn't get there because our neighbour's new freezer was delivered that day and so I had to shuffle stuff around to fit their old one into our place (their good karma vibes told them to pass the old one on to us for free!). The first step was to measure the power cord for the dryer to make sure it would reach if I moved it out of the corner into the place of the washer so the freezer could sit in front of the washer rather than the dryer - luckily it appeared to be long enough and the other hoses from the washer seemed easy enough to replace with longer hoses so I gave them the final 'okay' and said yes, we will take it, thank you! However I have not had a chance to go to the hardware store and get new hoses so nothing has been properly arranged yet and so now the free freezer sits right in front of our dryer and so you can't open the dryer door - tomorrow I'll try to get some longer hoses for the washer and get everything all set up.
[I'm realizing I should have made a point of posting each day last week cause this is getting to be long ... oh well, if you're still reading, bear with me, here's the rest of the week:]
Thursday, more data entry and also a meeting about another job. This past spring I worked for the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab as a Conference Assistant for the Digital Humanities Summer Institute - they were happy with my work and so they have asked me back to assist with the upcoming Text Encoding Initiative Meeting later this fall. I'll get a full 7 days of work which I'm excited about and more experience in event planning and coordination which is good for the resume. I'm mostly looking forward to it though since it will be held at the Hotel Grand Pacific downtown. This means I will be able to ask the hotel staff to deal with most of the big messy issues and I'll get to attend a reception or two as well. After work on Thursday I met up with my friend Jeanie and we headed to her house where she treated me to a yummy pasta and garlic bread dinner before our first fall meeting of the Victoria CF Chapter. The meeting went well and it was great to see everyone after our summer break - also I really didn't take on too much in the way of new tasks so that is a good thing since more CF volunteer work = less thesis work.
Friday I was signed up to being a weekend of babysitting for my cousin Nancy while she and Eddie were off to Vancouver for a wedding. She picked me up around 9:15 and we drove her to the float plane dock in the inner harbour - she got on a flight and I was off to their place with Danielle (almost 4 yrs) and 11 month old twins Matthew and Jacob. Things went pretty smoothly really and Danielle and I did fun stuff like playing soccer in the backyard, picking some of their backyard blackberries and baking a dessert while the boys were sleeping. Then Eddie came home from his golf tournament (not this tournament, but this is still pretty cool!) and took over care duties - then I stayed up too late watching too much TV (always happens since we don't have cable and they have digital cable - excitement!) and was up not too early the next day before Eddie headed off to join Nancy in Vancouver for the wedding. The rest of Saturday went pretty well and I think I was pretty successful in getting all three kids out the door on time for a birthday party Danielle had to attend at 2pm. Then it was me and boys for the rest of the night since Danielle was off to a sleep over that night too. Again too much TV, too late and an early morning awaited since the boys wake up at 6:30am. Around 6:30 (an I'm fuzzy here) I groggily got them their bottles and promptly fell back asleep. Later that morning Nancy and Eddie arrived home and then my friend Jen (who's boyfriend is on the same ship as Bruce) picked me up for some rainy blackberry picking - we headed back into town so I could change my clothes for the weather and the prickles (gotta wear a long shirt when you pick blackberries and I'd wear gloves too if I had some!) and get some supplies to make a batch of jam or two. We headed out of town towards Metchosin and made a stop at the Super Store - I was completely overwhelmed cause we usually only shop at little ol' Thrifty's which really isn't that small but they don't sell everything under the sun like at Super Store and they don't have a kid on roller blades with a helmet and elbow pads to zoom around the store and answer customer questions and run cashier errands - it was weird! After that over stimulation, we headed out to a park in Metchosin near Jen's place and picked and picked in the rain. We came back with 25-30 cups of blackberries! We swiftly made 3 batches of 'barely any sugar needed' jam (or more accurately fruit spread) and Tanya came out to visit and enjoy dinner with us. She brought a fabulous bottle of wine she brought back from Australia not long ago and we ate a bunch of cheese and crackers and barely had room for the mountain of roasted veggies I had cut up or the delicious, locally made buffalo sausages and yogurt marinated chicken Jen (the sausage queen!) prepared and REALLY had no room for the blackberry pie Jen had made the day before (I couldn't even finish it!). We were stuffed and boy was I ready for a good night's sleep after the weekend full of kids and berries!
And that brings us to today - I spent the morning preparing the berries for the freezer (a whole ziplock bag so far!) then headed to work for a few hours. On my way home, I picked more berries on campus - it was a bit rainy but I picked about 3 cups in my lunch containers and they are now in the freezer as well. I'm not sure what my compulsion is with freezing pounds and pounds of berries but really I think it might have to do with filling our new freezer ... I'll just keep telling myself that!
Well this post is ridiculously long and so I think I just figured out the purpose of this blog for me, I think it will serve nicely as a distraction from Bruce's absence since I really spent a whole lot of time typing this out and really didn't think about his not being here during that whole time. So if no one reads this terribly long and detailed description of my seemingly somewhat (who and I kidding, pretty) boring life for the next 6 months, all will not be for not, (is that even a saying??) if Bruce suddenly shows up at the door and turns his key in the lock to find me staring bleary eyed at the screen, suffering from acute carpal tunnel in my mouse hand I'll probably say:
"Hey what are you doing home so early??"
"Really, has it has been 6 months already?"
"What's that? Oh you want a proper kiss and hug hello after 6 long months?"
"Just wait, I've gotta finish typing my blog post ..."
The scary thing is that that's really not all that out there, is it Bruce???
Okay really time for bed now! Goodnight!
[PS Thanks for reading if you made it to the end of this post!]
posted by Brandy at 11:26 p.m.
2 Comments:
you should write books, you posts are always amusing and detailed. fruit
fly's definately suck! try fly tapes there is special traps for fruit flies
but i think they are more expencive and don't work as well i don't think...
...anyway as for your phone calls in the middle of the night... i guess you
know what you and bruce should be working on to be getting earlier calls
then eh... hint hint...lol
"Bruce usually calls me at 3am since there are line-ups around the phone
during 'normal' hours when most people call home to talk to their
>>>>>>>>>>>>>"KIDS">>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
during times when they will be awake - lucky me I get the middle of the
night phone calls"
guess you'll have to wait awhile to work on that one... but you'll have
something to look forward to.... talk to you later... look forward to your
next posting...
hi Brandy
Thanks for the up date.i did sign up this time for the e mail. i was very interested in the the census as you know (or maybe you don't) i am doing the family trees of the coons and the slys. henry is quite interested in what bruce is doing as he is totally fasinated with maps, and enjoyed where Bruce is.
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