Back at home...
Wow. It is a serious change to be back in Canada. It was 38 degrees a couple of days before I left Buenos Aires and it has been down at almost -30C for the last few days here in Toronto. I found an apartment after almost a week of hunting, and moved in a week ago. It is nice to see my stuff and to have somewhere to call my own, I guess, but in truth I miss the freedom of a new horizon, and the excitement of meeting new people and figuring out where to go next. I suppose that I can still work on the where to go next part -- it will just take longer to come to fruition than the on-the-road planning does...
The strike at my place of work continues. I think possibly if I wore every warm garment in my closet I could manage to bundle up sufficiently not to freeze if I went on the picket line. But I confess that it is hard to want to. I went up to the university a week ago to submit my contract and in the few moments it took to pass the picket line as a pedestrian was treated to some expletive-filled invective from angry undergraduates and also to stone-walling recalcitrant picketers. Which when you think about the fact that I was positioning myself as *one of them* is particularly disturbing. It is hard to see how the negative fallout from this strike will be absorbed in such a way that the teaching and learning environment doesn't get poisoned for terms to come. A distressing thought.
In the meantime I am trying to wrap my head around being back. I listen to music from South America and I eat international food and I am trying to reconnect with the people I left behind. All of which works to some degree. But it is strange. The travelling 'me' and the homebody 'me' have significant overlap... but they are not precisely the same. About that.
For the moment though, I must go and shovel my new sidewalk... Remind me why I thought a corner lot would be the best option for an apartment in a house?!
The strike at my place of work continues. I think possibly if I wore every warm garment in my closet I could manage to bundle up sufficiently not to freeze if I went on the picket line. But I confess that it is hard to want to. I went up to the university a week ago to submit my contract and in the few moments it took to pass the picket line as a pedestrian was treated to some expletive-filled invective from angry undergraduates and also to stone-walling recalcitrant picketers. Which when you think about the fact that I was positioning myself as *one of them* is particularly disturbing. It is hard to see how the negative fallout from this strike will be absorbed in such a way that the teaching and learning environment doesn't get poisoned for terms to come. A distressing thought.
In the meantime I am trying to wrap my head around being back. I listen to music from South America and I eat international food and I am trying to reconnect with the people I left behind. All of which works to some degree. But it is strange. The travelling 'me' and the homebody 'me' have significant overlap... but they are not precisely the same. About that.
For the moment though, I must go and shovel my new sidewalk... Remind me why I thought a corner lot would be the best option for an apartment in a house?!
Comments