This started off as a thread in Diving Deeper: A Writing Workshop. I wanted to get rid of that horrible January blog (not that the blog was horrible, but January wasn't a highlight of my life), so I thought I'd expand a bit on the thread.

We have just moved. Again. We have moved more or less exactly every 6 months for the past 2 years. These were not just house/apartment moves, but COUNTRY moves. For the 5 years prior to that, we lived out of suitcases, moving all the time. For the +- 13 years before that I lived in about 5 different places, but all in one city, Toronto. Before that, well, from time of birth I lived in too many places and too many countries to begin bothering to tell you about.

Suffice to say, it's a LOT. And for no specific reason other than the haphazard nature of life. So I can't blame my job, my husband's job or my parent's jobs. Just life. Things working out. Things not working out. Invitations. Dis-invitations. Spur of the moment decisions. Other people's spur of the moment decisions.

Now, I rather like being on the road. The time I've spent living out of a suitcase I don't regret. But as soon as furniture or large unwieldy objects come into the picture...ak.

We have moved into a very large house. The largest house I've ever lived in. It must be upwards of 250 square metres. This is partly because it has a full attic, which serves as one enormous room. But there are four bedrooms downstairs and two bathrooms. And just two of us.

We just moved from a 49 square metre cottage. The difference is VAST.

I can turn around in the bathroom! I don't hit my elbow on the wall! I have a choice of more than three places to sit !(before it was: bed or kitchen table or office). I can do my stretches and not have husband step over me trying to get to the other side of the room (house). We can cook together! We can invite people over! We can get lost! I'm getting fit just walking around.

There are some problems, of course there are. We are renting half-furnished. See below.



But... these are views from outside my office and our bedroom window ( apologies for the photos, I took them with my computer)




Behind the pond is a rushing gurgling river, which you can hear all the time...



This is just a small corner of the living room... those armchairs come with a sofa the size of my previous office. They are also SO ugly, but strangely comfortable.

I don't know how long we'll be here, but we don't have any plans to move in the near future or even the far distant future. I do sometimes wonder what I'm doing in a cold northern semi functioning (in some ways) country, but I simply don't have the energy to consider a different plan. We tried hot and beautiful (south of France) and that didn't work. So. Maybe actually being in a house that we like will help.

We are even going to get our stuff from Toronto shipped. A whole apartment of stuff that's been in storage for over 7 years. I will have outgrown my clothes (or out coloured them or something), we will be able to replace some of the hideousness, and have some of our favourite things about us, like our VITAMIX :-)

That's planned for later this year, in the meantime we have SPACE. if not SUN. For HOT, I need to follow in my brother's footsteps and go to Brazil. Why he's there and I'm here I've yet to figure out. Mind you, he's got mosquitoes.

Whenever I'm feeling down I find myself surfing the net for new music. Or something funny. I found something funny - hilarious actually - at the wonderful Steve Don't Eat It! Blog. Steve searches out the most repugnant or unlikely food available, eats (or drinks) it, and tells us how it was. Examples include breast milk, Cuitlacoche (a black fungus that infects corn fields) and Beggin' Strips (bacon shapes for dogs). Steve is a very funny writer doing a very strange thing.

After that, I did a stumble on 'music'. I found something that may be old hat to you but is not to me. Leekspin.com. It's an animation of a girl spinning a leek. That's right, a leek. Go on, I dare you. I couldn't stop listening. Totally addictive.

Then I tried to find out WHAT it was. Clearly I'm behind the times. She's the Loituma Girl. She's "a Flash animation set to a gibberish section of the traditional Finnish folk song "Ievan Polkka" (sometimes misspelled Levan Polka) sung by the Finnish quartet Loituma. The animation of Loituma Girl is taken from episode two of the Bleach anime series. In the clip, Orihime is twirling a Welsh onion (negi) while talking to other characters. The scene is an instance of a recurring joke surrounding her character, in which she wants to cook something so unusual that it seems almost inedible."

Then, of course, I go find this Finnish Loituma group. Here is the best vid of them I could find, and I think they are stunning.