While I very much wish this post was about moving to a house and away from our many annoying neighbours and unfortunate parking situation, it is actually about moving my blog. I am now located at http://dorktasticoddments.blogspot.com/, which is where I hope to stay. Come on over an see what's happening (meaning I am actually updating. I know, it's shocking.)

Farewell, small dizzy goslings.

I think this might be why Paul loves me....


Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 85% Robin 75% Superman 65% Green Lantern 65% Hulk 60% Supergirl 55% Batman 50% The Flash 50% Iron Man 45% Wonder Woman 40% Catwoman 30%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero am I?" quiz...

A bit of trumpet fanfare please. We have finally finished our wedding thank you cards (yes, 456 days after the wedding, shoosh). The main reason that they took so long is that we took on a seriously large project with them. We included personalized photos with each thank you card, Paul designed a website with all of our professional photos on it (password protected), and I compiled, sorted, edited and posted the best of the candid shots that our guests sent us. (If you want to see, drop me a line in the comments or send me an email). It was a lot of freaking work and I'm not even technically done because I have stalled on the Open House. Le sigh.

This means that I'm finally allowed to update again. I have a stack of entries rolling around in my head as well as a couple written in draft form that you should see popping up here in the next little while.
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Jayne: "Testing, testing. Captain, can you hear me?"
Mal: "I'm standing right here."
Jayne: "You're coming through good and loud."
Mal: " 'Cause I'm standing right here."

In the meantime, I don't think I'm able to hold this in much longer since Paul is asleep and has to be up at 6 to go to work...I was close enough to touch Nathan Fillion (of Firefly/Serenity - he was also the seriously creepy priest on Buffy) tonight but restrained myself despite Erin's frantic whispering, "Touch him! I dare you to touch his hair! Just lean forward and inhale!" I don't even know what Sarah was whispering at that point I was just gripping my hands together and holding my breath and probably blushing so much I lit up the room.

My impressions:
- he's really damn funny in his own right
- he's a lot taller than I thought
- he has a cute butt (despite what Erin says)
- someone cut his bangs too short and they're poufy
- he looks kind of amazing when he laughs
- it's really surreal to admiring that jawline in person when I'm used to it being crammed in a little box or pixilated on a theatre screen.

I don't typically go giddy over famous types, they're just people, but I do get a bit stupid around very attractive men and tend to not breathe enough which leads to stupid thought, actions, and every so often, words. Luckily I didn't make a moron of myself tonight. It's also kind of neat to see someone who is from here (seriously, who is from here? I mean who is from here that doesn't play hockey?) and who makes a pretty big name for himself and then comes back here. That's pretty cool, I have to say.

Today we finally had Paul's appointment with the hematologist, 6 weeks after discovering the blood clots.

She went through Paul's medical history, examined him, and laid out the information as she saw it.

There are three possibilites for a cause of the clot:

Most likely - Carrying in 70 pounds worth of IKEA boxes a week before our hospital visit caused an injury to the blood vessels in his shoulder, resulting in the clot (I brought this up the last thing before we left - since Paul didn't mention it - and the doctor seemed extremely relieved by this and hopeful that it was the cause rather than the other two or some unknown factor).

Possible - He had high Antiphospholipid Antibodies in his blood. The levels were higher than normal but not so high as to indicate anything certain. This could potentially indicate a blood disorder that led to the clot or it could be normal fluctuations. He is having the levels re-tested in April and September to see if his levels are consistently high, usually higher, or if that was an anomaly caused by the blood thinner injection at the hospital.

Least likely - Possible cancer in the pelvis or abdomen - he has an appointment for a pelvic/abdominal ultrasound in April

He will be on blood thinners until at least October, which is when we go back to see her. He is allowed to start being more active, but still no lifting and no contact sports - nothing that is hard on his arms.

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It always amazes me the impact of the C word. Cancer. It chills us to our marrows, flushes us with panic, and makes us cling tighter to our loved ones. Cancer is larger than life and even though it was the least likely option, it was the one that both of us fixated on.

Everyone has a cancer story: a lump, a mole, a lost friend or family member. Someone who fought to the end, someone who lingered too long, someone lost too suddenly, or someone who fought it and won. There is nothing good about cancer, no hidden benefit or positive side effect. You wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy, even on your worst day.

The scariest thing about it is that it's an overgrowth of the very cells that make up your body. It's not an outside invader, it's your own body turning against you, out of control with growth. To defeat it, you have to kill or remove a part of yourself, surgical sectional suicide. Cancer is synonymous with terror, which seems irrational but sometimes isn't.

I guess you know you're grown up when C is not for cookie anymore.

As promised, we flew out to the land of warmer-than-here for Squid and Mina's wedding. We stayed gratefully but uncomfortably in Bethie and Dave's computer room (why do people persist in renting out half a house without control of the thermostat, I ask you? That would drive me nuts.) and got to hang out and shop and stuff with Melly and Roscoe (and Kristy, who was visiting too). We also ate some fabulous greek food, celebrated Bethie's birthday and I got awesome new shoes.

(I hope that I don't upset anyone in the following description. I want to remember the wedding as was and do not intend to offend.)

The real reason we flew out, though, was for the wedding. Neither of us really knew what to expect from this wedding. Squid and Mina met while she was a student in his ESL class and most of their relationship had grown a province and a half away from us. I barely knew Squid (he is a childhood friend of Paul's) and we had both only met Mina once. Mina had decided that she wanted a "traditional Canadian wedding" (who knows what that means?) and Squid had gotten her some books to help her out with the planning. A baby-sized wrench in the works caused them to jump their wedding forward by three months and increase the disorganization exponentially. As a groomsman, Paul had very little clue what was going on and I had even less.

The first hitch was the rehearsal dinner, which the parents and sister of the groom did not attend, nor did the bride's parents. Since there were now not enough people to fill the reservation and Kristy, Melly and Bethie were dropping me off at the restaurant, suddenly they were invited to the rehearsal dinner. We actually had quite a nice time getting to know the matron of honor (Eungin) and her husband (Gary). Those two were a barrell of laughs, I could see why they were friends with Mina (of the innocent face and wicked sense of humor).

The next morning Paul left early to get ready with the boys while I was picked up later by Jo and G in a rented PT cruiser. The church was just lovely, overlooking the ocean. Once everyone was inside, the music began. What music would accompany the typical wedding? The Wedding March, Ave Maria, and Pachelbel's Cannon, of course. On anyone else the wedding dress would have been garish and tacky, on Mina it was lovely and sweet. The volume of the dress only served to accent her tiny waist and delicate features. I don't know anyone else who could pull off a tiara, veil, gloves and butt-bow, but she did so with ease and grace.



The only hiccough came when it was time to exchange the rings and she hadn't thought about how to get her glove off. (Sadly the groom wore a beige sharpei tie with a white shirt, which no one can pull off. I then made the faux pas of asking Paul if Squid is colorblind. Oops.)








Parts of the ceremony were interesting, different from the typical Catholic wedding, primarily because there were less than 10 Catholics in the entire church. Everytime the congregation gave the 'wrong' response the preists eyebrows would rise sharply and then he would settle himself and go on with the ceremony.



From there we travelled to the reception, which was held in a fancy house at the ocean's edge. The lunch was nothing to talk about but the view was amazing and the speeches were funny or heartfelt and interesting. We were served up insight into how the adorable Korean girl ended up with her handsome Canadian teacher and what made the two of them such a good couple. We heard the story of their first date, from the Japanese girl (in Kimono, below) who went on their first date with them, and (by letter) from the Chinese exchange student who had given Squid pointers in charming the ladies so as to win the heart of fair Mina. Squid gave part of his speech in Korean, addressing Mina's parents who were newly arrived in Canada and had minimal skills in English. Mina's brother kindly translated his father's speech for those of us who didn't speak Korean. Then came the first dance, the Mother-Son dance, the Father-daughter dance and roughly two-and-a-half songs more where people were just starting to mingle when the music was cut off and we had to go outside for the bouquet toss (twice) and the garter toss (also twice).







We travelled to the third location, the very posh condo complex where Mina's parents lived. (On the way we saw a man dressed as a sheep waiting for a streetlight to change and a band playing on the roof of a car dealership.) There the happy couple changed into tradition Korean wedding garb and the real fun began.



There was both music and goodies from both cultures, and wedding cake and games involving kissing the groom and making the bride grab men's bottoms to see if they could identify their mate while blindfolded. There was an apple and basket game, and a one-couple wheelbarrow race. There was possibly more genuine laughter than I have ever heard at a wedding.









All in all it was a fabulous experience. I'm so glad that they were able to bring parts of the bride's culture and so many others into their wedding celebration, rather than having the stereotypical North American wedding. All of their guests were enriched by the experience.

In the first week of January, Paul started complaining off and on that his arm hurt. He mentioned it kind of casually, that it was sore as if he'd worked out but he hadn't really done anything with it. He didn't sound like he was in a lot of pain or that he was particularly upset about it so I didn't think much of it.

On friday night he called me before he came home from school and said that he thought there was something wrong with his arm. Again, he didn't sound alarmed or in pain so I told him I would have a look at it when he got home.

He walked in the door, took off his coat and sat down on the couch. I glanced over at him and actually did a double take. I'm not sure that my butt touched the couch between my side of the couch and his, all I know is that I was examining his arm in under three seconds. His entire right arm was swollen and red, from his fingers right up to his shoulder and his chest and back around that shoulder. It was hard to the touch, like touching the fake plastic flesh of a mannequin. He said it only hurt in his shoulder but the arm ached like after a hard workout.

I couldn't convince him to go straight to the hospital, but I managed to convince him to go to the medicentre. Roughly an hour later we were on our way to Emergency with a referral letter from the medicentre doctor.

On a Friday night Emergency at the University Hospital is always a zoo, but because of the potential severity of Paul's case, we moved quickly through triage and into a "room" (curtained stall). After being examined by five doctors (one of them just poked his arm a bunch and acted like Paul was lying when he said he didn't work out), they sent him for chest x-rays and gave him a shot of blood thinners in his belly. They said that the biggest possibility was a blood clot and that we would have to come back the next day for an ultrasound.

Morning found us back in emergency, waiting for the results of the ultrasound. The technician found clots all the way up Paul's arm and a large clot in his shoulder, where the worst of the pain was. Apparently since there was no injury, no family history of clotting, and the clot was in an uncommon area, the doctors were quite worried. They gave him another shot of blood thinners and a prescription to continue them, a prescription for blood thinner pills, requisitions for a ton of tests, and a referral to a hematologist. We left for home, tired and shaken up.

It required a significant adjustment of our lives, a complete role reversal. Paul had always been the strong healthy one while I was generally weaker and sicker. Now I was doing the lifting and carrying while he had to rest and remember to take his pills and get his tests. We had to be careful of anything that might cause him to bruise or bleed, and he had to avoid all kinds of foods that would interact with his meds. While I was happy to cover where he needed help, Paul is just not good at being sick and remembering all of the important restrictions. He didn't want to have to slow down and not play hockey and watch what he ate. I was frustrated at what I saw as his lack of attention to his health and he was frustrated by all of the restrictions.

We've adjusted some now and found a better balance, but it's going to be a long haul until Paul is healthy enough again for things to get back to normal. I don't think they will ever get back to the way they were because I think that now he knows I am stronger than he thought I was (and I am less confident in his health than I was - paranoid, he says). The next hurdle is flying out to Vancouver for a wedding without me freaking out about him randomly hemoraging while fulfilling his duties as a groomsman.

The beginning of a new year is a time for resolution, in every meaning of the word.

RESOLUTION (noun)

1. A decision to do something or to behave in a certain manner
A course of action determined or decided on.
The state or quality of being resolute; firm determination.

The most common association of resolution with the New Year is to write down one’s New Year’s Resolutions. For example, this year I resolve to:
a) get out of debt (and by default, Paul gets this resolution too)
b) get back into to debt but good debt, by purchasing a newer and more reliable vehicle, and also by paying for Paul’s schooling
c) get healthier – both in terms of avoiding illness and in terms of increasing overall fitness
d) be more positive and less cranky with people. I ended 2005 on kind of a sour note after a pretty fabulous year and I don’t really want to do that again.
e) get more sleep – I’m exhausted and only getting more so (this is actually a sub-resolution of resolutions c and d)
f) finish our wedding Thank You cards – which we’re hoping to do before our first anniversary (we’re doing a website with all of our photos on it and sending at least two printed photos with each card, hence the long timeline)

2. The fineness of detail that can be distinguished in an image;
The process or capability of making distinguishable the individual parts of an object, closely adjacent optical images, or sources of light;
The ability of a microscope or telescope to measure the angular separation of images that are close together
The act or process of separating or reducing something into its constituent parts: the prismatic resolution of sunlight into its spectral colors.

New Year’s Eve is a time when we put our past under a microscope and examine it closely. We take the beautiful blurry image that is our life and comb through it, analyzing our intentions and wrongs and hurts; poking and prodding at them to see if they still have the impact they did way back when. We stand, crouched with our noses to the weave in the fabric of our lives and examine each thread to see what they led to and where they came from. We peer through the prisms to examine all of the colorful components that make up our lives. Alternatively, we apply rose colored glasses to soften the edges, to back away and make things blurry and beautiful again.

3. The progression of a dissonant tone or chord to a consonant tone or chord (Music).

To break that down into lay-person’s term. To go from a part of a song where the music clashes to a part of the song where it doesn’t. This applies to several parts of New Year’s. Firstly, the singing of Auld Lang Syne, where there is invariably someone who is both drunk and tone-deaf shrieking along at the top of their lungs, resolution happens when the drunk person either falls down or passes out and either way stops singing. Secondly, with my friends, we have two New Year’s Traditions: we burn our regrets, and we hang our hopes and wishes on a tree with bright shiny ribbon. Regrets equate nicely to a dissonant chord, they are things within our lives that clash with the way we wanted things to be. Hopes and wishes are bright and shiny and happy, like a consonant chord. We’re basically hoping that the background music in our lives will stay consonant for the remainder of the coming year.

4. The part of a literary work in which the complications of the plot are resolved or simplified.

A large part of New Year’s is reflecting back on the year past. It is a time when you try to tie up any obligations and resolve the plotlines in your complicated life. This year I accomplished many things that I expected to and many more things that I did not. In 2005, I:
- survived breast reduction surgery
- got a new job
- moved in with Paul
- got married
- won NaNoWriMo (and didn’t hate my story)

So really, 2005 was a combination of beginnings and endings, I emerged from 2005 substantially different than I went in. It was the year of change and stress and incredible happiness and personal accomplishment, and while some of these things were hard, they were still good.

5. Something settled or resolved; the outcome of decision making.

In this way, 2005 is settled and 2006 is forecast. It’s an arbitrary landmark, this end of the year celebration, but it gives us a chance to end a chapter and begin anew, once every 365 days (give or take). We resolve while looking back at what came before, at what we would change in our past, and we resolve while looking forward that we will make changes, that at the end of our cycle we will have less to regret and greater things to hope for in the next cycle.
It continues, on and on, until we reach our final outcome, our final resolution, and we burn our lifelong regrets and tie our hope on the tree.

For New Year's we were all pretty tired from the wedding and we went out to Amanda's place for a relaxing, game-filled New Year's. The best part of the night was from 2 am to 4 am when a smaller core group of us just hung out and talked and laughed.

This included three couples that normally lived far away and who add some indefinable quality to our group; they are catalysts, somehow, and make our group of friends greater than the sum of it's parts. When they are in town we have more activities and we have far more fun doing them. Even if we're just sitting around we laugh more and complain less. There are so many people that have moved away now that it feels like those of us who remain are just a shell, holding down the fort until the others come home for Christmas or a summertime wedding. The problem is, this year our group has no summer weddings planned. We may have to wait until next Christmas to be whole. Twelve months is a long time to go without your favorite people and it hurts my heart to think of so long an absence. The times when those special people get on the plane and leave puts teeny tiny holes in all of our hearts and I think that's maybe why we never do much as a group in January and February. We are all a bit curled in on ourselves, trying to rest and heal. Taking a break so that the contrast between life with them and life without them isn't so harsh. This year I'm going to try to suck it up and be brave, to plan parties and activities and fill the cold months with fun in any way that I can.

On that note, New Year's photos:








My gorgeous sister-in-law.












Amanda and the frame we gave her that Paul put together wrong, I affectionately called him a dummy, and Amanda laughed herself silly.



















The Spud Trooper that Paul got from Sarah to go with his Darth Tater.

















Chantal trying to teach us this tongue thing they do in Tanzania.














Melly trying to do the Tanzanian tongue thing.











Homey Hot Wheels.











They look so innocent sitting together until...
















...Wrestlemania!!!
















We laughed until late in the night.













And went home around 4 a.m. very sleepy.