• Meet Me
    • Why If By Yes?
  • Meet Perfect Husband
  • Meet The Babbies

If By Yes

~ the musings of a left wing left hander with two left feet

If By Yes

Tag Archives: change

In Which I Fret About The Chance That Things Might Change In The Nebulous Future, Because, Hi, I’m Me.

12 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by IfByYes in East, West, Home is Best, Life and Love, The House Saga

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

anxiety, change, generalized anxiety disorder, homes, life, living far away, moving house

PH likes change.

It is one of his most baffling but also more endearing qualities. He likes to visit new places, try new things, and basically expose himself to all kinds of potential for disappointment, regret, and other things that I avoid as if they were herpes.

Change me no likee.

Well, that’s not quite true. I like GOOD change. Really obvious, risk-free, guaranteed-to-be-positive change!

Most change doesn’t fit that criteria.

It was his love of change that sent PH out to Vancouver in the first place. He sold all his possessions, up and moved.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAMaking the decision to move out there with him several years later was probably one of the riskiest things I have ever done. I was leaving friends and family behind and quitting a job I liked. But on the other hand, I was heading to a place with much better job opportunities, I was young, and I had my fiancé with me.

It was fun, and exciting, and difficult. I had trouble finding a job, I had trouble making friends, and I had a lot of trouble putting down roots. I suffered depression. I lost two jobs.

But I’m finally getting settled in.

Carol with poutine hotdog

And now, Perfect Husband is starting to get bored of Vancouver.

I think he is also getting tired of sharing me with three different jobs – my vet clinic job, my dog training business, and my occasional Elance work.

Even though he knows we need the money, and he is supportive of my dog training business in general, he doesn’t like me disappearing for half the weekend on my dog training appointments. And if my clinic job asks me to work a Saturday? There is definite grumbling to be heard.

But at the same time, we want a second child and have no idea how we will be able to afford it. The math just doesn’t work.

If we didn’t have a $220,000 mortgage plus monthly condo fees, we wouldn’t be feeling the pinch so much. It doesn’t help that we know that if we outgrow our current place, we’d need an even larger mortgage. Our current one is tiny by Vancouver standards, because our complex has so many repair issues.

For a larger place, we’d be looking at $600,000 or more, very probably. And that just ain’t gonna happen unless I suddenly become VERY famous and rich.

So whenever a job pops up at PH’s company in a place with lower housing prices, even if it’s a job that he is totally unsuited for, he applies for it and starts browsing houses. I’ll get a text saying ‘Hey, want to live in Memramcook?” or “Who wants to move to Burns Lake?”

Of course, since he’s largely unqualified for most of these jobs, and because he lists moving costs as a condition of getting the job, the chances are remote… but there have been some close calls.

And every time he does this, I have to think about how I feel about moving.

The problem all comes down to change.

I’m actually HAPPY right now, which, to quote Marlin from Finding Nemo, is a big deal, for me.

I like the vet clinic where I work. I like my boss, and my coworkers.

My dog training business is picking up. We actually have a minor TV celebrity on our training roster right now. If we get permission to use her name on our website, that will look AWESOME.

I have friends who have little boys of about Owl’s age. Our neighbour dropped his two sons off to play with Owl for a couple hours yesterday and the house got so much more peaceful with to toddlers to occupy Owl’s attention. We have another friend’s tot coming over for a babysitting session tonight, so Owl will be happier than a pig in muck.

For all of the issues we occasionally have with Owl’s daycare, he loves it there. He talks constantly about the other kids, he hates to leave, and they love him. They tell him “I love you, baby” constantly.

Daycare Lady’s daughter even painted a large (and slightly Uncanny Valley creepy) portrait of him which now dominates the playroom. It is the Temple of Owl over there.

So why on Earth would I leave?

Oh, right – the fact that we are a $4,000 flight away from our families at Christmas time.

Oh, right – the fact that our parents aren’t getting any younger and are missing Owl’s toddlerhood.

Oh, right – the fact that we have no idea how we will be able to support a second child.

Oh, right – the fact that we definitely have no idea how we would ever afford a larger house than we have now.

If you had asked me three years ago if I wanted to leave Vancouver, would probably would have said yes. I was unhappy with my job, my friendships still felt uncertain, and I was lonely and feeling damaged by years of workplace bullying.

But now I don’t know.

I want to be closer to my family, but I don’t really want to start over in a new city – make friends, put down roots, go through all of that again.

I REALLY don’t want to have to hunt for a new job. My job experiences have been so fraught with stress that I just can’t face it again.

If we moved anywhere, I would want it to be either such a massive promotion that PH could mostly support us on his own, and I could just write or train dogs for extra money on the side, or it would have to be a place with such cheap houses that it amounted to the same thing.

And when it comes to moving back to the Maritimes, well, I have a lot of conflicting feelings.

On the one hand, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are home to me, and probably always will be.

2011-nova-scotia-4102.jpg

The clapboard houses, the drifts of snow, and the shabby corner convenience stores are real to me in a way that Vancouver has never been. I see Vancouver as shiny and soul-less by comparison.

Besides, if we moved back there I wouldn’t be facing the making friends issue – I still have friends there, although they don’t have boys Owl’s age the way my friends here do.

But they’re old friends who would pick up with me as if I never left.

On the other hand, I’m a massive snob.

I went through the public school system in Nova Scotia and I shudder at the thought of putting poor Owl through it. Even though I know there are good teachers and bad teachers everywhere, and it’s all just a crap shoot.

I also feel like being a professional dog trainer from Vancouver means something, whereas if I ever wrote a dog training book, the fact that it was written by a trainer in, say, rural New Brunswick wouldn’t do much for my reputation.

Everything in the Maritimes is small, and expectations are low. Businesses tend to have shoddy signs, and websites that use comic sans. People “from away” are looked at with suspicion.

I feel like moving East would be a huge step back for my career, even if it were a step forward for our finances and family life.

This is the stuff I torture myself over. 

I’m happy right now, but like it or not, change is coming – either we have a second child and things get really challenging, or PH actually gets an offer from one of these jobs he applies for, and my entire life will be uprooted, with good and bad consequences mixed right in.

I DON’T LIKE CHANGE.

Should I Stay Or Should I Go (Fear of Change Says HELL NO)

28 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by IfByYes in East, West, Home is Best, Life and Love

≈ 36 Comments

Tags

anxiety, change, jobs, moving, Nova Scotia, transfers, Vancouver

PH and I have always talked about going back to Nova Scotia some day.

After all, we don’t like that our son is growing up away from his grandparents and all of his cousins.

We don’t like that he may not know all the words to “Barrett’s Privateers” before the age of ten.

We don’t like that he may not know a Halifax donair if it fell on his shoe.

Most of all, we just think of ourselves as Nova Scotians, so obviously, SOME day, we want to “go home”.

But in the future.

You know.

Like, not right now, but maybe some day.

Sometimes, when I get really frustrated with living in the city, or when homesick for old friends, or for my mother, I have wanted to go home RIGHT NOW.

But usually it’s… “maybe in a couple of years”.

So when a job came up in Nova Scotia that PH would be perfect for, we didn’t know what to think.

I mean, what, leave Vancouver?

No more mountains? No more sushi? What about Owl’s awesome daycare? What about our diaper service? What about all of our friends, whom we would leave behind?

And yet…

The job was in a perfect location. Just half an hour away from my parents, and a little over an hour to his parents.

And then we looked at housing prices and we just started SALIVATING.

2,000 square feet and an acre of land for half the price of our current 1,000 foot townhouse? NO PROBLEM.

So we made a pros and cons list. It looked like this:

  • PRO
  • close to family
  • cheap houses
  • VERY cheap houses
  • close to Carol’s old friends/boy cousins
  • same salary, lower cost of living
  • Carol either doesn’t work or does dog training at home
  • No daycare/Nana Daycare
  • Have we mentioned the house pricing?
  • Cause it’s cheap, you know
  • Seriously, $70k for a three bedroom HOUSE
  • not condo, HOUSE
  • CON
  • moving expenses? How cheap is PH’s company?
  • Negative equity in house currently YAY GLOBAL RECESSION PLUS SCREW YOU MORONS
  • No Happy Nappy 
  • All of our Vancouver friends go byebye
  • Daycare lady would be sad 😥
  • No vet tech job for Carol, probably
  • Carol would have to take up prostitution
  • or dog training
  • one or the other
  • but probably prostitution

Ultimately, we realized that the universe was calling our bluff. When fortune just hands you the thing you’ve always said you wanted, you have to go for it. We’d be chicken not to.

So PH applied.

Well, it turns out he’s the best candidate by a country mile and they really want him.

What they aren’t sure of is whether they can afford to help us move out there.

What WE aren’t sure of is whether we can afford to sell our house right now, because the housing values are down and we don’t want to end up in a negative equity situation.

All of this is causing me massive anxiety because you KNOW how much I love uncertainty.

And change. Don’t forget my love of change.

I keep alternating between dreams of a big house and a dog-daycare that I run out of my own home, and joy at the thought of leaving my job… and complete panic at the thought of leaving all the people here, not least my awesome daycare lady who had gone above and beyond the call of duty for me and Owl.

I waver between excitement and terror.

I don’t want to go!

I don’t want to stay!

I want to go, I just also want to stay!

And then, the next morning, I woke up in a sweat and shook PH awake.

“I just realized. We CAN’T go to Nova Scotia.”

“Why not?” he mumbled into his pillow.

“THERE’S NO ANTON’S IN NOVA SCOTIA.”

Fun Good. Change Bad.

31 Thursday Mar 2011

Posted by IfByYes in My Blag is on the Interwebs, Perfect Husband, Pointless Posts, Vids and Vlogs

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

change, google chrome, katamari, mozilla firefox, web browsers

PH and I are Firefox users. We have always been Firefox users. Internet Explorer is for grandmas and capitalists. The idea of switching away from Firefox has never been seriously entertained in our household. When Google Chrome came out, we hissed and shied away, like undead creatures being exposed to a holy symbol.

But Firefox has been acting up lately. Crashing, of all things, which it never used to do, and running reeeeeally slowly. Sometimes the whole computer would seize and we’d open the task manager only to discover that Firefox was eating an extraordinary amount of the available memory – more than any other program running, including the anti-virus, Skype, and iTunes.

It can’t be my processor. Sure, this computer is two years old but we bought this computer with my video editing hobby in mind, and it’s a quad core processor. My RAM is only 4 GB, but that should be enough to run a web browser, you know? Even if PH and I do tend to leave multiple tabs running. When Firefox 4.0 came out, we thought the crashing would get better, but it didn’t.

So PH downloaded Google Chrome, against all of our natural instincts. I have to say, I really don’t like change, and there are things I don’t like about it – like, I had to re-add all my rss feeds to Google Reader, instead of having them handily in the toolbar or in an easy-access drop down menu. And it doesn’t have the little doohicky in the righthand corner so we can search Wikipedia or Rotten Tomatoes quickly.

I voiced all of these complaints and PH explained about Google Reader and figured out how to do those quick searches from the address bar and my reservations were temporarily stifled.

I have to admit, it runs a helluvalot faster, and it hasn’t hung up or crashed yet.

So I am giving it a chance.

I have to say, though, that the real reason that PH was able to talk me into switching browsers – even on a trial basis – was that he promised to install this capability:

[vimeo vimeo.com/21789864]

Holy Crapballs, Batman

14 Saturday Aug 2010

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?, Life and Love

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

anxiety, babies, change, fear, life, pregnancy

I don’t like change at all.

I live in a perpetual state of nostalgia for whatever used to be, always worrying that the now is never going to compare to what has passed, always fearing that I will never be as happy in the future.

I hated moving to Curacao, and I hated moving back to Canada. I didn’t want to leave my high school, and sobbed like a baby in my mother’s arms the night before I started university. I loved my university so much that I still miss it, so I sobbed and then suffered depression when I graduated from it. I even found it difficult to leave a job I hated when I got my dream job.

The only transitions I never found difficult involved being with Perfect Husband. Practically from the moment we agreed to date, we were talking about moving in together. He waited a year to propose, but that was more out of propriety than any kind of insecurity on his part. I was afraid of moving to BC, but I was so happy just to be with him that I piled my stuff into my car and drove across the country with him happily. I would change continents with him in a heart beat. I was so happy on my wedding day that I was shaking in nervousness, but not frightened.

But all the rest of change – terrifying.

Now I’m about to have my life get turned upside down. OUR life turned upside down. FOREVER.

And I’m freaking out.

Why on Earth did I ever allow myself to conceive a child? I mean, sure, I’ve been broody since I was 16 and fell in love with my baby-think-it-over. I loved caring for a baby robot, but so what? Sure, I’ve been mentally explaining things like boiling water and how brakes work to my imaginary future children for decades. Sure, the whole time PH and I were on our honeymoon we were thinking how much we wanted to bring our kids back there with us some day. Sure, I nearly cried when holding a coworker’s newborn baby last year.

But why did I think any of that meant I was ready for a baby?? I should have left well enough alone. Holy crap, what have I done??

Syndicated on BlogHer

I was syndicated on BlogHer.com

NaNoWriMo!

Contact Me

ifbyyes AT gmail DOT com

Subscribe Using That RSS Thing

RSS Feed RSS - Posts

RSS Feed RSS - Comments

“Facebook” Me (it’s a verb now, apparently)

“Facebook” Me (it’s a verb now, apparently)

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 317 other followers

I’m a Twit!

  • I Don’t Think I Mean What You Think I Mean ifbyyes.wordpress.com/2018/10/08/i-d… 2 years ago
  • The Cliff ifbyyes.wordpress.com/2018/09/01/the… https://t.co/0Xn1FFKHrF 2 years ago
  • RT @lynchauthor: AAAAAH that's so amazing thank you! Can I cross post this to my tumblr? twitter.com/Kefka73/status… 2 years ago

This Month, On A Very Special “If By Yes”…

January 2021
M T W T F S S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031
« Oct    

Most Popular

  • Poor Ron: In Which Everyone Completely Underestimates Ron Weasley, Even His Creator (Part 1)
    Poor Ron: In Which Everyone Completely Underestimates Ron Weasley, Even His Creator (Part 1)
  • Blog Tag: In Which I Answer Questions And Posit My Own
    Blog Tag: In Which I Answer Questions And Posit My Own
  • Show Your Breasts For Amanda Todd, Or, In Which I Finally Deal With Amanda Todd's Death
    Show Your Breasts For Amanda Todd, Or, In Which I Finally Deal With Amanda Todd's Death
  • Rowling vs Meyer, Round 4 -  How Can I Describe Meyer's Writing?
    Rowling vs Meyer, Round 4 - How Can I Describe Meyer's Writing?
  • The Cancer Principle: Depression is Okay, Abuse Is Not
    The Cancer Principle: Depression is Okay, Abuse Is Not
  • Be It Ever So Humble
    Be It Ever So Humble
  • Why We Don't Want Our Son To Think He's Smart.
    Why We Don't Want Our Son To Think He's Smart.
  • Poor Ron, Part 2: In Which I Explain That Ron Is Perfect For Hermione
    Poor Ron, Part 2: In Which I Explain That Ron Is Perfect For Hermione
  • Round 1: In Which Stephenie Meyer Confuses Feminism With Kung Fu.
    Round 1: In Which Stephenie Meyer Confuses Feminism With Kung Fu.
  • Quality Over Quantity
    Quality Over Quantity

Look Through The Vault

By Category

  • Autism (1)
  • Belly Battles (20)
  • Damn Dogs (35)
  • Early Writings By A Child Genius (9)
  • East, West, Home is Best (42)
  • I'm Sure This Happens To Everyone… (122)
  • Life and Love (635)
    • 30 Posts To 30 (24)
    • Fritter Away (11)
    • From The Owlery (89)
    • How is Babby Formed? (227)
    • Me vs The Sad (72)
    • The House Saga (27)
  • Life's Little Moments (59)
  • My Blag is on the Interwebs (91)
    • Memes (15)
  • Perfect Husband (87)
  • Pointless Posts (73)
  • Polls (6)
  • Shhh, I'm Reading (55)
    • TwiBashing (21)
  • Uncategorized (2)
  • Vids and Vlogs (22)
  • We Are Family (30)
  • Well (1)
  • Well, That's Just Stupid (83)
    • Oh The Inanity (15)

Blogroll

  • A Little Pregnant
  • Also Known As The Wife
  • Are You Sure This Is A Good Idea?
  • Bub and Pie
  • Built In Birth Control
  • Clicker Training, Mother F***er!
  • Daycare Daze
  • Don't Mind The Mess
  • Dooce
  • Emotional Umbrella
  • Fail Blog
  • Held Back By My Spanx
  • Hodgepodge and Strawberries
  • Ken and Dot's Allsorts
  • Kloppenmum
  • Light Green: Life As Activism
  • Magpie Musing
  • Mommy By Day
  • Mr Chicken and the Ninja Kitties
  • Not Always Right
  • Passive Aggressive Notes
  • Postcards From Oblivion
  • Reasoning With Vampires
  • Sweet Salty Kate
  • The Angus Diaries
  • The Domesticated Nerd Girl
  • The Problem With Young People Today Is…
  • The Salted Tomato
  • The Squeee
  • The Urban Cowgirl
  • Unable to Relate
  • Wings And Boots

You Can Has Blog Button!

If By Yes If By Yes

Member of:

For Women

BlogHer.com Logo

Follow my blog with bloglovin

If By Yes - Find me on Bloggers.com

Vote For Me!

Good Blogs - Vote me to the Front Page!

The Latest Talk

Charles on TuTu Cool For School
Mamma_Simona on I Don’t Think I Mean Wha…
Traxy on Fifty Shades of Oh, Holy F***,…
IfByYes on Fifty Shades of Oh, Holy F***,…
Laura H. on What I Would Like to Say to Je…

Pages

  • Meet Me
    • Why If By Yes?
  • Meet Perfect Husband
  • Meet The Babbies

Cancel
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy