The chaotic home life of a frequent traveller

Me: Have you seen the pitch fork?

La Niña: Mommy!!!

Me: What!?

La Niña: What are you going to do with the pitchfork?

Me: Someone has the turn the compost. The leaves haven’t been turned in a year.

La Niña: Oh. That’s boring. I thought you were going to join the protests. I had this vision of you standing in the middle of the crowd in your old leather jacket with a pitchfork screaming, “burn the Trump Tower down.”

Me: My life is not that exciting and there’s no way I’d be able to get a pitchfork through customs and immigration.

La Niña: Are you sure you’re not a part of the protests?

Me: Not unless it involves sticky notes and a boardroom that’s filled with junk food wrappers and stinks like “dude smell.” My activities are very corporate; I uphold the capitalistic system, which makes me the preserver of the evil (dry sarcasm).

La Niña: Don’t hurt yourself doing that.

Me: Yeah. My shoulder has been bugging me lately. I think I slouch too much. But, thanks for the mental image. That was really exciting.

Yes, the weekend home life of a frequent traveller is not that exciting. It’s mundane, jam-packed, and full of chores. My weekend is essentially what everyone else does during a week but jammed into one or two days. Most of the time is spent running (figuratively).

This was Saturday (it was a synchro meet weekend so there was one day to do it all):

Clean the house, do the laundry, grocery shopping, cook meals for the week, dog maintenance, guinea pig maintenance. Find a meal service because of all my recent inconsistent travel I’m no longer able to do all the cooking every weekend; La Niña is excelling in synchro so dP’s evenings are spent driving from place to place and they find themselves prepping/ordering dinner after 8pm. We found a great woman who will do our meals for the week, I messed up the order, she worked with dP to figure out allergies, and I think we are set. If this works I will be screaming hallelujah.

< pause >Big gasp for air.< /pause >

Doing the fall chores (dP wrecked his back/neck so this is all on me right now). Rake what’s left of the leaves (winter is coming), turn the compost, find a person to clean our chimney (outsourced to dP), gather up all the kindling and put on the porch, chop larger pieces of wood, dig out the “wood” from under the porch and put by the house (abandoned… we can walk the extra few metres to grab wood though I am worried that the depth of snow might make it hard to get to). It was too windy to clean the eves.

Check out our leaves… this is what was left after we hired a service to come in a big truck and suck up everything on the lawn. I kid you not… before the service the leaves were knee-deep and simply unmovable.

< pause >Another big gasp for air.< /pause >

Then there’s all the work/travel “stuff.” Book all travel for December. Plan trip to New York (La Niña has been asking to see New York at Christmas), expenses/billing, prep for European trip because there’s no time between arrival in Montréal on Thursday and departure for Europe. I know all this sounds like an extravagant first world problem… but this is my job and it’s how we pay the bills.

< pause >Done with the typical stuff< /pause >

This was a synchro meet weekend… and Sunday was spent in Saint-Hyacinthe, Québec.

Luckily, I gave birth to a “Hermione” and all I need to do is print the parents meet “list” of what to bring, what to do, where to be… and hand it over to La Niña. She takes care of the rest.

It’s roughly an hour to Saint-Hyacinthe from Montréal. But, you have to pass through Montréal City to get there. This can add an unknown factor to the travel time that no one can predict. Luckily, the drive to was straightforward (we were running late) and it took an hour and five minutes. The drive back took an hour and a half.

Below are the arena and pool in Saint-Hyacinthe. The city was built in the 1800s but grew exponentially in the 1930s as a Jewish safe haven during World War II.

The language of the town is 100% French and I encountered no one who spoke English. I’ve discovered that when I’m pressed for time and/or backed into a corner, I’ll just spill out French words and people understand. I just can’t be my normal chatty self.

Below is the girl during warmup.

Twas a good meet for both her and her duet partner. The two of them are a great personality combination. La Niña speaks English and her partner speaks French. And, rather than pick one language to talk in the two of them created their own language, which the rest of us only partially understand.

After was the mad rush to the airport so I could spend a few hours staring at the inside walls of an airplane. This is time I will never get back.

I don’t travel well when I’m fractured. And, I’m fractured because the current schedule doesn’t give me a “disconnect” day.

Most of the frequent travellers that I know need a buffer day between work and home to separate the two and reflect. Without it you have to work extra hard to dissociate one from the other; and, if you can’t dissociate you enter the realm of displacement and that’s not fair to anyone.

Regardless, I’m now I’m back at work.

See… I wasn’t kidding when I said my week is full of sticky notes and is spent in boardrooms that stink like “dude smell” and are littered with junk food wrappers.