What our life looks like right now

So, we've talked to most of you who will be interested in reading this, but just for information, this is generally what our life looks like now.

Andrew is taking classes at UBC in Vancouver, which is about an hour north of us, by car. However, due to gas prices and the fact that we can only keep one car at our apartment, Andrew takes the bus, which takes closer to 2 hours to get to UBC. He goes in 3-4 days a week (3 days of classes and 1 optional lab day), usually leaving pretty early in the morning and getting back early in the afternoon. Andrew generally likes his classes, his professors, and his fellow graduate students, but I'll let him elaborate more on that. He did find out that his advisor is an extremely important person in the field, who was not expected to take on more students. He never knew this, going into school, but is quite happy to be working with him now.

After spending the summer trying to find a job in the Vancouver area, and realizing too late that it is virtually impossible to get an elementary teaching job here, much less to get an elementary teaching job without a British Columbia teacher's license, I applied for my Washington State teacher's license, and am now substitute teaching in northern Whatcom County, in the Blaine and Ferndale school districts. I have liked subbing a lot, although it has its drawbacks. I am always the stranger in a building, and I have no colleagues, and I have to establish myself as teacher with a different group of kids every single day, as opposed to having my own classroom where the kids know me and I know them. But it has been great experience, and it is nice to have a flexible schedule, and it has done quite a bit in terms of giving back all the confidence I lost student teaching. It is nice to realize that I can keep a classroom under control, and that students do listen to me most of the time. This past couple of weeks I have been working as a math teacher in the same school; they are trying to make this a permanent position and have offered me the job, but it is not enough time or money, and I don't think it's going to work out.

We are living in White Rock, BC, which is right on the ocean and right on the border (across from Blaine, Washington). It is a beautiful place to live. We found a gorgeous apartment with huge front windows that face the water, and we get to enjoy an amazing sunset every night that it isn't cloudy. The White Rock pier is right outside our door, and we take a walk out to the end of it, to watch the sunset and the over-wintering ducks, nearly every evening after I get home from work. Our apartment is a huge step up from where we lived last year! Not only do we have insolation and a working shower, but our house stays clean and we even have a dishwasher and a washing machine and dryer. It's pretty amazing. We got a lot of furniture from Andrew's parents this summer, so our house feels much more like a house and much less like a glorified dorm room.

The downside of living in White Rock is that everything is extremely expensive. I have been doing most of the grocery shopping in Blaine, where you don't pay $4 for a loaf of bread. Without our cheap little downtown restaurants that we enjoyed in Colorado Springs, we have eaten out a lot less this year. But we have discovered The Bread Box, a produce market run by a Bulgarian lady and her sons, with ridiculously cheap, amazing organic produce, and so we have been eating a lot more fresh food.

We have been attending All Saints Community Church, a small Anglican church under a Rwandan bishop (similar to our church in Colorado Springs). We like our church a lot, and we enjoy the familiarity of the worship, but we are by far the youngest people in the congregation, by an average of thirty or forty years. We are really missing having friends our age living close to us, and we have been pretty unsuccessful in meeting people. White Rock seems mainly to be a retirement community, without many young people. There have to be some of them, but we haven't really found them yet.

Well, that most of the important changes of our year to date. I will continue to keep people updated on more of the details of our day-to-day life!

Some of Andrews Summer Excitement

In early July I got the chance to attempt make an epic climb in the North Cascades of Washington. I along with a couple of my very good friends, Brian Russel and Jeff Widman, and 5 other people hiked from Ross lake, over the top of Mount Challenger, into Whatcom county, where I grew up. The first day was 14 miles, the second was much harder. And Shorter. We bushwhacked up 3000 feet of elevation and then traversed along treacherous cliff faces with stunning views into the Picket Range, beautiful ice-bound lakes and, short of our destination, stopped on a ridge around 7,000 feet just in time for sunset. The next day was the easiest of the trip. We descended onto a the Challenger glacier, and climbed it to the top of the mountain. The very top, however took some rock climbing up above two thousand feet of shear cliffs. It was pretty incredible! Back down the other side of the mountain before dinner. We were planning that the next day would be our rest day, but, we had no such luck. We were forced to climb deep into a valley and then back out in order to get past “the imperfect impasse” a gully that cleaves the side of the mountain and, to many, is impassable. Our final day was just 20 miles of hiking.... Enjoy the photos.

That is truly one of the most wonderful places I have been, and is clearly the hardest place to which I have ever drug myself.

Mr. Widman (Jeff's father) on the tip of the mountain.

One of the ice-bound lakes


Alpenglow on Challenger.

The Luna Cirque and Pickett Wall

Blog reset

We have decided that, as our wedding is in the relatively distant past, we should update our blog to reflect our current life. So here goes. We plan on updating the blog weekly or semi-weekly with pictures, stories, and anecdotes on the weather, birds, and general geography of our new home here in Canada.