A Sunny Day

Just now, sitting on the back stoop, arms resting on my knees, dog snug against my leg, on a bright day that is now waning into late afternoon.

It's warm compared to yesterday, but anything's warm compared to that: -13C (8.6F). I had refused to turn up the thermostat (because it's October, damnit) and so spent the day shivering. We hooked up the electric blanket and went to bed at 9 o'clock, blocks of ice shaped like feet bumping into each other, yelps to "get over on your own side" in a bed the size of a football field. I don't like complaining about the cold because local folks can hardly wait to see how "the new people from Ontario" will cope with north Alberta's aptly named Cold Lake. We know cold, though. Both of us are hardy crops. The thing is, we're used to a woodstove, where you ignite a few sticks of maple and bake yourself down to your summer underwear faster than it takes to make porridge. The furnace here heats the air, not the house, and, the minute it shuts off, cold gels all feeling left in those icicles we once called toes.

The fighter jets drone overhead. Sleek bees with needlepoint noses. Incessantly practising to save the world.

Inside, I hear my coffee's ready.

If I was a pin-up girl ...

... I'd be Hilda!

Look at that girl. Happy, fun-loving, gorgeous and, unlike just about every other pin-up girl on the planet, plump!  Up until a few days ago I had never heard of her. Then bloggy friend Carrie Clevenger posted a Facebook link to a collection of Hilda paintings and I fell in love. Artist Duane Bryers brought this famously ravishing redhead to life and you can find out more about him (and see lots of other happy Hildas) on Les Toil's website.

Hilda's one of the reasons I finally changed the name of my blog. I know, I know, I'm slower than a frozen roast beef in a broken crock pot, but I didn't want to pick a new name until I found something that tickled my picky-pants fancy. Nothing made me stand up and sing. Nothing. But it was bothering me, so much so that I didn't even go near my blog because I felt guilty. I'd see the bookmarked link on the top of my computer screen, Life on the Muskoka River, and avoid it like I owed it money. Last night I dreamed about the darned thing. Argh. I woke up this morning and went, that's IT. I have to change the stupid name on my stupid blog before my head spins and I start spewing pea soup.

I wanted to put Cold Lake in the title and liked the Cathy-Cold Lake thingey going on. I mentioned Cathy Does Cold Lake but Dave thought it was too corny and way too porny. Then I kinda settled on Cold Lake Cathy, thinking it reminded me of Buffalo Bill, which is all western, and I'm now all about being western. So yeah, Cold Lake Cathy.

Then all I had to do was come up with a new header. Easier said than done.

Cold Lake isn't easy to sum up in just one photo. It has multiple personalities, it does. It's "out west" but it's also "up north." It's known for being home to Canada's largest air force base and not a day goes by that you don't see fighter jets zooming overhead, or military folks lined up in the grocery store. But it's also a booming oil town, with a soaring economy and camp-dirty 'oilers' lined up behind the guys and girls in fatigues. Even more, it's famous for the lake, Cold Lake, a deep, clear, wave-swept lake so big you can barely see across to the other side. And yeah, it's cold. Freakin' cold.

If this town had a nickname, it would be Sybil.

I looked at airplanes and oil wells and people shivering in the cold. I thought seriously about vintage cowgirls. Nothing seemed right. I almost gave up in frustration. I've been such a lacklustre blogger lately that I thought maybe I should just stop. Feck the header. Feck the blog. Just stop.

And then I remembered Hilda. She of the wide smile and the wide hips and the wide, wide love for life. She was perfect.

Welcome to Cold Lake Cathy. Because life isn't on the Muskoka River anymore and it was beyond time for a change.

Pickles, Sad Stories and Fresh Air

Everyone has a sad story lurking behind their normal exterior. I talked about this with my new neighbour, who kindly brought over an armload of homemade preserves this afternoon. Beet pickles, canned cherries, bread and butters – I can't wait to dive in and try something tonight at supper.

She brought preserves, I offered her a glass of ice water (hardly a fair trade) and we shared some of our darkest secrets. Do you do that with someone you just met? Um, yeah. If you're willing to show the world your underwear in a blog it's no biggie to swap secrets with someone over a cup of joe. Conversation, after all, is just live-action blogging.

I like our neighbours. As a matter of fact, I am liking everything about Cold Lake. The air here is so fresh. So cool. It's like the man upstairs just had a breath mint and he's spitting at us.

My friends and relatives back in Ontario and the eastern seaboard are sweltering under record high temperatures and every time I talk to them on the phone all I can do is gush about how cool and fresh everything is here. "The air," I say, over and over ad nauseam, "the air is so FRESH. Did I mention how FRESH it is?" I'm pretty sure I have no friends left in Ontario but I can't help it. Every day I marvel at the lack of humidity, the brilliant blue skies and the FRESH pepperminty breezes cooling my skin.

Our asthmatic cat has never been healthier. He hasn't thrown up since we got here (knock on wood) and he's positively kittenish, prancing around the house, breathing like a regular cat instead of an old hag cat with an oxygen bottle, a wheelchair, and a lifetime addiction to Player's Plain.

This morning we had a visit from a neighbour's cat. He didn't come bearing preserves but he seemed friendly as he was peering in our front window. I don't know for sure that he's male but he was, after all, peeping, and so Tom he is.

As for sad stories, I'm sure Tom will have much to tell his catified cronies – his peeping career at our front window came to an abrupt end when Misty the Wonderdog chased him off the front porch.

Just another day at Cold Lake. No, I don't have pictures to show you. The camera thing-a-ma-jig is in the trailer somewhere and I'm too lazy to go get it. And no, I haven't come up with a new blog title yet. (The pressure, the pressure...)

L is for Lake, a dish best served Cold

Credit

I'm back at the Tim Horton's in Cold Lake, sucking up their free Wi-Fi and handling real estate running-around while Dave is at work. It was snowing this morning. Snowing. On April 18. I'm beginning to think spring is never going to get here, although yesterday was nice and I saw a teenaged girl carrying her shoes and walking barefoot beside the highway near the high school.

I have a lot of time on my hands, waiting for Dave to get through his work day. I don't feel like hiding away in the basement room he rents – as nice as the people are who own the house (and they are super nice, the best kind of people actually), I feel I don't want to interfere with their day. So I find coffee shops with wi-fi and sunny spots to read my Kindle. The other day I fell asleep in the car at the Cold Lake Marina, the sun making me warm and drowsy, the view of a vast frozen expanse of white oddly pretty and comforting. I slept for a couple of hours, rousing every once in a while as a plane roared overhead.

Credit

There are a few things you have to appreciate if you're going to live in Cold Lake. One of them is the planes. Cold Lake is home to Canada's largest air force base and all manner of military jets come and go at all hours. I could sit outside for hours and just watch the planes go by. You know, if it wasn't snowing... The military has a big presence in Cold Lake. There's a young woman in fatigues, waiting in line for a prescription at the drug store. She is bubbly and pretty, and she's talking to a friend on the phone about girly things while she stands tall in army boots, her blonde hair in a tight bun. There's a military policeman ordering breakfast at McDonald's. He wears a red beret and a dashing jaw and he is sharing early morning conversation with the smiling Filipino woman who fetches his coffee and Egg McMuffin. There are a lot of people here from the Philippines. Almost every restaurant, retail store and hotel has Filipino men and women on their payrolls. There are too many jobs in Cold Lake and not enough people to do them, so workers come from all over the world. For some reason the Philippines has become a primary source of workers willing to take the lower paying jobs. In Ontario those jobs are held by folks from India.

So there are military people from the base and Filipino workers behind the tills, and there are also the oil field workers. Men. Tons of men, all of them with greasy hands and muddy boots, all of them a zillion miles from home. They are the tradesmen and the labourers who have left their homes behind to make ridiculous amounts of money working for the big oil companies. Many are in the oil field camps for five weeks at a time, cut off from the rest of the world; others rent rooms in Cold Lake and are bussed out to the fields for long, cold, dirty days. Every motel, every apartment or spare room, is filled with the men of the fields. When Dave and I move here early this summer we will rent out two rooms in our house to these men. Their rent will pay our mortgage. This is how it is done in Cold Lake.  The houses are expensive but the well-moneyed men are lined up for a place to rest their heads at night.

There is money everywhere. Money, and pick-up trucks. Almost everyone drives 4X4 trucks and even though there are at least three car washes in Cold Lake, these trucks are covered in mud. Part of it is from being in the oil fields. Part of it is the crappy roads. Seriously, the roads are terrible here. Pot holes the size of ponds. Nobody complains about it, though. Nobody worries. They just ride their big expensive pick-em-ups over the bumps and mud puddles, and carry on.

People are friendly here. This is a good place, I can feel it.

And if spring never arrives in Cold Lake, so be it. I shall buy a new coat and learn to curl.

J is for Jocular

I just snarfed down the most exquisite toasted coconut doughnut, I've got a large coffee half gone at my elbow and I'm sucking back the free wi-fi at Timmy's in Cold Lake, Alberta.

In a word, I am jocular.

Oh, J is also for Joke. A most hilarious and awesome waitress at Denny's in Edmonton said, "Wanna hear a joke?"

We nodded.

"Whaddya get when you cross a turtle with Viagra?"

Before we could guess she leaned forward on our table and whispered, "A slow poke."

Yes, there's still snow here. They don't call it Cold Lake for nuttin.

Big news

Dave's new workplace: Cold Lake Chrysler.

My apologies if I haven't been around much – I just have so much on my mind right now that I can't seem to focus on anything.

We're moving. Again. Oh, I can't believe we're moving again. I say I hate it and yet I keep doing it. I don't think I've spent 10 of my 52 years in the same place. My dad was a railway engineer so we moved a few times because of that, and then my career in the newspaper business meant I moved again and again. Then my marriage fell apart. Then I met Dave. Every time a "then" happened I had to move again. I remember planting trees up at Dave's house in Sundridge and saying to him, "every time I plant a tree somewhere, in the hopes of being around to watch it grow up, I move again." Sure enough, we moved when my company moved our production office to Bracebridge.

Fortunately I was never tempted to plant a tree on our property here – we're surrounded by trees already! Besides, we love this place. In many ways it's the place we have been looking for our entire lives. When we moved in I said to Dave, "I'm never planting a tree here. Never." But then we planted a couple of snowball bushes and a few lilacs. I didn't think of them as trees, but maybe the Great  Goddess of Moving and Tree Karma counted them because here we go again.

I guess I was born under a Gypsy star.

This all started last summer when my brother-in-law, Don, told us about a Chrysler mechanic who moved out west and was making so much money he didn't know what to spend it on. It's all due to the oil sands in Alberta and the incredible demand for skilled trades. It also has to do with Chrysler, which has launched a serious training program for its automotive technicians, insisting on a certain level of training at all dealerships and refusing to pay for warranty work done by unskilled mechanics. Dave, as you can imagine, is a bit of a keener. He had all his courses done before Chrysler made it mandatory. Not all mechanics felt the same way about the new regulations (Don did, to his credit – he's a real keener, too), so there are a lot of untrained or semi-trained mechanics out there and not a lot like Dave and Don. Knowing that, you'll have no trouble realizing that Dave is in high demand.

When the company he worked for in Huntsville was bought out just recently, Dave decided it was time to look around. Within a few minutes scouting around on the internet, he found a job posting for Cold Lake Chrysler, three hours north of Edmonton, Alberta.

The opportunity is amazing. The pay is amazing. It has benefits and bonuses out the wazoo. After debating its merits and cons back and forth until our heads hurt, we finally decided that Dave should take the job. For me the best thing is I won't have to work anymore. I can retire and concentrate on writing. Or eating bon-bons. Or picking my nose.

He will drive out there next week, leaving me behind until we sell our beloved house on the Muskoka River. I could be here for three months or six months or a year. You never know how long it takes to sell a house... it took us eight months to sell our last home.

I am not looking forward to being alone here. I will miss Dave terribly because he is my rock and my knight in shining armour and all that blah-blah-mushy stuff. I will also miss him because now it's up to me to do all those stinky jobs he does so well – jobs like cleaning the cat litter, taking the garbage out, shovelling the driveway, cutting the grass, bringing in wood and keeping the house in good condition for impromptu showings.

Did I mention I hate cleaning kitty litter? I did it today, as a trial run. I am happy to report I didn't faint or barf.

Seriously, I'm a bit of a mess right now. The thoughts of missing Dave, the thoughts of missing my family when I move. Not to mention the 41 million things we have to do in preparation for it all.

The worst thing, of course, is leaving my family behind. The kids are staying with their father, for all the reasons I've blogged about a thousand times before. Angus doesn't really care, I don't think – he has taken a part-time job with his dad at the hardware store and he has a girlfriend he is head over heels with. As for Sam, well, I know he will miss me but he says he can hardly wait to go out west and spend the summer with us in "the mansion" we are sure to buy for him. Still, I worry that I am the worst mother in the world. How can I possibly even think of moving across the country, away from my babies???

I worry about leaving my mom behind, who isn't getting any younger, and know this will mean more pressure on my sister, who has always been the one to help my parents out whenever she was needed. Don't think I don't realize what you do, Liz, or appreciate you. I will miss you, too, and I will definitely miss our trips to Kiosk.

When I say I've been stressed lately, I'm not kidding. My heart feels like its beating out of my chest and I know my blood pressure is off the charts. I am trying to stay focused and only worry about one thing at a time, but the adrenaline rushing around my veins gives me the attention span of a flea – an extraordinarily bitchy flea.  My apologies to anyone whose head I've bit off lately. The good news is, I won't be around to much longer for local head-biting. Long-distance chewing will have to suffice.

As for you guys in blogland, nothing will change. Except maybe I'll have to come up with a new name.  Any ideas?

Anyone got Valium?

Seriously, anyone?