School, and non-school, photos! ;-)

Well, we've missed a few school pictures.  I uploaded the 2019 ones in 2020 (Jade's 11th and Ria's 7th).  We missed 2020.  We missed 2021.  And by now not all children have school pictures.  So I'll have to do a bit of winging and include a bit of a retrospective ;-)

This year's photos!  Jade's 12++th grade photo, and Ria's 10th grade photo:

Yay!  Photos of Jade!  And Ria has a photo that matches how she looks in school, in a mask - hee hee!

In 2021 no photo of Jade for 12+ year, but we've got one for Ria's 9th grade - this one's particularly cute:

And in 2020 Jade helped me do a home-made school photo for Ria's 8th grade picture.  

Enjoy...

John Christopher Rucklidge, 15 January 1938 - 7 May 2021

May of last year started with William's dad, John, in hospital.  Then at home with Patricia.  All four kids made it to him in the end, but not all could get there before he passed, due to the difficulty flying during covid.  Now it is nearly one year later.

Alastair, William, Andrew, Julia, and others pulled together so many photos for his funeral, but this one feels the most John to me: John walking, lost in thought, with one of his beloved dogs.

When there's 4 kids, it's not often one gets them all together, but sometimes it happens.  Here's one of the few photos with all 5 of them together.

For John's last years, Patricia was almost always by his side.  They had some lovely years together, I'm so sad she must continue on without him.  They were good together.

In the mass of photos I found a few "just so John" photos....Bungee jumping, because why should age limit him?  ...and sledding with a dog.  

It was surreal for William, travelling in the pandemic.  So wonderful to have his siblings by his side.  

Bye, John.

January-April 2021: Planning, and planning, with extra planning sauce

The first 1/3 of 2021 was a never-ending homage to proper planning.  Plus circumventing chaos.  Plus masses of change.

Sidebar:

I was just checking that proper planning quote, and I notice how it transitions from the original 7P's, to 6P's, to 5P's.  I seem to know and prefer a different 7 P's than the official 7 P's.  I know "proper prior planning prevents piss poor performance".  The web tells me that the original is a British Army saying that "proper planning and preparation prevents piss poor performance".  I think that the addition of the word "and" ruins the lovely alliteration.  The 6 and 5 P versions clean up the language a bit.  Not important, but there you are.

First, a cat.

Oreo is always quite photogenic, don't you think?

Planning:

We needed to, in these 4 months:
- Find a house to buy in Toronto, without leaving California, and within a certain school's boundaries, and less than a 10 minute walk from a subway.  That turned out to be difficult.
- Sort out financing for said house, when neither W or I had a work contract for Canada, and the California house wasn't going to be sold until after we already moved out.
- Start immigration process to get Mona her permanent residence
- Figure out how to arrange the moving truck, as it takes 1 week for the furniture to move, but we have to be in quarantine for 2 weeks, and William has to personally sign for the shipment out at the airport, which shockingly can't be done when one is in quarantine.
- Purge our house of crap
- Find a moving company
- set up a bank account, even though the Canadian banks don't like to do that without you physically walking into a branch office
- Find and set up a real estate agent for prepping and selling the California house.
- Start preparing the house for sale, termite inspections, new garage door, etc.

....and.... we did all that, and then some.

Photos:  

Ria and I taking walks in the rain                                  ....and more of William's hot cross buns!

Chaos:

Meanwhile

- In mid December we plonked the car in for service, and it didn't come back to us until January.  Luckily it was all covered by the insurance, including the weeks of replacement rental - although that saga didn't play itself out fully until the June-September installment.

- Oreo stopped being willing to take her meds, so the peeing started again, and we went on round 2 (3?) of sorting out how to make her not pee on the house.  It involved drugging her to the gills again, but we did get it sorted out with a minimum of peeing.

- Ria managed to severely twist her ankle, and it took months for the swelling to come down.

Photos: 

Ria with her sprained ankle elevated                              Oreo melting off the side of William's lap

Also, some things get better:

- Somewhere in there Jade got all of her university applications out, and despite the fact that we never did manage to schedule an SAT or ACT without having it cancelled on us, she was accepted to several really good Canadian Comp Sci universities.  The world got better with that.
- Somewhere in there Jade figured out that she is, in fact, Jade.  She told us in April.  The world got better with that.
- Somewhere in there vaccines became available, and we got vaccinated.  The world got better with that.
- Somewhere in there the schools started allowing part-time in person school.  Ria declined.  Jade started 1/2 time, just for Freestyle classes, mid-April.  The world got better with that.

Photos:
William just looking cute                                                       Me and Fauci, at my Fauci Ouchie!

It was a hard 4 months, especially for Jade, but we got to the end of them in a much better place than we started.  I don't really need/want to mention the political and social angst of Jan 6th and its aftermath, but I found that I was able to separate myself emotionally from the chaos of the US, knowing that I was going to be in a different country in June.

I did spend a bit of time communing with the lizards and bumblebees of our back garden -- I do miss them greatly.

And, it ends as it begins, with cats.

4th quarter 2020, a retrospective: Floors fixed, and plans made

 Aaaah.  4th quarter 2020.  

By October that fateful year the wildfire season had finally mostly ended, the floor was finally dry, and we all thought that Covid had petered out and life would start going to normal.

HAH!

Well, some things did finally start getting more normal.  In late September the kitchen tile got fixed relatively quickly thanks to 7 tiles we found stored in the garage from the previous owner's remodel, and the pure luck that we only needed 6.5 tiles to fill the missing spaces.  We seriously lucked out, if we hadn't had those tiles we'd have had to replace the whole kitchen floor!

October was blissfully quiet, but in November we emptied the heck out of the family room, had the whole floor replaced (by insurance, yay!), and put it all back together.  Here's the masses of cr*p that littered the living room, and the family room subfloor placed.

The big furniture had been placed outdoors while the main floor was removed and replaced, then we had an interim room with the big furniture back, but they still had the finishing around the edges to do.  Ria enjoyed the funny layout.  Then, finally, back together before the end of the month.

Other things happened that month too.  Things opened up a bit so Ria did some in-person (masked) karate, and got a 2nd stripe on her belt (she's stopped karate since we moved).  In celebration, the cats cuddled with me on the couch.

The cats also snuggled cutely at the window, and at another window our favorite tree in the world exploded in fireworks of red to celebrate the autumn.

Late October, early November, however, also triggered a change of plans.  The hell of the extended presidential election cycle descended, making me once again, as 4 years previously, unable to sleep, anxious, and having to not read/watch news to keep calm.  We'd always thought about how we wanted the kids to experience the Canadian half of their dual citizenship, but we'd figured that that could happen by going to university in Canada.  By then Jade had decided to only apply to Canadian universities, and we thought about how much easier it would have been to do those applications from within the Canadian school system.  Then I thought about how I didn't really want to go through one of these horrific presidential elections again (I'm sure there will be a few more nasty ones before our societal mayhem calms down), and if we wanted to move, it would never be convenient, so why not now while life was already the essence of inconvenient and when Ria was already going to be transitioning between 2 school districts and Jade was going to be off to Canada anyways.  So, I started researching Toronto schools to figure out what might work for Ria.  We talked to LOTS of people in Toronto, and by the end of November I had found out that the TDSB (Toronto District School Board), by being so large, was able to have several high schools with special Autism Support Programs aimed at kids at or above grade level academically, but still needing autism support. It was a better match than any of the private school options, so we talked to the Autism Program lead at one school, and started figuring out our real estate options.  The die was cast.

Then, of course, with late November came the realization that Covid wasn't going to give up, and the kids would be schooling from home for the foreseeable future, most likely until vaccines were available.  Karate went back to zoom.  The isolation really started messing with Jade's head around then, with seemingly no end in sight during the school years that were supposed to be an explosion of independence.  She stopped being comfortable with photos, so photos stopped being taken.  So began her greatest (so far) journey in life.

Then, came the holidays.  They were quiet, just us and the odd Zoom gathering, and it was calm.

Our Julbord was delicious, and for New Years Eve we played board games and ate a ridiculous amount of desserts.  (Normally we have folks over for NYE and we dump our excessive Christmas baking habits onto them, but instead we ate it all ourselves, slowly, over months ;-).)

It was great joy to have 2020 be over.  Of course, we didn't really know how intense 2021 was going to be at that time, but we enjoyed the short-lived calm.

Cats of Toronto, Aker-Ruck Edition, Part the 2nd: New Windows

Apparently, the new house has different windows, with different views....

Cats of Toronto, Aker-Ruck Edition, part 1. Cats in Transition

So, most of what we take pictures of at the new house is the cats, as not all of our humans are into the photographic medium at this time.  And thus, we bring you Cats of Toronto, Aker-Ruck Edition.

For part 1, we bring you Cats In Transition.

 I can move in this bag, mom                                          OOh, check out these cool carriers.

Why such a mess?                                   The carriers are nice, but what's wrong with a paper bag?

Ugh, moving is going to be a pain, I think I'm just going to hide.  Wake me when it's over.

OK, we're here.... now what?

Puzzle, complete

 We finished doing the puzzle that I optimistically purchased for us to do New Years Eve.  I am now aware that 1500 pieces is not a 1 night puzzle. ;-) 

Ria wasn't too particularly jazzed about doing a puzzle, but Jade helped a lot.