It's coming together...

It's been a long time since I've posted anything, but we have been waiting for several pieces to fall into place before we could tell everyone...

We're going to France for a year!!

(See the tiny sign in front of our house? It says, "House for Sale".)

We have been thinking about this trip and planning for over a year, and finally it's becoming a reality. Here is the chronology of our progress to date:

February 26: We traveled to Vancouver to meet with the French Consulate and apply for long stay visas, which we need if we're spending more than three months in France. The applications totaled more than 70 pages, and 48 of them had to be filled out by hand. While there Mark and I were told that we needed to get leaves of absence from our jobs, which doesn't follow the normal procedure.

March 26: Mark told his boss in Prince George about our plans and asked for a leave of absence. Because the plan is to not come back to Burns Lake, and all leaves of absence over six months have to be approved by the Deputy Minister, Mark's request was sent off to Victoria.

Late March: We had the kitchen floor redone (went from laminate to ceramic tiles) and had the main floor bathroom tub surround fixed. The carpenter was good but in a hurry and left lots of the finishing details for us which took us (i.e., Mark) countless hours to complete.

Late March - early April: I asked for and was granted a one-year leave of absence. When I got the letter, I faxed it to the French Consulate, indicating that Mark had also asked for a leave of absence but didn't have the paperwork completed yet.

April 18: Our visas arrived by courier - exciting day!

April 20: We purchased our airline tickets from Calgary to Strasbourg, France, leaving Sunday, August 26.

Late April: We changed our minds about trying to find a permanent place to stay in Strasbourg before we leave. Instead we have booked a hotel for the last week of August and will take the time to look around in person. If we don't find a place that we can move into right away, we will secure something for October and then travel to Italy and Greece for the month of September.

Early May: Mark was granted a general leave of absence and received word from the Assistant Deputy Minister that they will try to find him a position on his return.

I faxed off applications for the kids to enroll for next year in E-Bus (short for electronic busing) Academy, an online school from Vanderhoof, BC (just down the road towards Prince George from us.)

We have been madly cleaning up the house in preparation for its sale. It's amazing how good it feels to get rid of years worth of junk - we should have done it a long time ago! We will try to sell the house privately first, and even though we haven't put up a "For Sale" sign yet, we have already had several inquiries.

May 10: We put up two (very small) "House for Sale" signs, one on our lawn and one on the highway (thanks to Cameron who slogged through the ditch in water over his boots). This earned us two more phone inquiries, but we have only shown the house once so far.

May 17: I sent our information out to two home sale web sites: bchomesforsale.com and hiway16.com. Unfortunately, our listings won't be up in time for the long weekend, but then doesn't everyone go camping anyway? : )

At this point, selling the house is our next big hurdle... or maybe it's cleaning out the kids' bedrooms... I'm not sure which will be harder. Both will happen eventually!

Our 2006

Happy New Year!

2006 was a busy year for us, and the following is a brief summary of our adventures.

Since January 2003 I have been concentrating my efforts on completing a Master of Educational Technology (MET) degree from UBC. In 2006 I finished four of the 10 courses, including ETEC 590, the graduating project, for which we had to present a portfolio of our learning during the program. I am looking forward to graduating in May after my last course!

I had intended to take a full leave from my job for a year but ended up teaching half-time for a few months. I was very excited to teach “Mathematics for Elementary School Teachers”, a course in the teacher assistant program, as well as filling in for a few courses in my other job in the Applied Business Technology program. When I was finished teaching at the college at the beginning of February, I put my name on the sub list for the school district to find out what it is like back in the K-12 system. The result? I survived, but by the end of the school year, I was saying to the booking person, “I can't work Mondays or Fridays... no, I don't really want to go back to that class... no, sorry, I can't work next week... and, oh, the week after that looks bad, too...” : )

This school year started off with my working two evenings during the week. However, one of my co-workers is now on maternity leave, and I am covering for her, which means that I will be working straight days until June. It's good for us in that we won't have to worry about the evenings anymore, but I will really miss my mornings at home to be able to work on the last course for my degree.

Mark spent the past year becoming more familiar with his role as District Manager for the Nadina Forest District. He started last year with a controversy about snowmobiling in a protected area near Smithers and worked his way through many Mountain Pine Beetle issues. We missed him several times throughout the year as his work took him to Vancouver and Prince George, with many day trips to Houston, Smithers and Vanderhoof. (Some of the Vancouver trips are to do work for the Legislative Policy Committee – doesn't that sound like fun! - I always tease him about it). Mark was also very busy cutting down trees in our yard this summer. Between him and a professional tree faller from Vanderhoof, who we hired to cut down the trees by our electrical lines, we now have 17 fewer (dead) pine trees in our yard. It really changed the landscape, and it has taken me a while to get used to it.

Cameron and Meghan are doing well in school. Cameron is now in grade 6 and Meghan in grade 4, both still in French Immersion. We really weren't sure how this year would shape up until almost the first day of school. Meghan's class (a 3/4 split) went back and forth between the primary and elementary school, until they at last decided to move them up to the elementary school. Cameron's class was without a teacher until the last minute, when they hired a woman who was a very good teacher but didn't speak much French. Luckily, this year their class has Cynthia, a 20-year-old French Monitor from Quebec. To complicate matters, the teacher's husband got transferred within a few weeks of school starting, and the class had a sub for the last six weeks before Christmas. Many of us think that Cynthia held the class together during that time; she'll have many interesting experiences to take back to Quebec with her at the end of the year!

The kids are still doing their regular lessons; however, Cameron switched from piano to guitar this year. Meghan still loves the piano and practices playing it almost every time she walks by. They had been doing Tae Kwon Do in the fall until someone accidentally pulled the fire alarm and got them kicked out of their gym! We expect that it will start up again as soon as the teacher finds another place to hold the lessons. For many winters the kids have taken cross-country ski lessons, but we decided to skip them this year. Meghan especially is too young for the group that she is in (her skill level is good but stamina is lacking), a result of being a dedicated ski lesson family, registering our children for lessons almost every year! We have made the commitment to go skiing as often as we can, regardless, and we want to have the kids try downhill skiing this year. Cameron is also anxious to go snowboarding again, but I'm thinking that Mark and I will go back to downhill skiing. I may have permanently wrecked something when we took our last set of snowboarding lessons!

When we weren't going to school or work, we had a few short but fun holidays. We travelled to Portage La Prairie, MB, during our two-week Spring Break in April and stopped to visit with my family in Alberta, and Mel and Gord Clark and family (kids, cats and dogs!) in Vanguard, SK, on the way. We had a good visit with Mark's mom and dad, and were able to record some audio conversations about their families and times past. Not satisfied with just one visit, Mark travelled to Portage again in June to help his brother Eric with some house projects. In late July we went to Rocky Mountain House, AB, to visit with my mom and enroll the kids in swimming lessons. As we have done in the past, the kids and I went earlier than Mark; a few days later, Mark took the train from Burns Lake to Jasper (with an overnight in Prince George) where he and I met and spent a night before driving back to Rocky. After Rocky we went to Edmonton and met with Mark's sister Barbara, her husband Tom, and three of their four kids. We had a good time with them at the Waterpark in West Edmonton Mall and the Telus Science Centre. Although we didn't have to go anywhere, it was a treat to visit with Bob, Sheila, kids and dog in August, when they actually came to Burns Lake! At Christmas we decided to do something non-traditional, so we booked a room for two nights at Esther's Inn (“tropical oasis”) in Prince George and went swimming and shopping. It was actually quite relaxing as we did our small amount of shopping in the early mornings before the crowds came out.

That's it for our news. As we head into 2007, we are looking forward to exciting new adventures in Burns Lake and beyond. We wish everyone the best for the new year!

Chris, Mark, Cameron and Meghan

For those of you reading this on the internet, click on the following link to see our family photos: www.flickr.com/photos/christina-t/

Check out our website at http://www.lakescom.net/~teskview/index.html

Naming my blog

My first task was to name my blog. I could have spent hours thinking about this! But instead I went to my dictionary. Tessellated means, "composed of or decorated with small blocks of variously coloured material arranged in a pattern or mosaic". This quite appeals to me, because I want to write about the many colourful and varied pieces that make up the lives of me and the people in my family.