Kat Dancing

My life now has a plan, which I will share with y'all. Backstory included as a bonus.

I had been planning to come back to Canada and live with Dan permanently since I left back in September. Everyone knew, everyone was planning on it, everything was cool.

Except that I found out I couldn't get a Skilled Worker permit like I was planning. And Dan didn't get a better job like he was hoping, or rather got a second and better job and then lost it through no fault of his own. And the family business suddenly got nationwide attention, which was of course fantastic but meant everyone's workloads were doubled.

But it was still cool. I was still coming to Canada.

And then, two weeks before I was supposed to leave, the girl we'd hired and I'd trained to replace me got an offer for her dream job and quit, leaving my parents with one half-trained, part-time, unreliable employee to do the three jobs I'd been doing.

I still went to Canada. But there was a lot more angst, and I spent a lot of time sitting around on my butt doing nothing and feeling guilty because my family needed me, doing delusitory job searches but not really applying myself to them because I was already sure they'd turn me down and because... well, because getting a job scared me, because it meant I'd stay in Canada. And my family needed me.

The workload at home increased. My mother's hints that they'd really like it if I came back degenerated into outright offers degenerated into begging. She and my father haven't had a day off work since I left. The single reliable employee is pulling seventy-hour workweeks. No one knows what the family's pulling: it's the first rule of self-employment - never count your hours, it will only depress you.

So I'm going home.

The very good news is that Dan is going with me. This makes me more happy than I can say. From a business standpoint it will be useful to have one person around who isn't terrified of phones; a fair bit of my mom's poor cash flow stems from her accounts only paying her if she calls up and nags them, and she won't call so she doesn't get paid. Not to mention the bills which aren't getting paid because no one has the time to do the accounting and the chaos-sinkhole which is the office that is getting gladly dumped on Dan's lap. From a personal standpoint... long-distance relationships are a strain. Living on phone calls was becoming increasingly stressful for me. If we'd had to seperate again it would have been hard on me. But we don't, and this is a happiness.

Of course, Dan, who has never lived anywhere smaller than Kitchener-Waterloo (combined population 400,000) and will now be living in Galax, Virginia (total population 7,000), so no one's pretending it's going to be an easy adjustment. Nor has anyone claimed that working for his girlfriend's parents will be anything but tricky. And it's a farm: long hours, shitty pay. The agreement is that we'll work through December and see how sane everyone is.

So the plan (remember there was a plan?) goes something like this:

In about two weeks, somewhere around the second of August, I take a flight home, where I'll be working, packing all my junk that didn't get packed before I left, and looking for a house for the two of us. Dan stays here and finishes out his employment contract with the University. If he's smart he will get some packing done too, but no one's betting on it.

Three weeks later, somewhere around the 22nd, I will fly back up here. I will help Dan finish (okay, let's get real here - start) packing and hopefully get to say goodbye to some people. We drive back to Galax early September. My car does not break down. (Yes, God, I'm looking at you.) There we do all the packing I didn't do (we are being realistic here) and move into the house I damned well better have found by then.

We work on the farm until the New Year.

By New Year's, we'll have stopped milking until March, which means we'll also have stopped making cheese. The Christmas rush will be over. At this point Dan and I will decide whether we can commit for another year or whether we want to move on. If we move on, that leaves two essentially quiet months in which my family can search for replacements and get them trained. I won't be leaving them in a bind this time. And, yes, that's important to me.

It's not much of a plan, but it'll do.


Revision Progress: 346 pages (of 385)
Changes: Line edits. Why is it all line edits? Is the book genuinely better towards the end, or am I just not revising properly? *angst*
Up Next: At a guess? More line edits.