Category Archives: Canada

Loving the unforgettable

Posted in Canada, Finding Home, Fun, Life, Love by

It’s cloudy outside and the rain is cold, but I’m here sitting in our living room as Nat King Cole sings his classic Unforgettable in the background on the record player. It’s smooth, slow and romantic.  Today is a day that’s perfectly lovely.

Saturday often translates into cleaning. Cleaning day. Except that this morning my entire family (mom, dad, Zsolt and I) were positively knackered. Maybe it’s the weather. Well, actually, more likely it was all that dancing Zsolt and I did last night while attending a friend’s stag & doe party.

So we cut back this morning to focus solely on the living and dining rooms. They were covered with things from my grandmother’s apartment, which had been sitting around for weeks. Amongst the items were her record collection and record player.

There’s all sorts of ways you can know a person; going through their music is a particularly rich experience.

Zsolt wired everything up (it’d been disassembled during the move) and put a record on the player. The sound of Hawaii flooded into our living room with its hypnotizing sounds coupled with visions of women in bright coloured leis, gently moving their arms like the waves. I bet Lulu and Benoit used to play this music during their midnight parties.

We began to clean. Packing dishes, moving spice racks, looking at tea pots and serving trays. And as we cleaned, we kept on listening. Hawaiian songs were followed by a Starlight Concert and its incredibly beautiful compositions of Hungarian Rhapsody, Czardas, and something familiar from a Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Then I pulled out some Bing Crosby and was reminded of A White Christmas during this wet spring day.

And all the while, I was just so happy. So glad. Here we are with my family, enjoying each other’s company and doing trivial little things that are coupled with such lovely memories and emotions. Happy, healthy and cancer-free.

It’s for days like this I moved back to Canada.

Good times, hard times, stressful times, out-of-work times, simple times, lovely dancing times . . . all part of the journey, I suppose. And today is a good time. So I’ve got to be thankful for that.  And for Nat King Cole and his beautiful voice. And for the memories and impressions that come through music. For memories of Lulu. For my family. For good friends. For Zsolt. I guess, for a whole lotta stuff in general.

Taxing trials and after-quakes

Posted in Canada, Life by

This week has been a head-spinner. It’s been a week where I’ve had to remind myself the golden lesson that cancer has the instant ability to teach: just lay off the stress, girl.  Relax, sister. Of course it took me a while to remember this valuable lesson, since I was head-deep in my ‘what the frack’ mode .  . . but practise makes perfect, and eventually I gave up my load. You know what that’s like? Sometimes stepping away from a problem feels like an impossible option . . .  so then how do you make the impossible possible?

Chantal and me at the LGFB shoot.

In the meanwhile, great things have been happening. Over the past couple weeks I’ve had a photo shooting adventure, finished my eighth out of nine stories for my lovely creative project, blogged for this great start-up company (and wrote the posts well, if I can say so myself), and largely became used to being alone. In fact, I started relishing my walks to the cafe. Alone Catherine is a productive Catherine. (Though I still miss my man!)

But!

Then I tried to do my taxes, again, and my head spun off into the atmosphere. You see, last year I earned a modest amount of freelancing income. Yay! But at the same time . . . how the heck do I prepare my taxes as a ‘small business –other’?  Apart from the wonderful discovery that expenses equal deductions (cue me combing my past visa bill and sourcing receipts online. Oh my goodness, did I really spend that much on my writing . . .yes, apparently I did), this tax season has my brain sizzling with anxiety.

Zsolt and I were in disagreement over getting an accountant. He wanted to save the money, I wanted to save the headache – but when push came to shove, and my meltdown alarms were ringing with the complications of my situation, we found ourselves a compromise (with the guidance of my parents, and considering the money saved from all those expenses I dug up). I guess we all move beyond times when we cannot find solutions, it’s just that limbo between problem and answer that gets me all stressed and stupid.

Whew.

But you know what? Even after agreeing on a compromise, the stress was still resonating through me! Like after-effects of an earthquake – my mental health was having after quakes: nerves and emotions totally unstable.

Which is when I remembered the blog post I’d written not so long ago, and thought, “yes, what a good idea,” and decided to do something to counteract that stress. Basically, I returned not to my writing (though this is lovely) and not to my conversations, but opened my Bonusprint program and began picking through pictures of our Greece vacation, making a photo book for the company to print.

Ah, the loveliness of creativity coupled with happy memories. And as I indulged in something that made me feel good – a creative project that had nothing to do with taxes, work, or obligation (and yet wasn’t television, cause while that’s entertaining it doesn’t change my mood) I began to feel more and more like myself.

I have a two-for-one deal with the Bonusprint people, so today I’m going to make a second photo book: the summer of 2011. It was a pretty freaking glorious summer, even if the winter involved a lot of catching up . . . and so why not? Right?

Sometimes when you’ve dipped your head in the pool of stress, and even after you’ve  pulled back out and found a solution  to the problem . . . sometimes you still need to recover yourself. Heck, we all know about that! Anyone facing any kind of challenge has had to nurse the after-effects.

So there you go, photo-booking and it feels soooo good.

P.S. The above beautiful photo was shared by Jason Kang on Totem Brand Stories‘ facebook wall, and was snapped by the talented Donna Griffith at last week’s Lives Affected by Cancer shoot. This was before the return of winter, where Chantal and I look optomistic in our spring dresses!

Even lovers need a holiday

Posted in Canada, Life, Love, Travel by

Sitting here on the red chaise in my parents room with the front windows cracked open. Outside there’s are two crows calling (squawking) to one another. One of them is picking around on the front yard where we had throw some seeds over the winter, but it can’t see me staring at it from inside. This morning I woke up, exercised on the elliptical, read the news, made a cup of tea, and now I am here writing this out.

Last night we took Zsolt to the airport and he flew off to Hungary. Actually, he’s still in the process of flying to Hungary and I can only imagine his state of exhaustion. By the time he makes it to his sister’s home in Erd, he’ll have been travelling for about 24 hours on very little sleep.

This morning I woke up, exercised, made a cup of tea . . . had some yogurt, fixed the bed, read the news . . . and now I’m here writing.

Make a plan: so this is my plan. Morning will be for writing, as it should always be but often is not, and this afternoon I’ll be reading up on NLP in order to better write around the topic of coaching, mentoring and leadership. This evening I’ll gorge myself on reality television and maybe help my dad with making dinner.

Zsolt and I often separate for long periods of time. He’s from Hungary, I’m from Canada . . . so when the holidays roll around, (and considering we currently have no children) one of us generally takes off to visit family for three to four weeks at a time. And when I say, ‘one of us’ that really means I take off to visit family, and leave Zsolt alone to fend for himself.

So I cannot hold a grudge against his going away for so long this time. Particularly since he’ll be attending his grandmother’s funeral and, I imagine, helping sort out things that need sorting.

But I guess it’s been a while since we split like this . . . about 14 months since our last separation (Christmas to Canada, which lasted for five weeks.)

Zsolt is a man full of wise words. This is largely because as a child he had a book of proverbs, and tried to memorize as many as possible. And while they don’t always make sense after he translated the Hungarian version to English, this particularl expression (something, I think, that came from a movie) works well. He says to me, “Even lovers need a holiday.”

And so he is right.

This month will be focused on my world, and my projects, and my wonderful work. It’s nice to have this time, even if being away from Zsolt does feel rather bizarre.

Even lovers need a holiday. It’s okay to be away from one another, and turn the focus onto yourself. And I like that that’s okay.

But geez, I do miss him. After being together so long, I think I may have forgotten how to be alone. However, I reckon it starts with routine.

This morning I woke up, fixed the bed, made tea, had some yogurt, checked my emails, read the news, and now I’m here writing . . . and it’s going to be a lovely day.