The Official Announcement

OK, you’ve probably noticed that postings have been sparse around here for the last little while. There are a number of reasons, and I’ve been holding off talking about them until the ink was dry on the paperwork, but now we’re ready to “officially” announce a bunch of this stuff.

First, I am pleased and delighted to announce that Dr. Patricia Genoe McLaren, a.k.a. Dr. Wife, has secured a tenure-track position as an assistant professor at Wilfrid Laurier University. Technically at Laurier’s newI think it’s about 10 years old, but that’s still “new” for a university.campus in Brantford, I should mention. She’ll be teaching primarily in their Department of Leadership, but the structure of the Laurier Brantford programs means she’ll also be involved with the Department of Contemporary Studies. Yes, this is the third impressive thing I was holding back on mentioning: that even in this ridiculously difficult academic job market, Trish has secured exactly the kind of job she wanted, and one she’s quite excited about for a number of reasons.

While she’s technically now an assistant professorAlthough I note she’s not on the faculty list online yet–probably more paperwork needs signing before she’ll appear there., since the job is retroactive to the start of JulyDon’t ask–I don’t understand academia, but the offer didn’t come until the end of July, and even then it was for a job starting a month earlier. The contracts are just done now., she doesn’t need to be on campus and teaching until January.

That’s a very good thing, since–as should be obvious–we’re going to have to move to Ontario before then.

So that’s the second thing: we’re moving back to Ontario.

I can’t answer any when questions yet. We’re about to list the house, and basically as soon as it sells (and who knows what that means in this market, although our agent is very positive about it) we’ll pop down to Ontario and buy a new place.

Yes, for the record, my feelings on this are, to put it mildly, not unmixed. I really like Halifax and our life here, but you gotta do what you gotta do, right? As a result of this I’ve been focused lately on the upsides of being back in Ontario, and trying not to think about the things I’ll be giving up from Halifax.

While matters are not fully settled yet, the odds are good that we’ll be looking for a place in Cambridge, since that essentially splits the difference between Brantford and Waterloo (which is one of the places where I could reasonably expect to find the kind of work that I am qualified for, and get the salary I am used to, if I ever decide I’ve had it with my current employers), and provides relatively easy access to Toronto (another such place), as well as to various cities where our families live.

On our recent vacation (one of the weeks there was radio silence here in August) we did take a day to walk around the Brantford campus, and then to investigate neighbourhoods in the Cambridge area, and found several places we think we could live. (It won’t be the kind of woodland retreat we have now, but the girls were already overruling me on that–even if we were staying in Halifax, they were going to force me to move into the city.)

As a consequence of the plan to list the house this week, we’ve been doing some serious work on making the house more saleable for the last several days. Most of this work has essentially been “doing things Trish wanted to do anyway that I was resisting”.

For example, we removed all the pine wainscoting from the hallways and breakfast nook, and repainted all the walls in those areas. This should have been pretty simple, but of course without wainscoting we had to put in baseboard, and the baseboard needed to be stained to match the flooring we recently put in. We replaced all the kitchen counters and the kitchen faucet. We did a bunch of other smaller things.

Most of all though, we apparently need to get a bunch of my stuff out of the house–it’s apparently harder to sell the house when it’s cluttered with tons of stuff. So, all the DVDs are packed. Most of the CDs are packed (and I’m on a mission to rip them all before they get packed, which might mean I never actually unpack them) with rest on track for packing very soon. The five bookcases in the middle of my office that form “stacks” between the shelf-covered walls have had their contents packed. The three short bookcases in the rec room, the bookcase at the end of the hallway, the bookcase across from the bar, etc, have all had their contents packed. Lots of other stuff is packed. Tomorrow some dudes will come and take all this stuff away to a warehouse where it will be stored until we get around to moving.

(As an aside, these 20 to 25 boxes of books is only a tiny bit of what we will need to pack and move. I think it’s somewhere between 1/6 and 1/7th of the hardcover and trade fiction. So there’s the rest of that, plus all the other kinds of books. The moving guy estimated around 10 tons of books, and “more than 200” boxes of books. More than anything else about this I will/do loathe the logistics of moving.)

So, to summarize: we don’t know exactly when (but before January–if it takes longer than that to sell the house we’ll just move anyway, either into a rental for a while or with bridge financing), and we don’t know where to (but probably somewhere in or near Cambridge), but we’re leaving Halifax and moving back to Ontario.