Jalyss and I have now been married a little over ten months. That means we've passed the marker of when we could have had our first baby, which is important to note when you're a young Christian couple in America. Forget cleanliness because fecundity, here at least, is next to Godliness.
In fact, when people meet you and find out you're newly married, they immediately start looking for the baby. "How many babies you had?" is their way of measuring the time you've been married. So now we measure all units of time in terms of how many children we could have had, with actual calendar anniversaries being of significantly lesser importance.
This is all just a long winded way of saying that we're not pregnant yet. Definitively. Jalyss took a pregnancy test on Father's Day, just so I could see whether I needed people to make a fuss of me.
This kind of fertility update is exactly what I imagine most people are interested in about our life, but just in case you were actually hoping for more than a gestational confirmation that we're still without any additions to the family, here's what else has been happening.
Jalyss and I continue to compete to see who can work the most jobs. For a long time she was winning, as I couldn't work legally in the US. I got around that by doing some babysitting and writing reviews of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.; a show with too much punctuation in its title, and too little characterisation or plot in its episodes. Neither of these roles made me the primary breadwinner, as I only earned $2 a article.
Fortunately I am now able to work and the jobs arms-race has really taken off, as we now have three jobs each. I work part-time at a local independent coffee shop, the delightful Mocha Monkey, where my main role seems to be confusing customers who think that I'm Australian. I've just started working two days a week at The Blessing House, which is hard to actually describe other than to say it's someone who has opened her home so that anyone can come in and relax there at any time of the day, and they need volunteers which I'm helping them find.
Finally, I work overnights at a crisis centre for disabled young-adults with behavioral problems. My first day there involved me being locked in the office by other staff to prevent a client from attacking me, so it's got the sort of whimsy that means you can't predict what will happen day-to-day, and frequently don't want to try. Usually, however, it's not that exciting; I'm there solely to support the main members of staff should there be a behavioural or medical emergency, so I go downstairs and sleep in the games room, which is a fair-sized space whose homeliness is undermined by the persistent stench of urine (a consequence of working in a place where people combine their responses to stress, displays of anger, and favorite activity into one ongoing attempt to find exciting new places to piss).
We've started to build some great new friendships with a few local couples which has served us well as through them we've got hold of an air-conditioning unit. This is essential, as I am already starting to wilt from Minnesota's summer. As fierce as their winter is, their less talked about summer is proving more of a burden for someone who is unused to temperatures in the double digits. Actually, it turns out that A/C has an exciting history in Minnesota, as the worlds first in-home unit was installed in Minneapolis in 1914. Of course, there's also the horrible correlation between the rise of air-conditioning and Southern Republican presidencies which is startlingly direct.
The VISA process continues, as glacial as ever. Entire civilisations have risen, fallen and risen again (although, it should be noted, not here in America) in the time it's taken for my four month VISA approval to happen, but I've finally been accepted as a 'Conditional Permanent Resident', an oxymoronic statement which says I'm able to live here indefinitely unless they decide I can't.
This is great news though because it means we are hopefully going to be able to come back and visit the UK this December. I couldn't leave until my VISA was at this point (or rather, I could leave, but I couldn't reenter). I'm looking forward to a real English Christmas; i.e. one without any snow.
Monday, June 22, 2015
Friday, January 16, 2015
On Winter
Forget war and other people, to listen to the people of Minnesota, winter is hell. The French learnt it in 1812 when they invaded Russia, the Germans learnt it in 1941 when they invaded Russia, and Minnesotans let me know all about it from the moment I moved here, months ago,
Minnesotans have a proud tradition of hyperbolic apprehension about the onset of the winter, and whilst they love to emphasise their ability to overcome the obstacles that the treacherous weather will bring, they also want you to know that you will get frostbite and die should you ever step outdoors between November and May. This slightly schizophrenic traits of describing a terrible, all consuming threat whilst also acknowledging that it won't actually make that much of a difference to their day-to-day lives is essentially the opposite of England's approach to the inclement climate.
We, after all, will readily accept that our weather is probably best described as tepid. Our summer is lukewarm but rarely scorching, and our winter is best described as 'nippy'; a word containing all the threat of a teething toddler. The worst we're expecting to face is a day of sleet, followed by three days of ice on the pavement and a national decision to take an ever increasing series of snow-days. Ditching work to go sledging is helped by a transport system that's crippled by a brisk nor'easter, let alone an actual cold front. We're a nation moving around on trains that can't navigate the wrong kind of ice, cars that collapse under a blanket of snow and entire airports abandoned for fear of frost.
But we take a perverse pride in our inability to deal with an annual event, as though every time it somehow comes as a surprise to us that the seasons have changed. The fact that it only happens once each year seems to be enough of an excuse for us to greet every snowfall as an excuse to just surrender to the weather and not go take part in our actual life commitments.
Meanwhile, in Minnesota it snows a foot overnight and nobody even notices.
Jalyss sent me out to shovel the snow a few days ago, A shovel isn't the same as a spade, I've learnt. You have to scrape the pavement, shattering through the lower layers of permafrost in order to shift the snow above. It's deep, compact stuff, forming the kind of strata usually reserved only for geology. On the top is a fine powder of fresh snow which blows around in the constant gusts, creating an icy fog that drops the line-of-sight to a few hundred metres and freezes the hair on your beard.
A beard is essential in Minnesota. It's not just a hipster affectation (like my record player), but a facial necessity. It constantly astonishes me that women make it through the year, because the extra cover of coarse hair is sometimes the only thing that prevents my face from sloughing away and my entire jaw dropping off, like a sub-zero approximation of the Nazi's at the end of Raiders of the Lost Arc, with less melting and more straight up shattering. When I say that my beard freezes, that isn't hyperbole. In the time it took me to clear the drive, my beard solidified, and the really crazy thing is that I didn't even notice until I came back inside and the heat melted it down the front of my chest. You know you're acclimatising when you no longer feel the need to keep track of whether your facial hair is forming it's own snow cone.
All of this is observed by the locals to be the hallmarks of an exceptionally mild winter, and whilst it's true that I haven't pulled a Captain America and woken up totally encased in ice more than two or three times, I don't especially appreciate the assumption that it gets worse than a wind chill of -40. That's -40 F, by the way. In C, it's - 40. - 40 is the temperature at which temperature conversion apparently just gives up and stops bothering.. Frankly, I don't know how to deal with double digit temperatures in either scale. I didn't even know that temperatures went down like that in anything other than a theoretical way. Meanwhile, everyone here seems quite disappointed by how easy this winter has been, as though all their doom-saying and warnings have been in vain, and the inevitability of my awakening to the harsh reality of life here has been lessened. It's as if I'd gone out on the moors during a full moon and come back the next day without having been attacked by a werewolf, and everyone is bitterly aggrieved about it.
It's like I won't be truly accepted until I've lost at least three digits to frostbite. Fortunately, it's only January, so we still have four more months of Winter to go. So I'm just going outside, and may be some time.
Minnesotans have a proud tradition of hyperbolic apprehension about the onset of the winter, and whilst they love to emphasise their ability to overcome the obstacles that the treacherous weather will bring, they also want you to know that you will get frostbite and die should you ever step outdoors between November and May. This slightly schizophrenic traits of describing a terrible, all consuming threat whilst also acknowledging that it won't actually make that much of a difference to their day-to-day lives is essentially the opposite of England's approach to the inclement climate.
We, after all, will readily accept that our weather is probably best described as tepid. Our summer is lukewarm but rarely scorching, and our winter is best described as 'nippy'; a word containing all the threat of a teething toddler. The worst we're expecting to face is a day of sleet, followed by three days of ice on the pavement and a national decision to take an ever increasing series of snow-days. Ditching work to go sledging is helped by a transport system that's crippled by a brisk nor'easter, let alone an actual cold front. We're a nation moving around on trains that can't navigate the wrong kind of ice, cars that collapse under a blanket of snow and entire airports abandoned for fear of frost.
But we take a perverse pride in our inability to deal with an annual event, as though every time it somehow comes as a surprise to us that the seasons have changed. The fact that it only happens once each year seems to be enough of an excuse for us to greet every snowfall as an excuse to just surrender to the weather and not go take part in our actual life commitments.
Meanwhile, in Minnesota it snows a foot overnight and nobody even notices.
 |
A beard is essential in Minnesota. It's not just a hipster affectation (like my record player), but a facial necessity. It constantly astonishes me that women make it through the year, because the extra cover of coarse hair is sometimes the only thing that prevents my face from sloughing away and my entire jaw dropping off, like a sub-zero approximation of the Nazi's at the end of Raiders of the Lost Arc, with less melting and more straight up shattering. When I say that my beard freezes, that isn't hyperbole. In the time it took me to clear the drive, my beard solidified, and the really crazy thing is that I didn't even notice until I came back inside and the heat melted it down the front of my chest. You know you're acclimatising when you no longer feel the need to keep track of whether your facial hair is forming it's own snow cone.
 |
It's like I won't be truly accepted until I've lost at least three digits to frostbite. Fortunately, it's only January, so we still have four more months of Winter to go. So I'm just going outside, and may be some time.
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