Family

Maybe I gave this post such a general theme so I could stick this image in:

Dad’s been made famous and immortal by appearing in front of his house in Google Street View. He said he’s operating a flame thrower here, which sounds way cool. I’d like to think he was screaming “DIE YOU MOTHERFUCKING WEEDS DIE” but Dad doesn’t have my anger issues outside of traffic.

The big family news in my life is that after ten years of living far far away from me (Kitimat) my mother and stepfather are moving to the even tinier town of Enderby, which is at the north end of the Okanagan and therefore an hour or so away from Kelowna by car. It lies halfway between Armstrong, purveyor of cheese and Salmon Arm, uh, land of fishy appendages?

I’d like to say that they’re moving there to be closer to me but the plan was in place before my job materialized so I feel just as unloved as before. They’re coming here instead for the milder winters, to be closer to Vancouver and its doctors, and because friends of theirs already moved there and said it was nice (to be so close to the cheese, perhaps). Due to the, um, ringing of the death bells in Kitimat (the town is shrinking as the mills are becoming more automated and people are retiring elsewhere) they put their house on the market now in hopes of selling it and moving to Enderby within two years. But since Murphy’s Law is gonna screw with you no matter what their house sold in a day, and the new owners were like “you must be gone in 4 weeks”. So they’ve been kind of busy and I hope to see them at the end of the month when they’ve settled in.

Despite saying I’d be in Vancouver for the long weekend I decided against it for several reasons, mostly due to time constraints but also financial, since I didn’t know anyone driving into town and would’ve had to fly (despite assumptions some of my Vancouver friends and family had, not everyone here likes Vancouver and wants to go there all that often). But since I had three days off I could finally catch up on sleep and take the time to visit my stepcousin in town.

The good thing about step-relatives, in my experience anyways, is that you’re not really related so you can make a decision to be family, or not, depending on how you like one another. It sort of takes the pressure off, but if you do get along then you get the warm fuzzies of having bonus family who actively chose to take you in. It’s an especially good thing when your real cousins are in other countries.

I’d avoided meeting my cousin until now partially because I’ve been exhausted from my new job, but also because 1. she may not care to meet me, and 2. we’re supposedly twins separated at birth and I was afraid that if we touched it would create a singularity resulting in a black hole that would swallow the earth. My parents didn’t know about her until maybe 2006, and when Mom met her she was shocked that R. and I looked so alike that she formed a hypothesis that my father and stepfather are related, which is kind of gross honestly. But my stepcousin lived outside of Vancouver so there was no easy way for me to meet her and the world was still safe. Until now.

It’s true, we do have some creepily similar features, enough that her father-in-law mistook me for her at a distance, and her husband was confused that we weren’t biologically related. I look more like her than I do any of my real cousins, in fact, so cue the Twilight Zone theme music, please. She’s really sweet, though, and we have a love of cats (she has 3) and tea (I win there) in common so I hope we get to spend more time together soon.

Lastly, my real-but-who-doesn’t-look-much-like-me cousin Hannah recently gave birth to Jacob, via C-section so that he and I could already have something in common. While I normally think babies are gross, I hope to see Jacob (of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne) before he is no longer one. In the meantime I have been enjoying the photos I am seeing on Flickr, of which this picture may be one of the sweetest things I’ve ever seen.

This Thanksgiving I am therefore thankful for my family, both by birth and by marriage, and I look forward to seeing them all again soon.