10 Things I Miss

What follows is not meant to be taken too seriously.  We love living here and I would rather live here than have all these ten items on my list.  But sometimes around the table we will talk about what we miss in Canada - Garth always asks me if I miss the Spaghetti Factory (which was my fave restaurant) - just as a kind of check-in with each other or something to chat about.  Sometimes, too, I wonder if our girls especially Elizabeth remember the details of life in Canada so either Garth or I bring it up to jog the girls' memories about things.  Tonight around the table enjoying our usual Sunday dinner fare - pancakes - the topic came up and I realised that what I missed was surprising to me, small things that I would not have thought I would have missed.  So here is my list.

1.  Really cold Canadian milk.

2.  Ice cream other than vanilla.  Good tasting vanilla ice cream (actually it is ice milk for those connoisseurs out there) is available at McDonalds but any other flavour of ice cream is difficult to find.  I have had some yam ice cream and some corn ice cream and even some chocolate but it all has a certain underlying taste of cooking oil or something like that.  There is a Baskin Robbins and even a Swensons Ice Cream store but we haven't tried them yet.  I did go to an ice cream parlour similar to Cold Stone Creamery while I was in Singapore and while it cost a pretty penny (about $9.00 Canadian!) it was worth it!

  

3.  An oven that I know how it works.  Still working on figuring out our oven.  I haven't quite perfected timing so things aren't either underdone or overdone.  Everyone is understanding though; homemade overdone cookies are still better than store-bought.

4.  A bug-free house that includes no lice.

5.  A Royal Conservatory - based piano teacher for the girls.

6.  Food you can get easily in bulk, for example, flour, baking powder, or cereal.  With a big family we have to buy a lot of little packages.

7.  A dishwasher.  Garth would probably put that on his list too.  

8.  A public library.  We have access to the school library but we definitely took it for granted that in Abbotsford there were two large main libraries that were also linked to a larger library system that you could request books from.

9.  An occasional cold day.

10.  Being able to plug appliances in without various attachments, ie a transformer, voltage converter, plug adaptor.  I still have to ask Garth which attachment I need.  Appliances that we brought from Canada still get fried, for example, Garth's little coffee maker, and I think our toaster will be next (we have had flames coming out two times and if you want both sides of the bread toasted now you have to manually flip it halfway through).  I have used my hair straightner once though but so far so good.

And one more that would have made the list 3 months ago but doesn't anymore:

     

11.  I used to really miss twist ties but I have now made a satisfactory adjustment to using rubber bands which are a lot more plentiful here for closing up packages.

One obvious thing that isn't on my list but wasn't really a tangible thing like the other items is seeing the faces and feeling the bodily presence of family and friends.  Priceless!

This list is just "tongue and cheek", just a reflection of my thoughts today.

Oh, and my answer about missing the Spaghetti Factory is 'no'.