We have to go back Brent. We have to go back!

It's time. The final step in the PhD process....the defense, the viva voce exam, the day of reckoning.

We leave today to fly back to England. After 33 months, and five trips back and forth between England and Canada, we return to British soil for the last of the PhD hurdles. There's no turing back now.

This trip will provide revisiting of favorite haunts, reminder of challenges overcome and accomplishments acheived, reflection on life before and after England, refreshment of friendships and rejuvination through travel, fun and relaxation. At last some new material for the blog! Stay tuned as we will share all the details and some musings on life after the PhD upon our return.

p.s. Good karma sent my way on July 7th is greatly appreciated. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.....

This blog post has been brought to you by Crown Royal. The official drink of Murrays abroad.

CHEESE!

At Conrad and Gail's for an excellent dinner! It is really nice to have dinner with friends because that is something that rarely happened in England. Damn you Leeds!

Defeating the Balrog (aka the PhD Thesis)

I have recently finished a complete first draft of my PhD thesis: a major accomplishment. There were days when I thought this might never happen. Much work still needs to be done, but as Brent reminds me, the genius lies in the editing.

Getting to this point has brought lots of hard work and long hours. I feel as though I have been permanently chained to my desk for the last few months. I’ve had minimal contact with the outside world, minimal focus for things other than my thesis and minimal physical activity. Needless to say, I would not recommend this way of life for very long. Luckily, it has been temporary, and the end is in sight. I already feel like life is a bit better. I have lived through this and have come out the better for it on the other side. I feel a little like Gandalf the White after he defeats the Balrog in the Mines of Moria (see photo below). His description of these events to the members of the Fellowship when he returns bears striking resemblance to my life of late:

“Through fire and water, on the lowest dungeon and the highest peak I have fought him [the thesis]…until at last I threw down my enemy and smoked its ruin along the mountainside. Darkness took me. I strayed out of thought and time…and everyday was as long as an ice age on the earth. But it was not the end. I felt life in me again. I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.”

So it is the turn of the tide. There are 30 months, 292 pages, 150 sleepless nights, 2 moves between countries, 6 temper tantrums, 1000 chocolate covered almonds and 5 pounds of weight gain behind me. But the tide coming in brings with it a new perspective on life, a few weeks of editing and polishing, a fun trip to England in July, the promise of new opportunities for work and play, and a chance to remember what I like to do to relax and have fun. I am no longer Beth the Grey, but Beth the White. I like her already!

The Ruby Files

This may be the most pathetic post yet but I have to do it anyway. No I have not turned into a crazy cat lady, but I do have random wanderings of my brain when trying to write and edit my thesis (as all good PhD students do) and I thought I should share some of these wanderings.

Ruby has been living with us for over a year now. She has been my steadfast companion during the long hours of data analysis, writing and editing that have been taking over my life lately. I think she may need an honorary degree by the time I graduate. Some days it is hilarious how much her behaviour mirrors mine. She really has mastered the PhD student impersonation! Here are a few examples:

Sitting at my desk. It's pretty much all I do these days

No...I can't bear to read any more books or articles!

Is reading the paper considered procrastinating?

I can't take it anymore. I am quitting!

Brent reminds me there is an outside world


This draft chapter I wrote sure is nice to sleep on.

This pretty much summarizes my life lately. Somehow it seems more fun when the cat is doing it though. I think Ruby may have to be included in the acknowledgments at the beginning of the thesis. And I better start shopping now if I am going to find a cap and gown in her size for convocation. Dr. Ruby. That has a nice ring to it.

2008 - A Year in Review

A new year is upon us. We’ve now been back in Canada, back in our house and back in our old lives for over a year. Where does the time go? So we thought it might be appropriate to reflect a bit on the year of 2008, the highs and lows and to ponder what 2009 will bring.

2008 felt much like a year of building and regrouping. We were kind of like the Toronto Maple Leafs. We have been building for the future. In 2008 we were trying to get faster, stronger and better able to handle the new challenges that lie ahead. The other way to look at it - 2008 was a transitional year. We were busy settling back in to life in Canada and trying to figure out what our next adventures will be.

Here are some of the events of 2008:

January: Our family grew by the addition of Ruby, the Davis family cat, coming to live with us. She provides us with hours of amusement and lots of cuddles. She is even proving to be quite a big help in writing my PhD. Brent settled into his new role as Legal Counsel at Sun Life Financial and devised various coping strategies to deal with the daily commute to Waterloo.


February: Beth had a wee trip to Fredericton to visit with Kurt, Catherine and our god-daughter Rachel!! It was a snowy and lovely trip. Speaking of snowy we also attended the wedding of our friends David and Patti in Ottawa. We haven’t been that cold (or that drunk) in a long time!!

March: Beth returns to work!!! Brent starts to hate driving on winter roads.

April: Beth has her first journal article published! Brent continues his labours on his LLM thesis. The end is not in sight.

May: Beth and Brent’s sister Julie board a plane for Glasgow. Beth attended the International Confederation of Midwives conference while Julie toured around taking in the sights, sounds and smells of the city. It was amazing to see over 3000 midwives in one spot! Beth did two presentations during the conference: a major PhD rite of passage. Brent stayed home and went to work: a major PhD spouse rite of passage.

June: Our fifth wedding anniversary! Had a fine dinner at our favourite anniversary place – Inn on the Twenty.

July: Enjoyed some serious summer. Brent interviewed for and accepted a new job at McMaster University. Only a 90 second commute!

August: A week of holiday! We toured around some local sights including a few days in Toronto and in Muskoka at Taboo. The next week Brent started his new job. It’s similar to what he did in England at the University of Bradford. It is also a job which utilizes the knowledge and research he has been working on for the LLM.

September: Beth starts as a lecturer at McMaster and she has a book published!

October: Brent gets his LLM! Beth has holidays. Plus on the PhD front, she has three chapters and counting.

November: Brent continues to adjust to the new job – meeting new people and learning new things. Beth continues to battle the PhD. Still on schedule!!

December: Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night! Brent has two weeks off at Christmas!!

So what is on the horizon for 2009?

A few big events are scheduled to take place in 2009. In June it will mark 10 years since we first got together and six years of marriage. Now that’s something to celebrate! Also, pending natural disasters and bouts of temporary insanity, Beth will be finished her PhD before the end of the year. This also means that a trip back to England will need to occur so she can defend her thesis. We are hoping to take a few weeks holidays around this time as well so we can explore a few of our favourite haunts and a few new parts of Old Blighty that we didn’t have a chance to see the first time around.

There are a few unknowns lurking in the 2009 timeline as well. No one is really sure what Beth will do after the momentous day when she finishes her PhD? There is talk of doing a postdoc in Toronto but her options may be broader than that. Who really knows? The point of us doing all this work and travelling was so that our options would expand. It is difficult to say for sure but on the whole it seems they have. Brent has a new job that he really enjoys and Beth...well...we might have to wait until the PhD is over and out before we know what her options are but it seems certain that there will be more options now as a result of doing it and of our time in England.

So, what have learned? Say yes to England. Say yes to new jobs. Say yes to new friends and fun and travel. Welcome 2009 and we hope you are good to us.

Update and the Dreaded B-Day

Although certain members of the B&B team have been known to spend a considerable time on rightmove.co.uk planning a potential move, things in Canada have gotten a good deal better than the last post. To wit:

1. BMD's PHD is coming along swimmingly. Although being far away from advisors is a challenge, her sticktoitiveness is gaining a result;
2. BD's job is coming along swimmingly. It really is a pleasure to work at McMaster and, even better, to live so close to work.
3. BMD Postdoc plans are progressing well especially since one potential supervisor has offered funding until independent means are established. Awesome!

So, even though every phone conversation with a certain Derbyshire Midwifery Senior Lecturer tugs on the heartstrings, things are pretty positive. It will be interesting to see how things shake down.

In other news, the B&B team has celebrated one birthday already and one is scheduled to occur tomorrow. That is if BD were having birthdays anymore. Regardless of whether the birthday is acknowledged by BD, it is nice to be home where family and friends make a bit of fuss over such things. Cake! Presents! Drinks! Food!

All of these things are, it must be said, a titch better than just Facebook well wishes (which are certainly appreciated as well!)

Is there Life to England Yet?

Greetings! B & B intended to never post on this blog again. It's been 9 months since we did so and about 280 days since we left Manchester and arrived home on a very cold day in December. So why are we posting here now? Originally, the purpose of this blog was to keep people informed of our adventures in England (and oh what adventures they were - getting a telephone, the multiple mistaken trains to York, the briefcase bartender, the Glasgow bombing, the flooding, the trips to Dublin, Achill, Moffat, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stirling, the Whiskey Trail, London, Plymouth, Paris, etc.). But a funny thing happened on our way to staying in Canada forever: we miss England. Oh sure, there is lots not to miss - the crowds, the rain, the expense, the grimness (Charles Dickens was right, Leeds can be the most wretched city in England). But of all the things that we miss in England, it is the opportunity for BMD to work at her dream job that is the biggest. When we started the PHD idiossey we didn't think her options in Canada would be as limited as they now appear to be. So something has to give.

So the purpose of the blog has evolved. Now, the blog will serve as a record of our thoughts and impressions as BMD winds her way through the final stage of the PHD process - the dreaded writing of the thesis. Hopefully, when the time comes to make The Big Decision, what we have written here will help us. If all goes according to plan, it's 280 days until we'll need to decide. Decision '09, let's call it.

As of today, there are Midwifery professorships advertised at the following universities Ireland and the UK: Dublin, Dundee, East Anglia, Canterbury, Surrey, Bournemouth and Southampton.

Yikes, that's a lot of opportunity.

Ask and Ye Shall Receive

So you want to move back to Canada to spend more time with family?

When the gods want to punish us, they grant our wishes…..

We have been able to spend lots of time with our families since our arrival back in Canada. We lived with the Davis family for a few days before having lots of family help as we moved back into our house. We had lots of family time over the holidays…Christmas Eve, Christmas Day with both families, boxing day, an extended family gathering on the 27th, plus a few bonus activities like helping Beth’s parents move, a girls outing to the Ballet with Brent’s mom and sister, a house blessing, New Years with Stephen and Pleuntje, an impromptu trip to Niagara Falls, a few dinners here and there, dog-sitting for the Davis family puppy….and the list goes on. And, we’ve only been home for a month! Even when we don’t plan things they seem to happen spontaneously…we went out for dinner last weekend and who should arrive at the same restaurant but Clint, Jennifer and Brad!

All joking aside, it has been great. We have enjoyed every minute of our time with our families since we returned home. It is part and parcel of just what we were missing in Leeds. After all, we never bumped into Clint, Jennifer and Brad on a Friday night at a restaurant in Leeds.

Here are some pics of our fun times with family over the last few weeks….

Canucks

We arrived back on Canadian soil on December 5th, 2007. All the travel went smoothly and we were greeted with balloons and Canadian paraphernalia at the airport. The -8 degree weather was a bit of an assault on the senses when we walked out of the airport, but we managed to keep our whinging to a minimum. We had a wonderful dinner with our families that first night back before crashing into bed.

Since that day, we’ve been in the process of reacclimatizing to Canadian life. Our main focus has been to reconnect with family and friends and to ease back into life. Life in England did at times feel like some kind of extended vacation and although we were eager to get back to ‘real life’ there has certainly been some feeling of wishing the vacation did not have to end. This is inevitable. But we know that being with family and friends and a feeling of belonging are what we have been longing for and we have certainly found that again in the many gatherings and social events over the last few weeks.
















The white coating of snow on everything when we arrived, and the 35 cms of snow that fell two weeks later certainly helped remind us of our former Canadian lives and of a love of the white stuff that must be deep in our bones. We would gladly take a cold, snowy, day with a crisp, bright, blue sky any winter’s day over the grey, overcast, dark days of winter in England. It is amazing what a difference that can make. Not sure our bodies can handle all the Vitamin D we must be getting from the sunshine.















Other early highlights of our adjustment back into Canadian life include our amazement at the size of the grocery store, our first taste of buttered popcorn at the movie theatre, being ‘car’ people again, eating an unlimited supply of chicken wings, drinking an unlimited supply of Canadian beer, doing the biggest grocery stock-up of the year and having it be the same price we would pay for a week of groceries in England, baking Christmas cookies and not having to ‘get creative’ with half of the ingredients, putting up our Christmas tree, reacquainting ourselves with all of our furniture and other stuff that was in storage while we were away.

We have also accomplished a few major things in the last few weeks. We have a new car. We negotiated the lease for it on our first full day in the country. Not too shabby. Wonder what kind of a deal we could have gotten if we were actually fully awake and not jet lagged? We moved back into our house on the first weekend we were back. We’ve managed to unpack most of our boxes and are feeling pretty well settled.

So we are settling in. We are starting to understand the new ‘normal’ of life back in Canada and we are enjoying every minute of it!

A Grand Finale

Some of you might be wondering what we are doing during our last few days in England. Are we going to fade away or go out with a bang? We’ve been preparing for our return to Canada for a while now so several events have been a part of our process of saying goodbye to England. We had our final trip to London, we’ve been out for our last curry dinner, we’ve both purchased the quintessential English item to take home with us, we’ve taken lots of pictures, we’ve said goodbye to our local pubs and we’ve had our leaving-dos with our co-workers. Of course, the preparations have also included cleaning our flat, packing our suitcases and shipping all of our boxes. So what is left to do?

There is one small thing that will be the grand finale….

On my last day in the country I have the pleasure of meeting HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

Pause for gasps of shock and delirium to set in.

The university where I teach has been selected for a royal visit while HRH is in Sheffield. I have been selected to represent the midwifery lecturers while he tours our school's clinical teaching area. Along with a few other lecturers and some students, I will give a demonstration of some of the simulated teaching equipment we use.

Not a bad way to spend my last day, I guess. I am working on my curtsy as we speak!