Musical Ride

This week has been an interesting one.

The most important development was Nate got a call to see if he could work starting Wednesday, which he could!  Hooray!  I might now have mentioned it on the blog, perhaps because I might have been trying to repress the fact that neither of us has been working since May 27th.

That's 3 months without work and income.  It feels like we broke some kind of world record...and not a good kind of record that you want to shout from the mountain tops about, or hang a plaque on the wall.

But hey, we survived.  And I guess that is what we would be shouting from the mountain tops: God has provided.  We had support of family and friends.  We had a roof over our heads, clothes to wear, and food to eat.  We are doing well.  It's a good reminder to be humble and to realize how little "stuff" you need to get by.

However, big on the "stuff" list we really feel the need for is a car.  Again.  Yes, we just sold the Jetta before coming to Canada, but in order for a higher level of freedom without cramping Ma and Pa Weeb's style over the next few months we realize we need to buy another car.

So this week (and last) Nate has been systematically researching cars and scouring used car listings.  I did a little but quickly realized that Nate seems to really love the hunt and since I don't really care what we get as long as it's reliable and affordable, it was much more time effective to let Nate do the looking.

We test drove a few earlier this week: one I couldn't get out the passenger side of the car once the door was latched and Nate had to release the door from the outside, another didn't even start when we tried to turn it on, another we walked away from due to some pretty major inconsistencies in what the seller was saying about it. 

Example: "You can drive it but just doing leave the housing edition please, there is no insurance on it right now, it just sits here all day."  (5min later when we asked to look in the trunk at the spare) "Yeah sure, let me just unload my suitcase and cooler of bottles we just got back from Niagra."

Tomorrow Nate has lined up a few more private sellers.  Pray we find a winner so we don't have to keep looking!

Other interesting notes about this week:  I ended up driving a friend of the family who fell outside the house to the ER.  I was the only one home when I realized what had happened and when she asked me if I could drive my response was yes, but when she asked me where the closest ER was....uhhh???  Not from around here...I have no idea.  

She said never mind, we will go to the one she knows.

So that's what we did.  I drove and she told me where to go.  After she was admitted and waiting for stitches, I dropped off her car back at her house, explained to her husband that his wife fell and she would need some stitches and she would need him to pick her up at and I walked home.  

But I will end on a positive interesting note.

Last night I went to the RCMP Musical Ride.  If you are anything like me you are asking what is RCMP?  Well let me fill you in.  It's the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  

And they perform every year with 32 horses and men/women that volunteer from the police force to train for this show.  They said they had around 350 application this last year and then they whittle them down to about 35 officers who are selected for the show.  Let me be honest and tell you, I'm pretty confident I'd never heard of this before or seen it on TV but apparently it's a pretty big deal and they even performed in England for the Queen's Jubilee.  So as I was hearing some of the background information, I was thinking more along the lines of classical musical numbers that the horses and riders moved to, but much to my surprise it opened with a few country honky tonk songs.  Not a single classical piece in the show.  But it was fun to see and it's obvious much time and training goes into this.  It was a good experience.