Limbo

We are on vacation ~ or a staycation of sorts since we are still enjoying exploring Vancouver and have no money to do anything else.  Ha!  Jonny finishd his suicide Hebrew (aptly named, we discovered) with glowing results and I am so glad to have him with us all the time now.  I don't think I realized how tired I was getting until I've had his extra pair of parenting hands here.  Love it, love him, love staycation.

We are also headed into a bit of limbo.  Things have gone good with our move to bigger living quarters.  Our place here seems to have been rented out as of Aug 31.  This is good news as we were told that if they couldn't find renters for it we would have to keep paying the rent even if we were gone because we were breaking our lease.  Bummer - imagine paying 2 rents in Vancouver!  Sick.  Anyway, it worked out.  God is good.

But.

We don't get our new place until Sept 6 so we have 6 days of homelessness coming up.  We can find places to put roofs over our heads but what we really are trying to figure out is where to store our stuff until we can move it in.  People have been generous already, offering corner and crannies for storage.  And it will work out - but for now we're tired of thinking about it.

We are really looking forward to, say Sept 7, when we can be moved in (well not really as our furniture may not be coming from Alberta for until the 10th or so), ok so we're looking forward to Sept 12 (ish) when we can look back, laugh and say "remember when we lived in that little house and then had no home for a week while starting university and Amy starts school too."  Ha ha ... fun times.

It will all work out.

I'm also looking forward to Sept 14 because I am going to audit a course at Regent on the Life and Works of CS Lewis.  It will be my morning away from home, a chance to meet and talk with adult people and get the old grey matter working again.  Auditing a course sounds like heaven as you get all the information with no assignments or tests.  And it's free.  Couldn't be better.

There is a ton of reading with the course, a Lewis book a week, so I've been starting this summer.  I know I can't get through a book a week and still be present to my kiddos. But the point I want to make is I just finished reading George MacDonalds "Fantastes."  This relates to my Lewis course b/c Jonny told me that Lewis was very much inspired by this George MacDonald book when he wrote fiction, like the Narnia Chronicles which I love, and I was curious as to how.  It was a Fairie Romance and full of imagination and new worlds and talking trees and goblins and heros and swords and such.  I could see the influence it had had on Lewis.

The ending has made me think a bit.  If you ever want to read Fantastes, beware as I am about to ruin the ending.  So the hero has journeyed far and wide and had life changing experiences and then dies.  And by dying he exits fairy land back to England (or Ireland...wherever.)  Then he is struck by how he is to live his normal like again with all these new adventures and experience under his belt that no one he know had any part in.  He came back changed - and now how was he to live as a changed man.

This theme is common among most of my favourite books - Narnia and the Lord of the Rings being the most well known.  Adventures abroad, the road home and then what?

I have no deep deep insight - it just made me look back at all that I've done and experienced in the last years and wonder how each thing has changed me and how I want to hold onto the things I have learned and have them shape me and shape my family.  I'm sure they already have.  But I'd like to be more aware of it.

Boy, I sound like a university scholar already, and I haven't even started the class.  :)

What are your favourite books?