Blogger it – return of the blog

As it turns out, working two jobs (one full-time, one part-time), trying to maintain relationships with the people I’m closest to (sorry everyone else), keeping up with hobbies and planning a life-altering move to another continent gets in the way of writing, or even maintaining, a blog. Who’da thunk.

But, since it’s 2024, and I now only have a part-time job and several nascent side hustles, I figured I’d give it another go. I have the time. I have the motivation – for now at least. So I’ve set up the blog from scratch, not even using a backup of the old one. I still have the articles I wrote somewhere, so perhaps I’ll repost those at some point. Or summarise them, since they were meatier than a Texan tomahawk.

The new blog is also a chance for me to build it better – content-wise – than before. My first attempt was definitely focused on very heavy reads, but I want to keep this one to shorter (if still well-researched) posts. Truthfully I don’t love reading 1,500 word blog articles, so why should I expect anyone else to wade through them? Also it really sucks writing 1,500-2,000 word articles, no matter how well you know the content. That’s not conducive for my motivation levels, so shorter posts it shall be!

2023 in summary

It’s self-indulgent to do so, but I’m going to talk about what 2023 held for me. I’m bad at reflecting on the past, so perhaps doing a little bit of that here would be good. People love sprinkling the phrase ‘life-altering’ on top of every little life occasion, but there is truly no other way to describe the past year. I’ll give you the summary here:

• I visited Canada for the first time in my life, with my then-girlfriend, in December 2022/January 2023. It’s obviously peak tourist season in Canada that time of year, what with the icy temperatures, snow and fog. We started in Toronto (Ontario), which has a lot of cool things to see, but is a city I didn’t really vibe with. Then we briefly visited Edmonton (Alberta), before heading on up north to Grande Prairie, and from there heading home. If that seems like a bizarre itinerary, it’s because it was. We visited Canada to activate our permanent residency – a process we started BC (before COVID, not in the biblical sense) – and which we fortunately concluded in late 2022. We were also here so TGF (then-girlfriend) could write the last of her exams to convert her medical license and begin practicing in Alberta at some future point.
• TGF received her exam result – a pass, of course – in April. This set in motion the reverse of what normally happens in the military. We had waited and waited, and now we really needed to hurry up.
• TGF became current-fiancée (CF) after I asked her to marry me in May and she foolishly agreed. She has committed herself to a lifetime of puns and dad jokes. And gadgets, so so many gadgets.
• I resigned my job effective the end of April. The end of a 10 year journey with the Bidvest Group, with a whole myriad of interesting experiences I’d have likely not gotten elsewhere.
• We cashed in our retirement funds, sold up investments, and then sold many of our possessions to move across to Canada. For esoteric reasons, North America considers 110v an appropriate voltage for electrical goods. So, bye-bye to all our large appliances.
• CF managed to arrange us three months accommodation – against all the odds – in the town where we’d need to spend our first three months of Canadian life.
• I arranged freight forwarders, packers, and onward transport in Canada for our 20ft container. Then we packed all of our remaining worldly goods into various boxes, helped load those into the container, and entrusted the container to a global logistics process that would move it nearly 17,000km by road, sea and rail.
• We said ‘auf wiedersehen’ (‘until we meet again’/‘goodbye for the present’) to our family and friends to move to a country where we knew maybe 10 people in total. Of all the things involved in emigration, this was the hardest to do, and these words cannot possibly convey how emotional this part of the process was.
• We sent our beloved cats Bentley and Leia via KLM to Amsterdam day ahead of us, with the help of a fantastic pet transport company. We would link up with them in Amsterdam, before flying on the same jet to Edmonton.
• On the 6th of June, we left South Africa for our new home in Alberta, Canada. We had five suitcases, one set of golf clubs, a carefully packaged PC tower and two bursting-at-the-seams-backpacks (packedbacks?) between us.
• Two days later, we started our new life in Canada by hiring a car, navigating to the airfreight terminal and collecting our two floofs. They’d survived the trip, and were intent on conveying their displeasure to us during the car ride to the AirBnB.
• We had three days in Edmonton. Enough time to: pick up essential supplies for the cats and ourselves, receive the first tranche of transferred funds from SA, buy a car and finalise insurance (processes that started in South Africa), and partially recover from the jetlag before driving three hours to a town called Bonnyville. This is where CF would spend three months proving she knew how to doctor, not just write exams, whilst under the supervision of a licensed Canadian physician (and ex-South African).
• The three months in Bonnyville (a popular holiday destination in Alberta) were wonderful and terrifying. You truly have to learn how to adult again when you move countries. Fortunately we had lucked into a houseshare with an amazing family, and we learned much of what was needed to adult in Canada from them. Eric, if you’re reading this, thank you.
• We managed to find a rental in our final destination – nearly 650km away from Bonnyville – before CF finished part 1 of her assessment. We took a trip to visit it a few weeks before we needed to move for real. The trip coincided with the delivery of our container, after just 3 months in transit from Johannesburg. With the help of an amazing mom and her kids, we got the whole container unpacked into our rental in just an hour and a half. Thank you, Corrie!
• We said goodbye to Bonnyville and moved ourselves and the cats and all the crap I’d bought (oops) whilst there. Being September, the days were already significantly shorter and the leaves were already getting their fall colours. The pictures you see are true, Canada in the fall is beautiful.
• CF started practicing as a licensed-but-still-supervised doctor in our new town, adjusting to working in both the emergency department and in a clinic as a family doctor.
• Twitter friends of mine from Edmonton visited us and helped make things feel a little more like home for a weekend.
• We experienced our first holiday season, and CF experienced her first birthday, without our families with us. We were warned these are the hardest times for new immigrants. The warnings were absolutely correct.

2024:

At this point, you’re undoubtedly saying ‘Ian, you are a filthy damned liar. You told us you’d write shorter posts on this blog’. And to that, I say, yes. You are correct. But I’m not a liar as Scrivener assures we’re only at 1,200 words. That’s shorter than 1,500 words. And hey, it still meets the definition of ‘a summary’, as ridiculous as that sounds. Every one of those points could be a whole post – or series of posts – on this blog.

I also don’t have much more to say on this post. 2023 was a terrifyinglytoughscaryexcitinglifechanginglyincredible year. I’m exhausted reading what CF and I accomplished and changed in a year. I don’t know what the year ahead holds (a paying job and seeing family would be nice), but I sure know I’m curious to see. I hope you join me, and hold me accountable to the updates I’ve promised. As a bonus in this post, I’ve included some of the pictures I took of our journey.