I’m one of the lucky people with whom pregnancy does NOT agree, and as a result, I am miserable. I am only half-joking when I say if I’d known it was going to be this bad, I’d have gone for a ready-made instead of bake-your-own.

Everyone I’ve encountered in the medical establishment seems to think this is charming. I want to punch them all in the face. Except the ones who prescribe the anti-nausea drugs. They can stay. I love them long time.

I know nobody wants to hear about the mood swings, or the exhaustion, or the nausea, or the hurling, or the pooping (or more specifically, the lack thereof).

But in the 12 hours a day I manage to stay awake (I suppose it could be longer, but honestly, I am so sick of being sick that I sleep a lot to escape the symptoms) that is pretty much all that’s going on.

So unless I win the lottery or spaceships land on my roof or my dog suddenly learns to talk, consider this blog on hold.

Go, look at the kittens, I will hopefully be back and feeling much better in a few weeks.

Well, I don’t know what she’d blog, but I think she’d be pleased.

I never really spoke about this (because frankly, it sounds a bit nutty) but I always had a “feeling” through my early 20′s that life would really start when I was 26. I don’t know why I latched on to that number. It really seemed like 26 is still young enough to be young, but finally old enough to be taken seriously.

So my 24 year old self (which is how old I was in 2004) was mostly focused on having fun. I ended the going-nowhere relationship with my boyfriend of the past 4 years. I started down a nearly-2-year-long road of some laughably bad dates. I began and grew some amazing friendships. I ran up my credit cards and lived for not much more than the day or moment at hand and did all sorts of things that are better left offline, rattling around in the brain cells that emerged from that period unscathed.

Because I always knew that after I got my reckless youth out of my system, ultimately I did want to settle down one day. With a man, and a dog, and 2.4 kids, and maybe even a white picket fence. I never talked about it much, because while I’m certainly pleased about life so far, and my own impending offspring, I don’t really find other people’s marriages or mortgages or kids very interesting.

Back to the timeline, I turned 26 in 2006. Met Neil the following February. Got a job that really solidified my current career path the following June, just before turning 27. The rest is history.

Speaking of the job – even a year ago, I was terrified of what having kids would do to my career. I enjoy what I do and have never imagined being a Stay at Home Mom. Finally, in the past few months, I’ve started feeling much more comfortable in my role and confident that I could return after taking an extended absence. I’m under no illusion that It’s going to be easy, but it at least seems possible, which is enough for me right now.

The Jen of 2004 knew exactly where she wanted to be by now, though had no idea how she was going to get there. But we’re both pretty pleased she’s arrived.

Also excited, and terrified, and overall overwhelmed by soul-destroying nausea!

You may remember posts from last summer and this past spring on our construction efforts on building the pig shelter and fencing in the yard. Well, they’re finally being put to use!

Except, we’ve gone from pigs to sheep!

Between Neil and I thinking we were moving, then my in-laws’ phone going down for a week or so (hazards of living at the edge of the grid), the pig thing fell through. Our original source sold all their piglets, and you’d be surprised at how hard it is to find piglets for sale!

Neil and I eventually went to the Fraser Valley Auctions to see if we could find any pigs that suppliers were unloading, but goats seemed to be the order of the day, along with a good assortment of sheep!

We left with a lovely lamb who lamented her way down the highway in the back of our car. And lamented in the ferry line. And lamented during the ferry ride. And lamented up the island highway (while she wasn’t busy nibbling on the poor dog’s tail). And lamented all the way into her pen, and all night, and most of the next morning until we put her with the neighbour’s sheep while my inlaws found her some friends.

The lamenting inspired her name: Agnes – short for Agnus Dei, the lamb of god. Also a movement in Mozart’s Requiem.

A few days later, Agnes was joined by two other lambs, Gloria and Miserere (have mercy), who were also known by their voices, raised to the heavens.

Thankfully (for my inlaws anyhow, I obviously can’t hear them from here), they have apparently quieted down and are now lovely little lawnmowers.

And come September (because we need to get them slaughtered before hunting season gets underway and any potential fall floods happen), we’ll have our own Requiem for a Lamb, and end up with a bunch of fleece and a freezer full of tasty sheep meat.

Besides, if you’re doing bio-dynamic farming anyhow, you really want to start off with ruminants, then follow with chickens, and finally end up with pigs. I think it might be a harder sell to convince my in-laws to go for the chickens, but we’ve got a year or so to work on them….

We very nearly moved to England. We’d have been leaving in a month. Neil had an offer from his existing company to go over and work on a project that was based over there. But for various reasons to do with the job and the project it went rapidly from being a very good idea to a really not so good one. So we’re not going.

I am simultaneously delighted and disappointed that we’re staying.

To be fair, I was also delighted and disappointed at the idea of moving. So many things I felt would be left undone here. Moving an ocean away from family. Leaving my job here. The excitement of a new adventure.

Now I just get to flip all those. Moving forward on projects here. More time with family. Staying on at my job. No big adventure.

It feels a bit like a zero sum game – but I can’t quite process that zero sum doesn’t equal zero emotion.

It’s amazing how much non-action can be an emotional roller coaster.

Of course we thought it wise to keep our moving news mostly to ourselves while all the details sorted themselves out. Neil still needed to get through some challenging times with his team at work. I didn’t want to rock the boat unnecessarily at work, or give up my job on the off (and now actual)-chance we didn’t go after all.

But at the same time, we were running around like crazy people in semi-secret, trying to sort out the details of international relocation.

Passport and visa research. Calls with our accountant about tax implications. Vet appointments to jump through the hoops to relocate our dog with us. Sorting out details of renting our condo. Working through the financial implications of an undetermined amount of time living off one salary rather than two. Putting off and pushing aside projects we had planned for here that were no longer practical in the face of relocation.

It’s been stressful. And while I thought pushing the reset button would alleviate some of that, it’s really just changed it.

Tying up loose ends and changing direction on some of our financial plans to reflect staying rather than going. Re-starting the fires under the projects we had snuffed. Figuring out what the rest of our year looks like, now that it’s in Vancouver rather than Oxford.

It’s ultimately good. Not only in a “good, we’ve sorted out this important life-event” way, but in a “this has forced us to re-evaluate what we’re doing here and what’s important” way, but in the meantime feels very strange.

I have no good ending for this.

Enjoy!

Anyone I know who flies with any regularity gripes about most domestic carriers. Myself included. And we all know that United Breaks Guitars. But a couple people working for United at YVR last Wednesday changed that for me.

We had an early flight, and were running a bit late in the morning. We have NEXUS passes, so never really sweat the lineups. The one big difference this time – we had a bag to check. The other issue? Online check-in wasn’t working when we tried it before leaving in the morning.

Check-in at the airport had been cut off 10 minutes before we arrived. That means we still had 50 minute before boarding (80 before takeoff) to clear security and get to the gate. We scampered over to the United desk, hopeful that we could grab our boarding passes and maybe have time to grab coffee at Starbucks after security before boarding. We weren’t worried.

Until we were subjected to the worst customer service person in the world. To be clear, she is not who I’m praising here. We got where we were going in spite of her. I would not wish for her to die in a fire, but I would wish for her to be decommissioned enough to never inflict her special brand of uselessness on anyone else ever again.

We stood as the 2nd people in her line for another 20 minutes, while she made molasses in January look like a contender for the Belmont stakes. When we finally made it to her desk, she just said “oh, there’s nothing I can do, you’re REALLY late (as if she hadn’t been ignoring us waiting for her for 20 minutes), made a big show of how terrible it was for us that we were checking a piece of luggage, and moved us to a flight three hours later, with a four hour layover, finally getting us to our destination 8 hours later than we’d intended.

I was not a happy camper.

We checked the bag that was apparently holding us back from our rightful seats, went through security and wandered down to the gate our plane was supposed to be leaving from. It was still 3 minutes from the scheduled takeoff.

And that’s when the heavens opened, the sun shone, an angel chorus rang out and the universe delivered unto us a saint named Laura.

Neil made small talk with her about how we were supposed to be on that plane right there outside the window, and she looked at us in total disbelief that her daft colleague hadn’t put us on it. You see, our plane was delayed about 10 minutes because it was late coming in and was still fueling. I find it hard to believe the pedantic twat at the check-in desk didn’t know that, but I’m no expert in airline operations.

We mentioned it was because we had a bag to check and that the desk staff were adamant that there was no way it would make it onto our plane (and with the post 9/11 security rules, you aren’t allowed to intentionally fly on a different aircraft than your luggage).

She made a radio call and in seconds had a response that our bag was indeed there, waiting for our later flight, and they redirected it onto our original plane for us. She printed the boarding passes and ushered us onto the plane. All this took her less than five minutes. Once seated, we sat on the runway for another 20 minutes waiting for fueling & maintenance checks to be finished.

In all the flights I’ve taken I have never, ever missed one. I was not eager to add that particular stripe to my record, and thanks to Laura at YVR gate 76 on Wednesday morning, I haven’t yet.

So you all can go ahead and dis United (and other domestic carriers) all you like. But as long as there are people like Laura working for them, I’m going to keep my mouth shut (and set my alarm 20-minutes earlier next time!).

photo from @julieszabo

Now, I will be the first to admit that (being in marketing) my tolerance for campaigns that miss the mark is exceedingly low.

But, of the people I talked to about the cookies, I’m not the only one who was a bit confused and left wanting (for substance, not cookies. The cookies were delicious.).

I want to like TravelMasters’ efforts – they’re branching out into a market that might make sense and they were certainly going in the right direction. But they could have done so. much. better.

If you can’t quite read the picture, the text is:

Kathleen’s Gingersnaps

1. Scoop premium vanilla ice cream in between two Gingersnaps. Roll cookies in toffee chips, wrap in plastic wrap, place in freezer
2. Spread chocolate spread over one cookie, top with slices of banana (sounds funny, but it’s delicious)
3. Mix a vanilla pudding package and 500ml whipping cream together to make “vanilla fluff”. Spread vanilla fluff over one cookie, top with sliced fruit
4. Spice up a roast pork gravy by substituting flour with crumbled gingersnaps
5. Grab a cookie and stuff it in your mouth….they are delicious on their own! Yum Yum!

If we can think to do that with a cookie, imagine what we can do with your next vacation
twitter tag #TMcookies

First, what TravelMasters did right:

• Targeted a conference where it can be reasonably assumed that many of the attendees are worldly, enjoy new experiences and have enough disposable income to take vacations. An excellent departure from the standard places travel agencies advertise (wedding fairs & home shows) and a good way to stand out!
• Provided a snack during the conference afternoons, when people are hungry and looking for a sugar fix
• Added some interest to the packaging to showcase their creativity
• Included a twitter tag to track conversations about the cookies, tying them into the social media part of the conference

Now, here’s how it could have been orders of magnitude better:

Who is Kathleen?! Sure, she makes a tasty gingersnap, but why do I care? Unless she is important to the company and its message (in which case, tell me who she is!), she is a distraction. Just call them “Gingersnaps from TravelMasters.”

Using the bag to tout their creativity is a big win, but the TravelMasters’ team did it in a way that creates a lot of cognitive dissonance (one of the few $3 words I still remember from university). I’m already at a social media conference, eating cookies. Now I’m reading about ways to be creative with the cookies. And out of nowhere: THINK ABOUT VACATIONS, QUICK!

I am not thinking about vacations now. I am wondering where the hell that came from, and wondering what it has to do with cookies or the conference.

How about instead, you put something on the packaging that shows how creative you are about snacks (which I’m already on) and travel, which is what you WANT me to think about?

Five things to do when you travel with our Gingersnaps (and I pulled these out of my arse in about 5 minutes):
1. Stash them in your carry-on when you fly to Paris (not liquid, so they pass the airplane food rule) for a better nosh when those intolerable nut-snacks come around
2. Share the cookies with someone on your bus tour in Auckland, make a new friend
3. Take some downtime, feed broken pieces to pigeons in Central Park
4. Stick your nose in the bag and breathe in the heady, sweet aroma when you’re walking past another open sewer grate in Thailand
5. Combat the munchies in Amsterdam. ‘Nuff said.

Adding the suggested twitter hashtag was also a great tie-in to the conference, but it’s a bit empty without a reason for me to tweet about the cookies. “If you build it, they will come” only works in Kevin Costner movies. You can’t just say “here, take your social media and get to it” – give me a reason to engage.

Along with the tag, ask me what other ideas I have for the cookies, or where I’d take them. Better, tell me to share my idea and enter everyone who shares into a contest for a travel perk or accessory.

Finally, maybe give me a reason to engage with your website. Put up a page where I can download the recipe (and while I’m there, remind me why I need you to book my next vacation).

And speaking of wanting me to think I need you to book my vacation, have a reason (beyond the cookies) for me to think that way!

I wandered up to the TravelMasters table at the conference and asked what made different from any other agency, and they gave me the line every other travel agency has ever given: “our agents have all traveled extensively, we have access to exclusive deals, we… (I tuned out).”

They had a captive audience in a pretty specific niche. Tell me something that matters to me and will pique my interest. I’m a tech-savvy person at a blogging conference. Set me up with a free travel blog, with a template customized to my destination. Give me a list of wireless hotspots in the city I’m visiting. Promise me one of the Lonely Planet iPhone apps for my destination. Something that shows you care about me as a customer, and understand me better than any of those other agencies who weren’t smart enough to show up at Northern Voice.

And on the chance that TravelMasters is monitoring for social media mentions and finds this – I’m going to New Orleans next week (first time) and Las Vegas two weeks after that (seventh time) – what would you suggest I do there with the cookies?

She’s my Mighty Ugly doll, just hangin’ out. She’s a bit of a misfit, and has just returned from a bender in Vegas, where she was found passed out under the craps table.

I’m quite fond of her.

Mighty Ugly was an excellent time. It took me right back to those days at the Children’s Festival where we’d be parked in front of a table of egg cartons, popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners and other assorted crafting detrius and told to make a monster of some sort. I used to love that. Turns out I still do.

There are definitely things about Battina I find ugly and challenging. The pinwheel/dice thingie I stuck on her front. The star on her back. Added only for garishness. Which was kindof the point.

I do like her wacky hook-feet though!

Getting my hands dirty, so to speak, in crafting again has made me less afraid of working with the materials. I reacquainted myself with fabrics and fasteners and notions. I glued and cut and stuffed and sewed and tried some things and gave up on others.

One result was Battina.

The other? I’m a lot less afraid of crafting and creating than I was before Mighty Ugly.

I still might not ever make something beautiful and pretty. But you know, ugly’s really not so bad!

This is odd. Not least because of all the things one could be frightened of, I pick crafting? Really? But it’s more than that. I used to sew. I was in a 4H sewing club. I made something cute. I won AWARDS for sewing.

But that was over 20 years ago.

Today? Terrified.

When I think of crafting, I think of spinsters wearing sweatshirts with cats on them, and making toilet-paper holder dolls, not at all ironically.

I am also a perfectionist. I am excellent at following directions. You need someone to put together your IKEA furniture? I’m your gal. But put a pile of materials in front of me and say “go! create! craft!” and I freeze up, start stuttering and quickly find an excuse to go be somewhere, anywhere else.

Except, I got the teeniest bit of hubris from putting together an official “craft” yesterday. Kimli was passing out pinwheel kits in the swag bags at her talk, which came with directions and all the materials I’d need, down to a needle and thread. I dusted off my old sewing skills, and gosh darn it, I made a thing!

Perhaps I can do this after all….

So it is with great trepidation (and a tiny bit of hope) that I am taking a leap and have signed up for the Mighty Ugly workshop tonight.

I am to make a thing. An ugly thing. An ugly on purpose thing. Without directions.

This is so far outside my comfort zone, my head may explode.

Perhaps that will count as the ugly.

Wish me luck!