We have a rented furnished house to live in until July 1st. It overlooks the "Little Shuswap" lake and we watched the trumpeter swans out our front window on the lake http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumpeter_Swan
Just as an aside, about the swans, they were hunted to near extinction at the beginning of the 20th century. Out in the Chilcotin (an area west of where I grew up in BC), a man named Ralph Edwards is credited for saving the Trumpeter Swans by hauling grain up to Lonesome Lake in the 1920s and 30s. A book was written about him by Leland Stowe, called "the Crusoe of Lonesome Lake".
They only come in the winter.
Well it is now the 4th and every day is getting better and just now realizing what a very difficult time the past while has been. I said to Ken I just could not believe how much better I felt yesterday than the day before, and today I just cannot believe how much better I feel.
Our malpractice and privileges have pretty much gone through, and so essentially all the things that were issues in our working in Eugene, have been solved here. We have left two beautiful homes behind, and it is always hard, HOWEVER... the house we are renting is so incredibly bright it seems to make up for some of the shortcomings. I guess all the snow helps the brightness, I had forgotten how much light the snow brings into the house.
I am so happy to be back in the same country as my children, and how badly I feel for having been gone for so long from my parents. Looking back I am trying to remember why we went to the US.
We went because we wanted to be by the ocean. Having a bit of a wild older son, the very best days our family had together were days on the beach. So we wanted to be by a beach. Most people are unaware of this but there is very little ocean front that is habitable on the west coast of Canada, and what is available is some of the most expensive property in Canada, Vancouver, and Victoria.
At the time we left, the BC government was limiting "billing numbers", the one thing you need to posses as a physician in order to be paid. The govt at the time thought that there were too many doctors in the province and that that was why health care costs were so high.
We wanted to move to a place called Sechelt, and it would have cost us 600 thousand for a half time practice (so a quarter time each), since the way the system worked. Rather than end up in debt just for the right to practice we looked south.
A flyer was frequently delivered to a friend from the OHSU, the med school in Oregon advertising positions for doctors in rural areas, and we saw jobs on the Oregon coast, and eventually took one. It took over a year to get our green cards.
Recently preparing for this move, I went back over our annual taxes for the past 17 years or so as I was curious if we really DID make more money in the US and many had accused us as moving there for that reason. I found that of the 14 years we have been in the US, only one year did we make more than we had in Canada, and many of the years we made less than a half than we had made in Canada.
Anyways, I digress again. It is now Monday and we are on our way to Kamloops with a very sick dog, poor Rex has had diarrhea for the past 2 days, and was basically up all night, and most recently has been passing just blood.
We are not sure if this is perhaps his end, but it may just be an infection.
We will see.
We are otherwise doing very well up here and I will post this now, with the hopes to have some time in the next few days to post a few pictures. We have very minimal internet where we are.
Love
Janet
jankenb @ gmail.com
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