Jay and Jaime's Wedding Page: The Big Moves, 1 and 2

Off to Calgary... August 2010

So we were settled in at our house on Sanderson Road for about a year. Our new home was just around the corner from my 1st house on Westwood. It was a nice little set-up, about 700 feet in total if I remember but not really conducive to 2 dogs, a cat, Jaime and a baby. There was only 1 bedroom on the main floor and a steep (today we call that slant illegal) staircase going up to the two small bedrooms upstairs.

But so it goes, I sold that for a healthy profit and let it ride into our second home on Sanderson. There were some troubles with the previous owners who decided to leave a broken motor home and a shed full of junk behind (use those subject clauses and demand penalties in the sales contract people). A few calls to the Realtor to get them to move it and hey, a month later we finally had the house to ourselves.

It was a handyman special but had lots of floorspace, nearly quadrupling in size from the Westwood home. I saw lots of potential but I also encountered a lot of problems as I realized the person who renovated it before had less experience than myself and a drinking problem. The house was painted completely primer white inside, the best feature being a fish tank situated in the wall above the entrance room and in what we made the kids' bedroom. It was a weird floor plan, like a bunch of boxes all linked together.

We repainted everything, Jaime worked hard on preparing the baby room, with help from my Mom. The colours were nice. During this time, I was working a couple of jobs (as usual) - I worked for Carrier Sekani (as did Jaime) providing family visitation support/supervision. I also worked 24 hour shifts at Taborview and graveyard shifts at ENCAAS. It was sad situations I was going into but over the years I have normalized it.

The burn-out in social services personnel is incredible. I can't believe Jaime picked this incredibly hard life as a career and I respect her so much for choosing it. I've worked with people whose only education was they knew how to play second base and were great at the job. I worked with others who I believed did more harm than help and they have their degrees. I've worked with families where I could see no reason why the kids were in care and with parents who should not have their children near them at all. I worked in gov't approved homes you would swear were crack houses, not foster homes. I supervised one mother who would later turn out to be one of the victims of that Ft. St. James serial killer and then went on to supervise visitations with the father and their two young kids two and three years old. Imagine them asking in later years whatever happened to mom. I talked in my blog about that kid who committed suicide in Abbotsford just days before aging out of care and the problems inherent in a system that hides these problems so I won't really go into it here. This is supposed to be a 'good memories' blog.

So we needed a change and wanted to be somewhere optimistic but still close to family and Jordan. Jaime applied to an agency in Calgary. She was offered a job over the phone. When we moved there, I applied for a job in their group home division and was accepted. I don't recall much of that time, can't even recall our trip over there to house search. I just knew I was getting out of Dodge, finally heeding the call of Alberta like my brother had done fifteen years before me. The new job was still graveyard shifts but honestly after PG, I couldn't imagine it being any worse.

Typical Mt. Robson picture

So we let my family know and Mom tried not to cry. After all Avery wasn't even a year old yet when we made this decision. We had another garage sale, managed to rent out our home to two nice ladies, one also a social worker, packed up a U-Haul with a car hauler on it for the PT, threw the cat in the CRV while the dogs came with me and we headed out east...