one monkey short of a barrel.

“I’ve got some bad news,” says my dad when I answer the phone.

Obviously, I get a little worried. When I left, my grandma wasn’t doing very good. My grandpa died at the beginning of the year, and she’s been going downhill ever since.

“Alright,” I say, hesitantly.

“Well, this is your first Christmas away from home, and there’s something you should probably know.”

Now I’m just confused.

“Your stocking, your gifts under the tree… your mom and I buy those,” he tells me, with this tone in his voice. It’s a tone I know well - it happens when he’s trying to be serious but he’s got a big smile on his face. “There is no Santa.”

He just makes me so happy. I’m going to miss his Christmas morning omelets.

Before I was even born, my gramma made me a Christmas stocking with my name on it. She made a matching one for both my sisters. They are beautiful, and they are a big part of Christmas for my family. We open our gifts on Christmas morning with my grandparents, but we open our stockings in my parents’ room first, just the five of us.

We were at Wal-Mart today, at 4 am, and James started pushing the cart towards the Christmas decorations.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked, since we’d pretty much just gone out to pick up envelopes for me to send my mom a disc of photos.

‘To get you a stocking,’ he replied with a wide smile.

I looked at the selection of generic stockings, red and white and green, with Christmas trees and glitter and fluff. I just couldn’t do it.

‘I can’t,’ I told him. ‘I already have a stocking.’

I’ve missed concerts and Halloween and Thanksgiving, but this is the first time I’ve felt like I’m really going to be missing something.

I have never gone this long without getting a haircut as long as I can remember.

Seriously. Once I started coloring my hair, I became a regular trim-every-six-weeks kind of girl. It was nice, to freshen up my color and snip off any split ends, and especially to keep my bangs manageable.

I currently don’t even have bangs. I miss them.

My last haircut was in June. Right at the beginning. I colored my hair brown again, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to afford blonde hair anymore, and that was that. I kept planning to book an appointment as soon as I went back to Canada, but it’s been months and I just can’t wait anymore!

And I know, it’s boring, and it’s just my hair, but I’m excited. And terribly nervous. I searched for a long time to find the fantastic stylist that I have back at home, and I just don’t know if this new girl is going to compare. I guess we’ll see in about eight hours.

It seems that whenever I am thinking about calling my mom, she calls me first. She called me today at 11 am, which she should know by now is only several hours after I’ve gone to bed and I won’t be up for quite a few more. I called her back at 5.

“What are you doing?” she asked me.

I told her I’d just gotten out of the shower.

“No, I mean in Kansas. Are you coming back?”

I explained to her again about laws and how the government here just won’t allow me to stay and work here without a visa, and she told me that what she meant was how much longer was I staying. Since I’d left with the intention of staying for another three-ish months and being home for Christmas, I thought I’d made that pretty clear. And then she asked if when I returned home, I’d be breaking up with my boyfriend.

Um, no. I don’t drop my entire life and come to Kansas for four months if I’m not planning on this being long-term. It’s Kansas.

So I told her that I’m happy here, and I love my boyfriend, and he’s happy, and he loves me, and I need to be with him. And then she told me that she didn’t want me to come home.

“At least not until you have a plan, and you know when you’re going back,” she said. I don’t know if she realizes that when you apply for a visa, they don’t give you an estimated date of citizenship. “Maybe you should stay there for a while longer, while you figure that out.”

I guess they’re not really missing me.

“I just don’t know if we should live together again,” she said. “It didn’t really work out the first time.”

The first time being the seventeen years after she gave birth to me.

I still haven’t applied for a passport.

My boyfriend lives in another country, and I’ve had the application filled out since July, but I haven’t managed to get the damn thing in the mail so that I will be able to come back and visit him after December.

I think I’m trying to escape reality.

I’ve also stopped worrying about visas, which has left me feeling like the time that I’ve spent here could have been a little - or a lot - more productive. Not that I haven’t had fun. But when I think about the part where I have to go home in just over a month, and have no idea when I will be allowed back into the country… it just scares me a little bit.

I’m thinking that maybe I need to stop having so much fun, and focus on some of the obstacles that I need to overcome to get myself moved down here, so that it feels like this is really my life, instead of some dream that I’ve allowed myself to enjoy for far too long.

And I’m still in Kansas.

It became apparent to me, while I was here, that I really had no desire to return to Saskatchewan. Of course, I missed my family and my friends, but I wasn’t excited about the idea of going back to continue to sort of work out of my little apartment. And I certainly wasn’t excited about the part where I had no idea how long it would be before I’d get to see James again. It was that part that kept me here.

We did go back to Canada for a couple days. I hadn’t come prepared to spend months here, so there were some things I needed from home. We also decided to move my stuff out of my apartment, so that I didn’t have to pay rent for an apartment I wasn’t living in. I got to see my friends and my family and everyone seemed excited for me.

So here I am. I’m sort of working from my boyfriend’s house in Kansas. It’s humid here, but I like it.

So, I haven’t posted in a while.

I don’t know if I can even begin to explain what’s happened in my life since January. I broke up with the boyfriend, moved out, and got a new boyfriend. One who lives in Kansas. Which is miles and kilometers away from me.

He came to visit a few weeks ago, and if any of you keep up with my flickr site, you’ll already know that it was an incredible two weeks. People asked me if I was nervous or scared about meeting him, but I really wasn’t. We’d been talking since November, and there were days when we spent all day on the phone together, killing first my cordless phone, and then my cell phone. I’ve never been able to talk to anyone the way I can talk to him. Honestly, sometimes I forgot that we’d actually never met.

When he left, I cried for three days. It hurt in ways I’d never imagined it could.

 And now, I’m going to Kansas next weekend. On the bus. For a month. Ish. And I can’t wait to see him again.

I miss how he touches me.

My only vivid memory of my grandfather is from when I was much, much younger.

After every meal, my grandpa would get up from the table and walk into the living room, where he would lay back on the couch and nap, with his feet crossed. While my parents helped my grandma with the dishes, my sister and cousin and I would play hide-and-seek in my grandparents’ old house.

I remember scurrying frantically around the living room, trying to find a place where it would be impossible to find me. I hated being the seeker, because I was terrified that my sister and cousin would jump out and scare me.

“Come over here.”

I didn’t even know he was awake. “Come over here,” he said again and winked, lifting up the blanket he was laying on.

Not exactly understanding what it was he wanted, I walked over to him. He grabbed me and tucked me beside him on the couch, covering me with the blanket and positioning himself on top of me before pretending to go back to sleep.

It was the best hiding place ever.

The last time I saw him was on his birthday, Christmas Eve. We went down to our cabin on the creek, with Grandpa bundled in blankets and wearing slippers, a warm toque, and mittens. Even wrapped in layers of padding, he still looked tiny in his wheelchair.

I gave him a bag of cashews. Last year, I gave him grapes, because that’s all he could get down. There was no need to buy him anything material - he didn’t need anything that anyone could buy.

In his eulogy, my uncle told about how his dad had called my grandma’s name in the middle of the night at the hospital a few weeks ago.

“What do you need, Dad?” asked my uncle, who was staying with him that night.

“A piece of tin,” my grandpa told him, holding out his hands to show my uncle the size he required. “About this big.”

My uncle told him that, unfortunately, he didn’thave a roll of tin or any tin snips, and asked Grandpa what he needed it for.

“There’s a hole” Grandpa explained. “It’s where the light is getting in.” *

I’ve never seen my dad so sad. He smiled when he hugged me, but it never reached his eyes. My mom, who sat a pew behind him during the service, slid a tissue between his fingers as he lifted his glasses to wipe his eyes with the back of his hand.

* It was later discovered that the light was coming from my uncle’s laptop, and even though I don’t necessarily believe in it, the symbolism was kind of nice.

I almost didn’t answer the phone when I saw the travel agency’s number on my caller id. In the end, however, my curiosity got the better of me, and I pushed ‘talk’.

“It’s just for the afternoon,” she pleaded. “We don’t feel comfortable leaving anyone else.”

And, because I’m a pushover, I gave in.

“You should have asked for more money,” said the collective voice of everyone I know.

I should have.

She said also said they want me over my spring break, if I have any time to give them. I very nearly said no, but I’m not that kind of girl. So I said I’d think about it, and think about it I will.

I want at least $12/hour. My time is worth at least that much.

I’ve never written an “opinion piece” before.

For a few months now, my editor has been encouraging me to branch out of my little arts and entertainment niche and start doing a column, a sort of regular little opinion piece about the community. As appealing as that sounds, I’m absolutely terrified to actually have my opinion published on paper, with my awful little picture running beside it.

He emailed me yesterday and asked if I’d be interested in giving it a try. His idea is for me to do a series of “Top Five” lists about the various cultural events that went on throughout the course of the year.

Which, of course, excites me tremendously, because I love cultural events.

But I am absolutely terrified. Who says my opinions are good enough to speak for the community?