I drew this and made a wee animation of it on the flight yesterday:

But as soon as I had the thought, I imagined a voice in my head saying, “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be just fine.“

As the flight went on, I found myself growing excited about being in Toronto. I have this feeling that anything is possible here.

And my nephew was waiting for us at the airport!

I was a little delayed, as my case didn’t fit into the customs form’s little boxes (typical, for my life). I fit the “resident” bit, but not the “How long have you been away from Canada?” bit. Fourteen years!

I also had to go into a separate area to talk to an agent about having “Goods to Follow”, except they wanted me to have a list of everything printed out. Well, I haven’t done this before and didn’t know that was a requirement. Of course, being able to show it to them onscreen didn’t count, so the woman gave me a form, with eight spaces to list the things I’m shipping, plus their value. But it’s 92 boxes’ worth of stuff, and we didn’t even getting shipping insurance because it would take a year to go through and provide a value for each item (which is used and has no commercial value anyway).

So the bureaucracy begins. But so does the fun.

We had a farewell get-together with my family-in-law tonight. Seeing my husband say goodbye to his sister-in-law, then niece, then brother, the reality of our move finally sank in.

I feel like a murderer for splitting up their family.

We sold our car today (well, we gave it to Pum to trade in toward the purchase of a new car). That’s the last item on my KonMari list checked off.

In the last month, I’ve caught up with so many brilliant, beloved friends & met many more of Craig’s, both on the Continent and in the UK.

Now my inner introvert is completely burnt out from constantly being on the go and being endlessly “on”. I could cry, but not ’cause the reality has hit home — it hasn’t yet; there’s been too much to do.

We had our car evaluated today so we could give it to my mother-in-law (“Pum”) to trade in. That’s the last box ticked.

Time for my niece’s birthday party. Here’s the cake Pum made:

I drew and did writing work in ‘Spoons and Tesco today, and spent just as much time chatting with folks I know from around town.

Now. At the end. As you do.

So many people to see, so many visitors, so many dinners out. Yes, it’s just four weeks until Craig and I leave Caithness, and the stark fact of it is really dawning on me.

People here have been so kind to us, and the landscape is vast and gorgeous.

We went to a model fair at a local hotel when Craig’s family visited recently, and among all the scaled-down farm equipment, articulated lorries, planes, and boats, there was a table featuring all kinds of buses. When I saw the burgundy Lothian bus, I suddenly choked up.

I used to ride those buses into Edinburgh when I first moved to Scotland 14 years ago. It’s the feeling of those days that fuelled my novel, Idea in Stone.

It’s strange to be going back to Toronto. Exciting, in many ways: work is going extremely well (I’m illustrating a second book for Strategic Coach), I have dear, old friends there, and there’ll be such a wealth of culture for us to explore (it pains me that I’m missing the Toronto Comic Arts Festival by two months; everyone I admire in cartooning will be there).

Sometimes I wonder if it’s giving up, like I didn’t make a go of this whole Scotland thing. But I did achieve what I set out to: even according to “Me-Then”:

For days, there’s been a sporadic noise coming from the wall of our living room. Craig and I deduced that something must’ve fallen down the chimney and, since that’s closed up, was trapped there.

It was breaking my heart to think of a living creature trapped and afraid in our chimney. So I took off the vent cover behind the TV, and, sure enough, there was a rectangular opening to the chimney. I left it open, and before long, a pigeon came out.

After much flapping & chasing on both our parts, it squeezed out of the top living room window and flew out across the green.

Thinking there was no solution, I’d been trying to rationalize leaving the bird be to die, but I’m glad I wasn’t able to do that.

I took several big bags of stuff to a charity shop this morning, and some broken electronics to the recycling post. We’ve still got heaps of books to donate, but we’re finally making some headway.

Last weekend over brunch, we made an inventory of the things we own, and over the next two months we’re going to give most of them away and pack a few select things to ship to Canada.

I have an acute sense that all these possessions are just temporarily borrowed for the time I’m here on the earth, anyway. That’s handy when it comes to making decisions.

Meanwhile, I’ve been busy doing illustration work, and, since I want to get better at that, I created a “cartoon school” for myself: I took all the ebooks, PDFs, reference pictures, manuals, and video guides I’ve collected and organized them into a curriculum. I figure this will take me at least a year to work through.

The four main subjects are:

1. Draughtsmanship
2. Software
3. Content & Story
4. Meaning & Motivation

There’s so much good stuff here, and I have that feeling again like I did with the podcast that I want to share it and spare others the effort of finding these things from first principles — except a lot of it belongs to other people and isn’t mine to give away. So I’ll concentrate on just doing my lessons.

There’s so much material that I’m using dice to decide what to look at next, and today’s lesson was on colour theory. This brontosaurus was my test subject: