It's not just a colour...

Trying to choose a paint colour should be a simple task. It seems like you should be able to just walk in the store, point at the colour you like, and take the paint home. But instead you find yourself swamped in swatches of colours you don't even like. No one likes beige. But beige is so reasonable.
The problem is, when you choose a paint colour, you're choosing your style. The room doesn't just sit empty with the beautiful colour as the main event. No, you've got to fill it with furniture. So if I paint a room robin's egg blue, I've gotta come up with chic and glam furniture to complete the look. You can't just stick a dingy couch up against the wall and call it good. If I want a nice clean white, I've committed to crisp furniture and bright accents. But white will make my house look like it's made of bare drywall. Yellow reflects in too many ways, and besides, how do you match furniture to a yellow room? And it's not called yellow, it's called Soleil, for your information.
So beige it is. Beige is a safe colour. No one will argue with beige. But wait, do you want a pink-beige, a yellow-beige, a green-beige... because you've got to keep in mind if you're getting a beige couch it's best not to have the beiges clashing.
Somehow I've got to figure all this out from 2000 km away from the house.

Insensitive Hag.

Are you someone's child, or someone's spouse?
When you get married, you have to make a conscious decision to become "family" to the person to whom you read your vows. I understand that you will never stop being someone's son or daughter. But at some point (hopefully, very early in the marriage) you need to decide who you're going to pledge allegiance to if the time should come. Who is your first priority?
In my opinion, your parents have already lived their lives. They got their chance to have a spouse and raise a family, start their own traditions, make their own choices, and enjoy some privacy. So when it comes time for their offspring to take that path, in my opinion, it is not fair of them to ask their children to put life on hold. It's not fair to their spouses. Now nobody has a chance.
Perhaps I am an insensitive hag for thinking this. I have yet to be in this position with my own parents, so I speak from a removed view of the situation. But maybe that is the most rational.

The trouble with hippie publications

You can't have too many cooks in the kitchen. It totally ruins the stew.
This is true not just for stew but also for managing a magazine. When you get enough people that believe their work is the best and should be showcased most prominently, eventually someone's going to get mad. That's why it's best to have a select harmonious few in charge who will accept submissions from the heated artist types and let the artists wait until it comes out on the rack to get all worked up about how there is not enough of their art in the magazine.
This can be hard to do when your mandate is to provide a community outlet for creativity. People start to interpret this in ways that the inventor might never have even considered. Perhaps their version of creativity is to trump others. We would be creativity squashers if we told them to check themselves!
In my opinion, the ideal creative-hippie-everybody-has-a-say magazine would work like this: the publisher, or person paying for the thing (*ahem!*) would ask for submissions and decide what is suitable to publish. Once all submissions are in, the team of selectively chosen harmonious making-it-happen-ers would work TOGETHER to put everything on paper and make it look pretty. This does not leave it open to the submitters vying for the most exposure.
As with any new business, there are growing pains that one must endure in order to reach a state where the business is well defined (thanks to being forced to define it). Sometimes it's best to put aside emotions and be thankful for challenges like this, because it will only help to evolve and chisel and define our ideas.

North-iversary

This day three years ago, I was sitting down at my empty desk for my first day of my new career, anxious and excited for what being the Hay River Hub's new reporter would do to change my young life.
I definitely did not expect that three years later, I would be sitting (still in Hay River) in my new house writing the editorial for my own newspaper.
The writing's a little rushed though. I have my second ultrasound in an hour, before which I have to walk my dog and make a quick lunch for my husband. Not to mention choose the paint colours for the interior of the new house, pick up the pilates lesson plan for the class I'm leading on Tuesday, and squeeze in an interview with the Hub (irony?) about my new newspaper.
A lot of people say they came to the North for a week and stayed for a lifetime. That used to scare me. I tried my very best to make sure I made it back to Vancouver in good time. But despite my best efforts, it actually felt more natural to see where this path would go.
In this blog, I hope to track the progress of a pregnancy, the development of restoring an old house, and the challenges of life in the Northwest Territories.