Approaching normal

As moving madness blurs into holiday madness, I can feel a shift to a new stage in our little immi experiment. We're mastering the morning rush, we know which shops have which stuff (we even made rye bread and squeaky cheese), we have our brunch place and a few well-kept secrets, our friends are used to our being in the same area code. I've even been back to Edmonton twice already, with another trip coming soon. And if Mr. O gets this job, which is (dare I say) likely, then things will be different/improving/almost normal.
Okay, so Mr. O is still judging Finland vs. Canada matches in his head on a daily basis, but he's also starting to see that both places have both advantages and disadvantages. A woman I know who moved here from Denmark more than 40 years ago told me the other day that the thing that appealed to her about this place was that nobody was going to carry you through, you really had to make your own way. And it's true. While I'll never stop believing in the basic social net that the Nordic countries have so perfected, and you'll never convince me that free universal daycare and post-secondary education are anything but pretty damn sweet, I can see a point there. Living in Finland, you start to expect that the government will clean up every mess - the rampant alcoholism that spread its ugly all over our old neighbourhood comes to mind - and so the individual need not ever stick his neck out. Canadians, with their head-up-ass time-waste of a government, suffer from no such illusions. Even in Toronto, which is the quintessential every-man-for-himself city, people still help each other out. It's a ultra-thin lining, but there it is all the same.
A week ago, we were seriously talking about picking up and heading back to Stockholm, where Mr. O would have a sweet job and I'd take a Swedish course, make meatballs. In a way, it feels like the easy option. On the other hand, the thought of packing alone gives me vertigo. And Mr. O, fed up as he was, couldn't give up on the few plans we've already made on this continent next summer: a trip down south for a family wedding, a weekend at the Folk Fest with my sibs. There are still things we need to do here, and so Stockholm will have to wait. So will Berlin, and Helsinki, and all the other places we still want to go. Now that things have calmed down a bit move-wise, we can take a bit of time to have a good time, or just do nothing at all.