What I am up to

I sup­pose soon­er or lat­er I shall have to stop mere­ly drop­ping hints and wait­ing until I run into each and every one of you. The world — and our respec­tive place­ment across its crust — is going to require me to make some sort of com­pre­hen­sive com­mu­ni­ca­tion that spells out just what is going on, and spec­i­fies just exact­ly what I am up to. And I also sup­pose that there is no time that is real­ly quite like the present. This, then, is that afore­men­tioned com­mu­ni­ca­tion.
 
I am, to employ the cliché, “going back to school.” Nine years after I start­ed my final year of col­lege, I am begin­ning a new course of stud­ies that will, if all goes well, grant me some let­ters to put after my name that I can actu­al­ly use more or less reg­u­lar­ly with­out look­ing like a pathet­ic and pompous jack­ass. I am return­ing (as a lay­man, I should prob­a­bly spell out) to church work, and I am going to need an advanced degree to do so. That degree will be a Licen­ti­ate in Canon Law, or JCL, which I intend to gain through four years of full time stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Saint Paul, locat­ed in Canada’s cap­i­tal city of Ottawa.
 
“Whoa!” you will be say­ing at this point. “That’s a long ways away!” This is cer­tain­ly true; the geo­graph­i­cal prox­im­i­ty of this des­ti­na­tion to my cur­rent habi­ta­tion­al zone is so slight is to be almost com­plete­ly neg­li­gi­ble. It is hard­ly close to here at all. But we are prepar­ing to pack a selec­tion of our belong­ings into card­board car­tons and trav­el across much of both our coun­try and the coun­try that gives our north­ern bor­der its pur­pose.
 
[But this is trade­mark Bean­er blath­er, which we are try­ing to wean our­selves off. A more restrained, nat­ur­al tone will now be attempt­ed for the remain­der of this post. We apol­o­gize for any styl­is­tic incon­ve­nience this may have casued. (The Edi­tor)]
 
I will be accom­pa­nied on this odyssey by my wife and two young sons. This is, with­out con­test, the great­est adven­ture that our young fam­i­ly has attempt­ed, but we are large­ly able to bal­ance the ter­ror of the unknown with the excite­ment of a bright new future burst­ing with pos­si­bil­i­ty. The pack­ing is pro­gress­ing nice­ly, fol­low­ing an impres­sive amount of let­ting go; we have been able to purge large vol­umes of things from our life, fair­ly pain­less­ly, which is an achieve­ment of note tak­en all by itself. 

So, at the end of this month the four of us will board a train at the Saint Paul Amtrak depot and head east, through Chica­go to Detroit, where we will cross the riv­er and the bor­der and con­tin­ue our rail jour­ney from Wind­sor, ON through Toron­to to the down­town Ottawa sta­tion, mere blocks from my new edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tion. There are many things to do yet before our depar­ture, and each day seems to slip by quick­er than we would like. We hope to be able to spend time with as many of you as pos­si­ble before we leave, and we will do our best to keep in touch while we are away. More details and updates to fol­low, of course…