Almost exactly 6 months ago I moved away. I borrowed some money, I bought a truck, I left Ontario and ran off eastward for no real reason whatsoever. Not for a job. Not for family. Not for a girl. In fact I left all of those things back in Ontario. I wanted a change of scenery and decided that rural Nova Scotia was a good place to land.

So far, I haven’t regretted it very often. It is unfortunate when you are 26 and doing the ol’ long distance relationship thing that you swore you’d never do again way back in high school. For New Years I bought a six pack and watched a movie I had already seen twice. All my old friends are two dimensional now, pixelly faces on a computer screen. But I have space. I ride wild whales bareback. The people here really are more than kind to me, regardless of how hard it is for them to understand why the fuck I’m in their town, just in time for the brutal winter. Some people actually invite strangers over for dinner. It’s certainly not the place for everybody, but I was getting so damn mopey and cynical in Toronto that to me, this is paradise. A lot of my problems that weren’t actually problems don’t really have a place here.

The worst part is that I have two nieces that I actually adore and I couldn’t make it back home to see them for Christmas. Save the “Oh how sweet, he loves his nieces“; speaking purely practically, now that I took off, my girlfriend and I are too damn far apart to ‘make babies’ of our own even if we wanted to… It’ll never happen. We both still eat KD and live rent cheque to rent cheque. So if I’m not going to be a papa, I had better be an awesome uncle. Plus, Edie & Alice are just cool ladies. There are plenty of good reasons to adore them. I had planned to spend the holidays with ‘em, but the brakes started to fail on my truck, I didn’t want to crash and die, so the money I’d been setting aside for the flight had to be re-purposed.

Instead of shipping them more toys, I made a movie about how awesome they are at saving Christmas. I asked my sister to record a voice mail of the girls talking. I didn’t explain why, just that I wanted her to get them to ramble for a while. She sent me a few audio clips, which I then cut up and mucked around with. I edited myself doing some goofy voices in and turned their recordings into a story that had them helping people around my town during the holidays. Of course I bugged Colleen to draw the girls and some characters, she did, and voila. We created something to embarrass them with a few years down the road.

I sent the movie to Ontario and asked Dana (my sis) to show it to ‘em on Christmas after the excitement of present opening. She even filmed their reactions on her phone, watch below… I’m not sure if Alice is having a timeout or just being a weirdo.

So while this wasn’t really an Ain’t Friends project, Colleen definitely helped make it happen. As you can see above, the girls’ favorite part was that THEY WERE MADE OUT OF PAPER! I definitely miss the little buggers. It makes me happy to see them watching it. In the end, while there are obviously pros and cons to moving halfway across the country for no particular reason, if it makes ya happy, it makes ya happy. Piss on it, do it, find creative ways to stay in touch with all the people that make your life good. Enjoy.

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