Hello!

I have a blog? Really? Oh, yeah... So, in honour of this rememberance, have a real update about my life:

I have been back in Edmonton/Canada for one month and ten days. I miss Peter. =( If Peter is to be believed, he misses me as well. I've settled back in comfortably with my parents. It's cheaper and easier this way, plus, I get to be with my dog. =) Perhaps, eventually, I'll move out. We'll see.

I gave myself a week to get things together before I started looking for a job. The search was going so-so when I got a call from Frankenhorn, the musical instrument repair place. I'd been around to talk to people at those kinds of places and leave resumes. Robert (the guy who owns/runs Frankenhorn), had told me that he wasn't hiring, and, if he was, it wouldn't be until the end of June, when the summer rush would hit. But, yeah, then I got a call from him the next week. Turned out that the "sales" guy wanted to be gone by the end of June, so Robert had decided to train me to do his job and to cover for the woodwind repair girl, Frauka (I may not be spelling that correctly) during August, when she'll be in Germany getting married. I started on Tuesday.

So far, it's seems quite excellent. I'm refurbishing a couple of clarinets to familiarize myself with their mechanics and basic repairs, then I'll move on to flutes, I think. Frauka, who is training me in this, is only in three days a week, though, so the other two days I've spent with Louis, the "sales" guy I'll officially be replacing. I put "sales" in quotation marks because this job isn't like any other sales-type job I've ever had. Basically, it involves dealing with schools to get them to send their instruments to Frankenhorn for repair, instead of elesewhere. It does involve "cold calling" some places every day, but it's not like telemarketing--the teachers know who we are, and we call every week or so to tell them we'll be in their area and ask if they need anything fixed. There are also flyers to hand out sometimes that we just leave with the office for most teachers. Basically, it's a lot of driving and picking up and dropping off of instruments.

Speaking of the driving, the "company car" (*snerk*) is a standard. I never learned how to drive a standard, so Louis has been teaching me. I drove from the shop to St. Albert today. There were three stalling-related incidents, but, overall, I don't think I'm doing too poorly. It really helps that I know how to drive to start with. I have no idea how people first learn to drive on a standard--it seems like it would be a great deal to learn about at once.

This is the kind of job I would have gotten in London if I'd had my pick of jobs. I'd probably have wanted to work with Phil Parker, which deals only in brass instruments, but I have no problem fixing woodwinds. The thing is, though, that this job isn't in London, and it's not just a summer job, either--Louis' position won't really need to be filled until the fall, when school gets back in session. I've decided to stay at the job for a full schoolyear, so until next summer or fall. Peter, obviously, will have to be in London for at least a couple more years. We've decided to give the long-distance thing a try. This is hardly ideal, and, like I said, I miss him a great deal already, but this is the best thing to do, we think. A good job in a field I like will allow me to save up some money and get some experience that I can put on my resume for when/if I go to London or elsewhere with Peter. Robert knows that there's a chance I might go back next year, and he's fine with that. Honestly, I think I lucked out in getting this job, so I'm not going to just assume that I can go anywhere and do the same thing.

But, yeah, after being together for five years (nearly five and a half, now), being away from Peter for so long is sad and difficult. =(

Other than that, life is pretty normal. I've been hanging out with friends, something I missed desperately in London. Even before I was working, I had much more of a sense of purpose after coming back to Canada. It's nice to have more things to do and people to interact with. I asked my psychiatrist to lower my dose of meds so that I only had to take them twice a day instead of three times a day, and that's going well. Actually, I feel good and fine in that department. I have an appointment with the specialist who deals with they myriad of things that have been wrong with my ear over the course of my lifetime. Not too long before I left London, I started feeling pressure in my left ear, and it was... leaking, for lack of a better word, this sweet-smelling stuff. I went and talked to my GP about it, and she said that she couldn't see anything wrong, but that what I was describing warrented going back to my specialist. I doubt it's the cholesteatoma again--after the second surgery, I was doing remarkably well, and even if it was growing back, there's a large enough cavity in my inner ear from all the little organs they removed that a cholesteatoma cyst wouldn't be causing pressure yet. That appointment's in a little over a month, so I'll know then what's going on, hopefully.

So, yeah, that's what's new with me. What's new with whomever reads this blog?