o, it's been a while since the last post, and I've actually had people check up to make sure that I haven't moved to Chechnya, or been assassinated by disaffected chipmunks, or carried off by the Bald Eagles which infest parts of the locality; none of the above has, in fact, happened.
I've been, um, adjusting to the new reality. Yeah. Adjusting. That's the ticket. I've been adjusting. The adjustment is, like many things, divided into three parts.
Part the First: I hit town, with the grace of a polar bear falling off an iceberg. I had plenty coming up to keep my mind busy.
There was the deck in the Valley, which is now pretty much done (there's a little tweak I want to do to the blocking, and in a few years it may have to be redone completely, in which case it will be a much better deck...) but it's done.
I hit the gym, and got my weight squared away for the moment. My VO2 max would still get me a non-speaking role on The Walking Dead, but there's always next year.
The Great Tucker visited us, and discovered Swallows and Amazons, and we took a day to go to Historical Sherbrooke, and saw the blacksmith and the woodturner gave him a top, and we got caught in the fog, and rode a cable ferry, and took long enough getting home that we had to stop for junk food, and then had DONAIRS for supper, and almost hit a deer. Best. Day. Ever. (Great kid, Tucker. Miss him.)
Part the Second: It starts to sink in that I'm never going to get back to where I was. There won't even be something closely comparable to what I left behind. This fact hit around early summer. The hitting thereof was not a happy time. I continued to do stuff (woodworking, typesetting, playing
Part the Third: Came the fall, I continued to play in the Brass Quintet, and joined a couple of choirs. I met nice people, and came to like them quite a lot. I have started to get back in the gym. Piano lessons in the new year are a possibility. The guy across the street has noticed my woodworking, and complimented my bench. I'm actually starting to learn some stuff about woodworking. I wrote a couple of pieces of music, and it's been hinted that more would be welcome. So, things are going better.
Except where they're not. Even now, in my "adjusted" stage, I still miss the Happy Pals at Grossman's, and regret with every fibre of my being every the 2000 Saturday afternoons that I could have gone to hear them, but did not. I miss Crusaders Rugby, and the squat sled at Iroquois Ridge Community Centre, and the John Laing Singers. I miss the hock shops on Church Street, and Niagara Falls.
I miss running up to Brampton for lunch with Ken and Ruth. I miss rep cinemas, and cramped little bookstores, and buskers in front of the Eaton Centre, and the Central Reference Library. (Need to know the engineering details of torsion boxes? Yeah, they have a book on that. They have a book on everything.) I miss the second hand stores on Queen Street; I miss Sayal's in Burlington.
More than anything else, I miss the Trafalgar band, and choir, and congregation, and everything about it.
So, it's getting better, for tightly constrained values of better. Next adjustment is realizing it'll never be the kind of better I was hoping for...
It's Christmas. I've been here about a year. Time to start carrying on.
Back to you shortly.
