The nights get shorter and so do I.
6:33 p.m.
Hubby departed this morning for the job interview I’ve been dreading. He has also taken the only working vehicle and left it in long-term parking at the airport. We tried jump starting the Volvo yesterday. It absolutely refused to cooperate, even though the glove-compartment light flickered momentarily as the battery of the Subaru attempted to pour life-giving electricity into its own dead heart. It has been sitting immobile on the driveway all winter. I am supposed to call CAA early on Monday morning to see if they can get it going, and if not, have it towed to my garagiste where I can presumably get a courtesy car for the interim. I hate this plan, but it means the difference of going or not going to belly dancing that night.
Also, as the job interview approached, the real possibility of moving from here has been looming. There are pros and cons. On the pro side, if he is offered the job and takes it, I am practically guaranteed students who are bound to be better than what I’ve been teaching here. There will be more performance opportunities. We will get away from a department which is plagued with unhappiness because of the idiotic decision to hire on a permanent basis someone who is totally incompetent at his job, and then was granted tenure. The lingua franca will be English instead of French. But the cons consist of having so sell the house, pack up our belongings (which are considerable), and moving far away to the geographic centre of this enormous country in a location which no one will ever visit. My children will have lost their “home”, I won’t just be able to hop on a bus or a train to visit my mother for a weekend, and my brother coming from the Middle East to see our mother won’t come out there to see me (whereas he does come and spend a week with us now every time). I will have to leave behind, possibly never to see again, all the friends I’ve made here. I have already told my husband that any decision he makes I will accept and he has said if he is offered the job he won’t make any decision until we’ve discussed it. Gah! I hate this!
I went to hear a jazz band last night from a Toronto college which is returning from its recent tour in the UK. They were quite good, but too loud for the hall they played in. It consisted of an enormous brass section, congas, piano, drums, guitar, bass (the latter was the only girl in the ensemble), and vocalist. I left before the end because I had to go to the bus depot to pick up Little Princess who was returning home from being wined and dined by the grad school which has snapped her up. It was almost a relief to slip out early.
She had supped with her grandmother the night before who had been rather confused at first. Her washing machine broke and she spent the morning walking around a major department store looking for the necessary part, so that when Little Princess showed up at her doorstep, it took her a minute or so to remember who she was and why she was there. The next day my mother telephoned me to apologize to her granddaughter for her state of mind the previous day, but she wasn’t home yet. She is vacillating between wanting to stay in her own home and selling it.
My daughter and I walked into town today to have phò at the Captain’s, meeting her BF and his roommate for lunch. It was nice. I love hanging out with these guys. If we move to this new place, I won’t be able to do that. I’ll be a middle-aged woman and I’ll have to start acting like one. Dammit! We dropped into the pharmacy so she could pick up her prescription and at the bank so I could work the ATM, and then crossed the street to the beer store thinking we would get a little chocolate or something. It turned out that there were two new suppliers of edibles handing out their wares.
One was a Frenchman in a tall, white chef’s hat who offered us pieces of red-pepper laden pizza as we entered. He also gave Little Princess a sample of Irish stew which she gobbled down, even after having consumed a huge bowl of soup just previously. The other vendor was a woman with goat cheese incorporating different additives: pesto, smoked trout, red pepper and some kind of meat, as well as chêvre preserved in oil. I tried samples accompanied by a drop of specialty beer. Absolutely delicious! What luck. I love that kind of serendipity.
I bought a container of the pesto-riddled cheese, two bottles of beer, and a bar of orange dark chocolate. The clerk/manager dropped a cork coaster into the bag, his business card printed thereupon, and then we walked home again. Spring definitely seems to be in the air. There are still mountains of dirty snow lining the streets, but they themselves are clear, as were most of the sidewalks. Only occasionally did we have to skirt a puddle of slush-filled melt water.
I’m still thinking about my comments page. Is it worth it? People don’t really use it that much. Would I be better off getting a Haloscan? Should I bother at all? Maybe some input from my readers would be in order about now.
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