Stuff and Things

Since it worked out that I was the last one to do a story post, I didn't want to do another one, so I'm just taking a free week this week. The rest of y'all can do whatever you want. :)

(Also, I wasn't sure if we were going to do Sarah's suggestion of listing off options for directions the story could take; if anyone wants that just let me know and I'll add some on my last post.)

It's actually been a while since our last free week, so I guess I do have some stuff to talk about. I finally started working. I got a job at the local community college working in their Employee Relations office, which deals with employee grievances, student complaints against employees, and bargaining with unions. I'm kind of disappointed about the whole thing, really. From what we talked about at the interview, they said it would be part photocopying/filing, part database work, and part research. I've been there slightly more than half the total time I'm hired for and so far it's been all photocopying/filing. I know that it makes sense to hire students to do that stuff, and I don't mind doing some of it, but after four straight weeks it's getting pretty old, and I'm upset that they misrepresented what the job was when they were hiring me. On the bright side, though, at least I'm getting paid, and have something to put on my resume, and have new people to be references. Not to mention a reason to leave the house on a regular basis.

Speaking of house, I'm going to be moving very soon, probably this weekend coming up. I'm reeeeeally excited about it. This is mostly because I'll be moving back in with my best friend/former roommate, who I've missed a lot this past year that we didn't live together, even though we did still hang out fairly regularly. Partly it's also because I don't really like two of the three people I currently live with, so I'm looking forward to getting away from them. It's not like we hate each other or anything, they just have some habits that I'm not crazy about... like slamming doors, or taking my food, or having their loud drunk friends over at 3 am, or not checking with the rest of the house before inviting someone to stay with us for two weeks. So, yeah, it will be nice to get out of here. Though I'm not really looking forward to the actual packing and moving and unpacking.

About a month ago now I volunteered at the Jazz Festival, which was so much fun. It's my favourite festival in the city, all the music is always so good and I love getting to be a part of it. Not to mention getting to see the shows for free in exchange for doing something as simple as selling tickets or emptying garbage cans. The two highlights of the festival for me were Mike Essoudry's Mash Potato Mashers, who put on a heck of a show, and Besh o droM, whose show ended up being the most massive dance party.

There was something else on my mental list of topics to discuss, but I seem to have forgotten what it was, so I guess I'm gonna wrap up there. Hope the rest of you are doing well!

Knowledge is Happiness

I would really like to learn to speak more languages. I think it would be really interesting to learn something outside of the Germanic/Romance languages, and even more so something outside of the Indo-European language family, but yet I think it would probably be easiest to branch out slowly. I've been saying for the past few years that I'm going to learn Spanish, but yet I never seem to actually get around to doing so.

I would also like to learn to play more instruments. I already do piano, clarinet, and alto sax, but I would like to know more. I think I'd like to add a string instrument to my repertoire - guitar seems like the obvious choice, I guess. I've been thinking about buying a ukelele to start out on, so I might do that. Someday I would really like to learn the cello - I think they're such a beautiful instrument - but it's really not within my financial means right now, so that will have to wait a while.

I guess really one of the main skills I would like to learn is people skills, but I think those ones just take practice. Things like striking up conversations with strangers, or making new friends more easily, bringing up difficult topics of conversation - those are all things that I've just never been good at.

Knowledge-wise, I would like to learn more science. I really liked physics (and math) a lot in high school, but just not as much as arts, so I didn't really get a chance to continue on with them in university. My best friend/former roommate is a physics student, and one of my other former roommates was in engineering, so just being around them and talking about what they were studying helped a little bit, but I would really like to know more. I thought it would be interesting to learn some biology, too, since the only time I ever studied it was learning the parts of the cell way back in grade nine--but I tried watching Crash Course and after a certain point they were just so full of acronyms and unfamiliar words that I always came out feeling more confused than when I started, so I've resigned myself to just not ever knowing biology.

Anyway, as much as I would really like to know everything, those are the most major ones, so I think I'll close out there.

Making Christmas

I love Christmas.  I love everything about Christmas.  I love Christmas decorations, and Christmas food, and Christmas music.  I like the weather here around Christmas - refreshingly cold but not freezing, with just the right amount of snow.  I like family get-togethers, and I like all the time spent baking and cooking and getting ready, and I like the general cozy and cheerful atmosphere of Christmas.

This year is kind of odd in that it doesn't really feel like Christmas yet, even though it's less than two weeks away.  This year is actually the latest that I've had to do exams since high school, so I haven't been able to indulge in Christmasness as much as I usually do.  And the fact that we've had an abnormally mild December and only got one snowfall, back in November, really hasn't helped.  Also since I live with strangers I don't have a ton of Christmas decorations like I always did at home and when I had an apartment with friends.  I do have these two little friends on my windowsill though:

I also tried to make a TARDISflake during a study break earlier, but I gave up because I didn't have anything that was sharp and small enough to cut out all those fiddly little windows.  Here it is anyway:

I am listening to Christmas music now and it's helping a little bit.  Plus on Saturday I'm going to see the Nutcracker, so if I'm not in a Christmas mood after that there must be something wrong with me.

In which I say "so" a lot

Tunes

Favourite things are really easy to write about.  Hey look, music!  Bands!  Yeahhh!  Here are a few of my favourites:

The Decemberists are probably my favourite band.  A lot of my favourite songs are by bands that aren't The Decemberists, but I think they probably have the highest percentage of songs that I really like and one of the lowest of songs I don't like.  My favourite of their albums are The Crane Wife and The Hazards of Love, and I really can't choose between the two because they're such completely different things that it isn't even fair to compare them.

The Weepies are also really great.  Like the Decemberists, they have a very high percentage of songs that I like.  For some reason I tend to listen to them when I'm sad, even though there music isn't necessarily sad, but that just seems to be the way it works out.  I guess it's fitting, though, given their name!  I especially love their first full album, Say I am You, and their mos recent one, Be My Thrill.


Ingrid Michaelson has a very very beautiful voice and I absolutely love her music and there's really not much more to say about her than that.


Great Lake Swimmers have been amongst my favourites for a long, long time.  They came to Halifax last fall and I didn't get to see them because they sold out too fast and I was pretty much devastated.  They are super-duper mellow and their music is really good for quiet sleepy cold winter indoor days.


The Trews are a fairly local band, although they've made a name for themselves at least in Canada.  They were on Radio Free Roscoe once if any of you ever watched that show :P  They're the kind of band that just reminds me of friends and home and happy times and I always get really nostalgic if I listen to them too much.


Hey Ocean! are my new favourite band.  They're from Vancouver and I just saw them play in Halifax on Canada Day.  The lead singer's voice is amazing and their songs are just so catchy and I love their lyrics.  Plus they looked like they were having so much fun on stage that it was hard not to like them.

Not paradise, but it'll do

As I mentioned before, I grew up in rural Nova Scotia, but I moved to Halifax almost four years ago.  The house I grew up in was surrounded by hay fields, and there was a forest just beyond one of them, which had a perfect little skating pond in the outskirts of it.  Inside the forest were more hayfields, which were perfect sledding hills, and there were the foundations of old old old houses that I used to explore.  Our lawn was full of perfect climbing trees, and we had an old barn that still smelled like hay and animals.  My next door neighbours owned horses, and I could smell the ocean from home.  It was paradise.

So I'm not much of a city person.  It's noisy.  There are no trees, no birds, no animals.  The ocean is a good twenty-five minute walk away.  Everything smells like cars and the buildings clutter up both my wide open spaces and my beautiful blue sky.  Although I do like being within walking distance of everything, and the city does provide more opportunities for people-watching.

That said, I guess as far as cities go, Halifax is probably a pretty good one.  At least we have an ocean, and there are little pockets here and there that are sort of like real places - parks and graveyards and such that at least have trees and flowers and things.  We have the second-largest natural harbour in the world, and if you get up to take pictures of it at sunrise it looks like this:

Which is totally worth it.  Halifax also has a pretty fantastic music scene, although I don't take advantage of that nearly as much as I should.  We also have a bunch of fantastic festivals, like the Halifax Jazz Festival, and International Buskers Festival (the largest one in the world), the Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo (the world's largest annual indoor show), and a lot of others.  I'm always inordinately proud when my small city has the best and biggest in the world of anything, as you can probably tell.  There's also a really fantastic farmer's market, and the best used bookstore in the world (the one I mentioned in my last post).  So even if it isn't paradise, there are plenty of upsides that get me through until I can move back to my nice rural areas. :)

Raindrops on Roses and Whiskers on Kittens

I absolutely love fresh bread.  I have a bread machine, which is probably the most wonderful invention ever (other than, you know, the wheel, and electricity, and all those actually important ones).  I love being able to set it up the night before so that I can wake up to the delicious aroma of it in the morning and eat a warm and delicious breakfast that finished baking 5 minutes before I woke up.  I love the texture and the flavour and just everything.

Warm summer rain is just the best.  It rains a lot here, and most of the time it's cold and awful, but in the summer, when it's a nice warm rainfall I love to be outside in it.  The harder it falls the better.  I like to see all the people with their umbrellas, and hear the sound of the rain, and I don't know, something about a good rain storm just makes the whole world feel fresh and new and beautiful.  Two years ago my friends and I were camping and we ended up doing the hike out of our site in the middle of a tropical storm, and it was just the most wonderful thing.  I also especially love going to the beach in the rain.

I'm also a huge fan of used books.  I like to see what pages past owners have dog-eared, and what places they may have chosen to underline or annotate.  I like the smell of them, and I like to wonder if anyone else laughed or cried over that same book in the same pages that I did, and why they decided to get rid of it and why they had bought it in the first place.  I especially love used book stores, and most especially one nearby that has books absolutely floor to ceiling and boxes sitting haphazardly in the aisles because they just have so. many. books. and I always just want to know where they all came from and whether or not they were loved.

Another thing I love is discovering new music.  I do this thing sometimes where I just go to the library, browse the CD section, and pick out a few to listen to based entirely on band name, album title, cover art, and song titles.  If something catches my eye, even if it's a genre I don't usually listen to, I'll bring it home and give it a try.  I've discovered some really good music this way, and it's always such a thrill to hear a really good song for the first time ever and have it be all special and surprising and wonderful.

I think the last favourite thing I'm going to mention is blankets.  I love blankets.  I grew up in a big old house that was really hard to keep warm, so I was used to just using blankets all the time - curled up on the couch reading, sitting at the computer, whatever.  There's something about blankets that's just far cuddlier and more comforting than a sweater could ever be.  I have a variety of blankets of various weights and snuggliness that don't even go on my bed at night, they're just around, and I grab whenever I sit down anywhere that isn't the table or the floor.  Blankets are just great.