Fall is here!

I had a happy day today. I walked to work this morning and though I was a little late because of a house key fiasco, it was nice. It was cold and I had to wear a big comfy sweater over the "uniform from hell" (that is its official title) and the air was crisp and it smelled good. The sun was out so that was warm and it was really pretty. Then I worked for five hours and it was not very busy so that was nice. Yesterday was insano-rama x 100000. We had all 9 tills open and we all had lines of at least five carts long! This is what happens when all the students come back for two universities! But today was calm and nice. I had an old man come through my till and today was his 58th wedding anniversary! Cool. Then I walked home and it was still fall. Fall makes me happy, for many reasons. First, this is my first fall in five years with red leaves. This makes me very excited! I also love the way things smell and the air gets crisp and it tastes different or something. I think the sky is a different colour of blue in the fall. You get to wear comfy clothes but no long underwear or anything and it is a good time of year. I am even looking forward to winter. People tell me I am crazy, and there are some days that I try to plot a way back to SA so I can skip winter again, but I like snow. It will be nice to have packing snow all the time. I am too old for making snow people very often, and will be too busy with two, maybe three jobs, but I like that it is possible to make one anytime I want. And firing snowballs at my sisters back is nice too. :)

So I got home from my happy walk and I had a nice nap with my cat. Then we ate a really yummy roast for supper and tomorrow I am making pilgram soup with the left over broth. Yum.

So that is my happy day. Yahoo.

A Pedestrian's Plea.

I, like Steph, have been doing a lot of walking around KW this summer. Though I have access to a car more often than Steph, I still walk to work most days, and when I am working at Pam's office downtown I walk between bus stops. Steph has given a small rant about being a pedestrian already, but let me add to it.I hate construction workers. I was walking to work yesterday morning and there was construction on the highway overpass that is between my house and Zehrs. There is no other way for me to get to work, unless I want to walk another 6km out of my way. The construction workers blocked the sidewalk on one side of the road and were blowing smelly tar smoke at the other side. This is a very busy street so I couldn't just walk on the road. They could have stopped blowing the smelly smoke for the 45 seconds it took me to walk by, but they just looked at me and kept going. I got to work coughing and smelling like tar. Not a very good start to the day!

Don't drink and drive!!

So, I know I will get bugged for not posting for so long, but the internet was down at my house and with my dad off gallivanting in Pennsylvania with my mom, I had no one to fix it magically. So I had to fix it myself. I finally did! I am great. So that is why no posting.

Another weird story about my neighbourhood. I left this morning at 6:30am so I had time to go to Timmy's before I started work at 7am (on a saturday, this is very painful for me). I was driving down my street and I saw a bike on the side of the road and my first thought was "it isn't garbage day, so why is there garbage there?" Well, it wasn't garbage. It was a person. I nearly had a heart attack because I thought someone had been hit by a car or something so I stoppped and ran over. I was really really scared!! But then I got to the guy, a kid of about 16 or 17, and I realized that he was snoring. I tried to wake him up, but I couldn't. He smelled like beer. I finally put it all together (it took awhile because my mind was working on fear!) and realized that this kid had been so drunk that he passed out while riding his bike home sometime during the night! Since the guy wasn't bleeding and the snoring sounded pretty healthy, I moved the bike off the road and went on my way to work. My hands stopped shaking about an hour later!

That is the most exciting this to happen this week. Oh, and I painted my parents living room with my sister and now I have to figure out how to put all the furniture back and they get home tomorrow. Yahoo.

Oh! And Annemarie called me tonight and she is probably coming to visit! I was in the middle of commenting on Steph's blog when she called, so that is why the randomness of that comment. Yahoo!!!

back to real life

It seems like a long time since I have posted here. Life is getting back to "normal" here. I have started working at Zehrs. So far the people are fun, especially the other girls who were hired with me, and the job is not horrible. It is however a lot more exhausting than it has any right to be! I came home after my first training shift and promptly fell asleep on our living room couch for three hours!! I have too many codes to learn, but aside from that the job isn't really very hard. It is just tiring.

I am not working at Starbucks yet, because they have not called me. I planned on calling them today to see what was up with that, but other things got in the way so I will do it tomorrow or monday. My parents are painting the living room, rather my sister and I are going to do it, but I helped my mom move furniture and wash walls. I also got the slide show for sunday all worked out. I am speaking at my parents church on sunday about my time in Africa. I have put together a nifty slideshow of some pictures and it is set to fun music by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Their music makes me happy. So, now the slideshow is finished - it is about 7 minutes long. Now I have figure out what I am saying for the remaining 23 minutes....

This week Brian Dyck was in town. He and his family were living in Mthatha South Africa when I arrived there last fall. They moved back to Winnipeg in November so it was nice to see him and catch up a little bit. While we were talking I started to notice some things that I do differently now that I am home. First of all, the way I go grocery shopping is a lot different. I used to go with a list but if I saw something else on the shelves that seemed useful, interesting or appetizing I may have put that in my cart too. Now when I go I have a list, I look at the floor on my way from aisle to aisle and leave as fast as I possibly can. Sort of ironic that now I work in a grocery store. Anyway, I have realized that the choices and variety available here are just a little overwhelming. I didn't have many choices when I went shopping in Mthatha and now I am not entirely sure what to so with eight different varieties of pickles or tuna. This making choices problem has also extended to my cooking. I used to day dream about cooking and baking when I was in South Africa in my tiny kitchenette with no oven and a poor excuse for a stove. But now I hardly ever cook or bake anything fun because it means I have to decide what to eat! I didn't have any power over what I ate for eight months! Now I do and it isn't as easy as it used to be.

So while some things are getting back to normal, I am realizing that some things aren't as normal as I thought they were. Sigh. But I have been reading Terry Prachett and Orson Scott Card so that makes me happy.

The End.