Finally Caught Up!

John started work on Monday. I spent the day trying to make the apartment livable, rearranging boxes to make walkways so that we could get to everything in the living room and so that the furniture was all positioned correctly and everything was at least in the correct room, if not unpacked. It was so tempting to unpack all of the boxes, but I knew that I would regret it come September 1st so I left them alone.

I ventured out of the apartment by myself for the first time. I explored the lower floors of the building, found the mailboxes and the laundry. Then I headed over to the mall connected to the building and explored it as well. It was a holiday so most of the stores were closed.

The grocery store was open though, so I picked up some groceries and came home and baked a big pizzagna. It's one of John's and my favorite lazy foods. I've been known to put one together the night before a party and we spend the next day hungover on the couch, watching bad movies and eating reheated pizzagna. It's easy, makes lots of food, dirties minimal dishes and you can throw in extra veggies so that it's a little less unhealthy. I used canned tomato sauce (don't tell John! He's a tomato sauce purist) to make it even easier.

John didn't get home until around 7. He has a 50 minute commute each way so his work days are really long. But despite that, when he walked through the door I was immediately struck by the fact that I couldn't remember the last time he came home from work smiling and happy. It was so wonderful to see! We sat and had dinner and he told me about his day. He loves the people and he loves the job. I'll admit I had been nervous that we would get here and maybe it wouldn't be what he expected or he would clash with the people, or something else could go wrong, but it turns out I had nothing to worry about. So that is a good thing!


Tuesday, I again spent most of the day working on the apartment, this time tackling the bedroom and the bathroom. I went for a long walk around the neighbourhood, still trying to get my bearings, recognize the local busses, figure out where all of the amenities are like the bank, the post office, the drugstore. I'm slowly getting the hang of it.

I got my watch battery replaced and a second set of keys made as well. The locks here are pretty friggy. It can take me over a minute to get the apartment door unlocked (Note to Mom and Aunt Debbie: Don't worry, we have two deadbolts on the door too. We are safe!). The key maker actually looked at my key and asked me if it worked well because apparently I'm not the only one in the building who has this problem. He said the locks are 15 years old and have been discontinued so he has to order in custom made keys to cut for them. I'm not going to bother complaining though since we're only here for a month. Hopefully the next one will be better.

When John got home, we went out onto the roof. There's a pool up there and a rooftop patio. He gave me a lesson on which directions were which and how far we were from different things. The view is pretty amazing from up there.

Then we took a long walk exploring even more of the neighbourhood. It seems to go on forever. I guess that's not surprising given that Yonge Street is the longest street in Canada. We popped into a little sushi place where the prices were low and the sushi was good but the pieces were almost too big to fit in my mouth. I had a beef teriyaki roll and some veggie tempura. John had mackerel and eel. He said the mackerel tasted like it had been frozen which I guess is to be expected since we're not on the coast anymore. At the end of the meal they gave us each half of an orange that was cleverly cut in a way I had never seen before. I love that sort of thing. It poured rain while we were in there, but by the time we left it had almost stopped. By the time we got home it was pretty late so we went to sleep.


Today has been pretty uneventful, and I feel like we're starting to get into a routine. I finished putting the apartment together and spent about an hour pouring over maps trying to figure this place out. I had planned to go out and track down a fabric store but John borrowed my transit pass for the rest of the week so I ended up putting it off. He has to switch to weekly passes because of something to do with the fact that he uses two different transit systems in the morning, so I met a guy from kijiji and sold him John's old pass. Then I picked up some groceries for tonight's dinner and headed home. I revised my resume to reflect my new address and to target less impressive jobs. I'm not looking for anything fancy, just somewhere I can work part time while I go to school (assuming I get in of course). Still no word on whether or not I'm being accepted, but I did get my first piece of redirected mail today so at least I know that if they try and send me a letter, I'll get it.

John got home early today so I didn't have dinner ready. I did the cooking while he got settled in. We ate, watched an hour of TV and he passed out around 8pm. I think he's still getting used to these early mornings after all the months of late shifts.

That's it for now. So far so good!