Back in the Saddle

Welp, we've made the move and are becoming nicely settled in our beautiful new apartment, thank you very much. We moved on the hottest day of the year, loading the U-Haul by ourselves at the Wolfville end.



Luckily, our friends Mike, Cliff, and Jesse helped us make light work of it at this end. The place is full of sunlight and storage space; has a big kitchen, high ceilings, a big deck, and hardwood floors; and is in a really pleasant little neighbourhood at an arm's length from the hubbub and hipsters of downtown. OK, maybe there are a few hipsters around...

Alison and I each have our own office. There's still a fair amount of stuff to be put away or on the walls, and we need a few more shelves, but so far it's working out really, really well. I've been getting a decent amount of design work to do from quite a few different sources, some of whom are telling their friends about me. On Friday I went back to Acadia to do a day's worth of little jobs for them onsite, at freelance rates, and pick up the files I'll need to finish off a couple of big projects I'd started before I left. There's barely been time, but I've also been trying to work on branding my own business so I can get some business cards out there, a website, etc. That's the real fun part.

On my first official day of freelancing, I set up my desk and computer and sat down to work on a couple of newspaper ads. Only the iMac wouldn't start up. I tried everything, but I couldn't get anything to appear on the monitor — not even a sad face or a little hard drive with a question mark on it. A trip to the local Mac store revealed that the RAM needed to be replaced. So, a hundred bucks and a few hours later it was working fine again. But that was quite a scare. I've since burned everything important on the hard drive onto discs.

Another little unexpected cost has been Buster, whose left eyelid started looking all swollen a week and a half ago. When we took him to the vet's, they discovered a large scratch in his cornea. To find it, they had to put drops of blue stuff in his eye and then shine something like a laser pointer into it. He wasn't very happy about being in there to begin with, so there was an episode wherein the vet and her assistant had to grab the screaming and spitting Tasmanian Devil off the floor, wrap him tightly in a towel, and put one of those lampshade collars around his neck. Somewhere in there he knocked out one of his lower front teeth. They gave us a tube of goo to put in his eye three times a day for a week, charged us 150 dollars, and told us if it didn't work he'd have to have eye surgery. Plus they strongly suggested we have his teeth properly cleaned and extracted where necessary. We thought about the thousands of dollars this would all cost in order to keep a fourteen-year-old cat alive who knows how much longer, decided a toothless Buster is not such a big deal, and crossed our fingers that having him hate us three times a day over the eye drops would solve that particular problem. Luckily, it appears to have worked. I.e. his eye seemed to us to be better and when we took him back into the vet she charged us another 85 dollars to tell us that his eye seemed to be better.

Since being back there've been band practices, some recording, softball games, a rock show taken in, a couple of decent movies rented (Wise Blood, Waiting for Guffman), and plenty of hanging out with pals. Two hurricanes in there too, but nothing very spectacular. Next weekend The Lodge play their first show in awhile. I can walk or bike everywhere I need to go. I randomly run into people I know all over the place. And the Commons was not even completely ruined by Paul McCartney and KISS. There's a reason why I love this town.

P.S. Here's some photos of our Maine vacation. It was pleasant as hell.