Way Way Up She Rises

Hello there. I'm back. I will still post on the sunflowers and sunrises travel blog regarding travel and life in my temporary hometown of Victoria, but was feeling the need to vent express myself differently here, as I always have. Travel blogs are not meant for such emotion.

Okay, enough said. I'm currently living on the west coast, several thousand kilometres from where I was living this time last year in my cozy apartment Nova Scotia. The weather is definitely better here, and I am truly looking forward to a less stressful winter, with little to no snow compared to the blizzards that wreak havoc on the east coast. My nerves were near shot. So were my tires. While I didn't put my car off the road, I did come close several times and when I sold my car, I took notice of just how threadbare my tires were...wow, I must have been a pretty good driver to keep it on the road with those tires...

Anyway...Stormy is with me and seems to like the apartment. He is so adaptable, it's why I love him so much. I bought him a new kitty condo and put it in front of the large living room window. He also has a new bed, with a homemade afghan I made him, and seems to like that as well. He wants to go outside, which I don't permit, although I will take him for a walk on his leash occasionally. If you can call it walking...it's more like let's stop here while I roll around in the parking lot dust. Wait, I want to walk 5 feet. Okay, let me lay in the grass here for awhile. We don't get far...but I am never tired from our walks.

Television has become quite a distraction. I could sit in front of it all day, ignoring all other life forms. Why has this mesmerized me so? My television is on from the moment I get out of bed, until I turn it off to go to bed. It isn't always on a program, sometimes just Galaxie music stations. There are a ton of new programs out this fall, and so far my very favorite is the revamp of Hawaii Five-O. Love it! Well cast and so far has my interest.

Now, I do get out, and leave the sofa from time to time. Typically I'll walk somewhere everyday, some days much farther than others. Earlier in the week I walked for about 4 hours downtown, taking photos, doing a little shopping, sat on the grass in the sun writing for awhile at the waterfront.

My writing has not been as free flowing as I had hoped. It's still a little painful to think back to what is now lost, and I've found I just can't write about it unless I'm in a certain mood to do so. I almost feel like it's a block of sorts, but try not to make to much of it and reckon I'll be able to fill pages once I do get there. My topic notebook is slowly filling so perhaps once I fill that, I'll be ready to develop them from there. Going down memory lane on a daily basis can be very bittersweet, and I'm not always up for it. Weird how that works.

I miss my father every single day. It's just over a year now since he died. Sometimes I like to think of him as still living on the other side of the country. I have a million unanswered questions for him. I seemed to just run out of time. I moved back east in January and he died in September. It was quite a marathon to keep up with the needs of supporting someone dying at home with a blind spouse, and now it seems like just a blur in the past. I was the most tired and stressed I'd ever been in my life.

I still think about the house fire that burned through most of my belongings on New Year's Eve. I just want to throw up sometimes when I think about what I've lost. It isn't about the material things per se. It is about the memories I've lost - photos, home video, slides, my daughter's baby clothes, my childhood box of memories. It has affected me more than I have really talked about with anyone. I feel such guilt over losing so much history. I don't know how to reconcile that one. I still jump when I hear loud bangs, and it puts me right back to the night of the explosion that burned down my apartment.

So there you have it. Hibernating on the west coast to lick and heal my wounds. If some writing comes of it, groovy. If not, I will at least have had some rest.