You'll Never Outfox the Fox

Wow. It's been 10 days already since my last entry and I feel like I have so much to write. But I will have to summarize now and catch up later because there's only so much time in a day and I've already exceeded today's limit.

The first couple days after I arrived here I can barely even remember now. I had nothing much to say then. But after two days of downtime I was suddenly swept up in a whirlwind of action. I arrived last Monday night (i.e. Tuesday morning) and on Tuesday evening my mother and I went into Charlottetown to pick up my music for "Anne" and to have dinner. I have no idea what we did on Wednesday, but on Thursday I began driving into the city every evening for work. The show is three hours long and Charlottetown is an hour drive from here. I like to be a little early so I've been leaving the house at 5:30pm and returning home after the show at 11:30pm. The commute alone has sort of left me with limited hours in the day, but I also relish each hour of "me time" in the car. I have been remarkably (and uncharacteristically) tired by the time I get home, though.

A funny thing happened as soon as I got here. My body suddenly decided that after many many years of being practically nocturnal, it would instead like to be in bed (and preferably asleep) by midnight -- and we're an hour ahead of Toronto here so when I got here midnight felt like 11:00pm to me. Getting up in the mornings is still challenging, but by that I mean that setting alarms or being woken up by my mother at 8:30 guarantees me out of bed by about 9:15 or 9:30. My schedule, even up to the night I spent in the motel before getting here, was bed between 4:00-5:00am and waking up close to noon (on either side, depending on the day). So for such a drastic change to happen so suddenly and without any fuss is baffling to me, but exciting.

I have so much to say about work, moving (the movers came at the end of last week), and so many other things. But they will all have to wait because it's already almost two hours past my new bedtime. The thing I want to tell now is the story of our fox.

We have three plum trees clustered together in the backyard and the yellow plums have become very popular with one of the local foxes. Pretty much at least once a day there's a fox hanging out under the plum trees, happily munching on plums. My mom told me about him before I came and tried to get pictures, but he runs away if you get too close or make too much noise so she had to take them from the house, through the window. A few days ago I managed to get to the edge of the deck with my camera before he noticed I was there, and then he was satisfied to let me take pictures while he kept eating plums -- as long as I didn't come any closer. I've been shouting and waving to him now every time he shows up in the yard, and today when I left for work he stayed by the trees (about 20 feet away) until I got into the car and turned it on. He's getting so tame, by next week maybe he'll just eat the plums out of my hand.

He's become such a regular visitor that we've even named him. My mother said something to me about him the other day and I heard, "Michael the Fox," though where I came up with that is still a mystery. It turns out the only word I heard correctly was "fox" and for the life of me I can't remember what she actually said. But we decided that Michael was a totally adequate name for him and so that became his name. It wasn't until a day or two later that the humor of it suddenly hit me. So now that we've become aware of the joke we inadvertently made through our miscommunication the fox's official name is Michael J.


I also realized today that another fantastic fox name would be "Guy." Oh, well.

Next time.