Oh boy. It's been a while.

I want to say that a lot's been happening and that I've been really busy so I don't feel so bad about not having replied yet to everyone who's e-mailed me to see how I'm doing. And so that I have an excuse for not having updated my blog in over a month. But it isn't true. Pretty much nothing's been happening.

Shortly after my last post, I had a couple friends here visiting, and then right after they left my mom and her cats headed back down to the States. So within 2-3 days it went from 4 people and 3 cats in the house down to just me and Chloe. Chloe's been pretty stressed all summer because of all the moving and change and people coming in and out. She was getting kind of skittish and hostile even while we were still living in Toronto (of course, so was I...) but it got pretty bad over the summer. After the house cleared out we spent about 10 days unwinding and milling around and getting used to it just being the two of us again, but our settling-in process was sort of interrupted with a trip down to the States at the beginning of September.

It was a fantastic trip for me, but maybe not so great for Chloe and my mom's cats. Chloe and my mom's calico aren't exactly friendly and they had to share the house without us while we went out to California to visit family. They dealt with it, though, and after Chloe forgave me for leaving her we headed back up to the Island.

I'll be honest. Since we got back, I've done pretty much NOTHING but play computer games. Yesterday I never even got dressed. And my schedule has reverted back to a 3:30am bedtime and breakfast at noon. I keep trying to go to bed earlier, but... we've had mice. It's not the mice themselves that keep me up all night. It's Chloe. With the mice.

There was a mouse hole behind the refrigerator that's been there for years, and we've never seen any mice or any mouse droppings so we never bothered to do anything about it. But last week, mice suddenly started coming out from behind the fridge in the middle of the night. The first mouse came as a complete surprise to me -- seriously. I was sitting at the computer (of course), and Chloe showed up next to me and started playing with something. I thought she had brought over a toy for me to throw for her, which is our usual routine, but when I leaned down to pick it up I saw blood all over the carpet and realized it was a live mouse.

It was still pretty spry. She'd injured it, but not intentionally. She kept letting it go and it would start to run and then she'd hop after it and catch it again and pick it up in her mouth and carry it around. And this continued until I finally managed to grab it myself. I took it outside and released it in the yard, which in hindsight was probably not the greatest plan because if it didn't die it probably scurried right back into the house.

Anyway, I figured out it had come from behind the refrigerator because Chloe spent the rest of the night sitting there waiting for another one. And within 36 hours we'd repeated the whole experience with 2 more mice (though she's been getting better at catching them without hurting them and I've been getting better at taking them away from her). She was spending day and night in the middle of the kitchen floor staring at the fridge, and I was staying up all night with her, knowing that if she caught another one she'd try to bring it to me wherever I was (even if I was asleep in bed). I finally caved and went to bed one night while Chloe was still stalking the refrigerator, and was relieved the next morning to find her (and only her) on the bed with me -- not a mouse in sight. Until I came downstairs, and found a dead one on the living room floor. That afternoon, a friend came over and set out a couple mouse traps (the killing kind, I am sorry to say), and that night I heard a terrible *SNAP* and knew we'd caught another one. After that I moved Chloe's food and litter box upstairs and started closing off the kitchen at night.

So eventually, our contractor came over and boarded up the mouse hole for me. I left the traps out for a while (hoping for several reasons never to catch anything in a mouse trap ever again) and after 3 mouse-free days I put the traps away, brought Chloe's food back downstairs, opened up the kitchen again and went to bed early.

And about 15 minutes after I got in bed and turned out the light, I heard Chloe's "mouse squirk" (a series of short, high-pitched "blrrrps") from the hallway downstairs. Slightly concerned, but hoping for the best, I called, "Yyyes?… Chloe?… What's up?…" and was answered by more squirking from the staircase, and then the upstairs hallway. At that point I jumped out of bed, turned on the lights and went running into the hallway just in time to see Chloe, mouse in mouth, bounding back down the stairs. It took about another half hour of chasing (chasing the mouse with Chloe's assistance, chasing Chloe with the mouse in her mouth, keeping Chloe from chasing the mouse while trying to get him myself) before I finally caught it and, uh... released it outside. :P

So now I have NO idea where they're coming from, since the only visible mouse hole in the house has been boarded up, and neither does Chloe. She's back to sitting in front of the fridge all evening, even though I pulled the whole thing out to prove to her that there's no hole back there anymore. So I'm back to closing off the kitchen at night, and waiting to see where and when the next mouse will appear.

Meanwhile, Michael J. (the fox) has moved from one plum tree onto the second, and now the third, and I still see him almost every day. Last week he even came up on the deck and peeked in the windows at me. And I also suspect that either he or a skunk is eating the apples in the front yard. Not to be outdone by foxes or mice, there is also something living in the ceiling -- not the attic, not the chimney, no, the ceiling between the first and second floors. No idea what it is or how it's getting in and out of there, but... yeah. It's pretty creepy at 2am to hear something walking around above you when you know there's no one else in the house.

So that's what's been keeping me busy (or at least entertained) lately. Well, that and Oblivion. Somehow I have this funny feeling that I'm going to have a full menagerie this winter...

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.

Change of travel plans = 12 hour drive

But I'm already home!

Today was a LONG day and full of the unexpected. To start, Chloe and I slept through 3 alarms and finally woke up at 11:00am -- checkout was at noon. I frantically showered and got dressed and started to pack up the room and in the midst of putting on my makeup spilled it all over my black shirt. So I re-dressed and tried again. We got out of the motel fairly smoothly after that, and stopped for coffee and gas before getting on the road. Shortly afterwards I nearly missed our exit and had to cut across two lanes at the last second. Thankfully there was no one very close behind me (and in Quebec they apparently expect you to pull moves like that).

A couple hours after leaving Brossard I was passing through Lévis and started mulling over the whole motel mess. I had initially booked my motel stays for this trip a month ago, back when I was still convinced there would be some way for me to haul all my stuff in a trailer behind me. I would normally make this drive in 2 days with an overnight stop in Lévis, but decided to extend it to 3 to give myself extra allowance for any trouble (or just slowness) the trailer might cause. After I realized the trailer wasn't going to work and hired a moving company I tried to cancel both my motel reservations so I could go back to my 2-day travel plan. I successfully cancelled the 2nd night (in Fredericton, NB) before realizing that my reservation in Brossard couldn't be changed. So last week I re-booked my reservation in Fredericton -- or so I thought.

After an 8 hour drive (and pretty much nothing to eat) we pulled into the Comfort Inn in Fredericton and I went inside to check in. They couldn't find my reservation in their computer but apparently had one for last weekend that had been a no-show. I went to the car to grab my printed e-mail confirmation and sure enough -- the reservation I made was for last week and I neither cancelled it nor showed up. I know exactly what happened, too. On their website, if you search the availability for a date and then choose a "bargain" price it resets the date on the next page. I know this because I've done it many many times. But this time I seem to have forgotten to re-change the date. I confirmed it, they sent me an e-mail, I printed it, and I even looked at the reservation receipt this afternoon before arriving and I just NEVER caught it.

(The most frustrating part is that I had a similar bout of idiocy back in April on my way to Maine. I thought I'd made a reservation for my stop in Brossard but the day before I went to print the confirmation and realized I'd never received it. And then I realized I'd never actually booked it. I'd followed the booking process through to the confirmation page on the website but never actually clicked "Confirm.")

In any case, once we got there the motel was completely booked and from the looks of it so was the other pet-friendly motel down the street. So after a quick phone call to my mother we decided that since I was only about 4 hours away I should just keep driving, making my arrival time in PEI between 1-1:30am. I got home a little before 1 (because I was the only car on the road in the middle of the night) and within an hour had broken 2 things and been offered another gig.

So now we're here. We're home. And everything was pitch black when we got here, so I didn't get the usually spectacular first view of the Island while crossing the bridge. But I did get to see stars -- lots of them. And a fox ran out in front of my car and startled me (and more so probably himself)! But I saw him and stopped in time. And if I didn't know so well where my driveway was I could totally have missed it in the dark. But we made it. And tomorrow we'll wake up in our blue house, surrounded by green land and red dirt and the ocean and an overwhelmingly vast sky.

I moved away from Toronto today.

My mom asked me a day or two ago how I was feeling and I said, "Name an emotion. I'm there." It's pretty true. I know I'm going to really miss people, and despite all that annoyed me about Toronto there are things I really loved. But right now I'm not feeling sad. I only had a real moment of sad today when it hit me that I wasn't ever coming back to my apartment. I've spent the last few weeks packing and getting rid of everything and the last two days cleaning. But even when there was nothing left in any of the rooms, the space still didn't feel empty. It seemed very strange to me.

Moving into a new place has always carried with it a sense of excitement and revival. For me it's always been centered around making a space my own -- painting, furnishing, living. I don't like feeling transient so I settle in almost immediately. Even while travelling I make a motel room feel a little like more than just a place to sleep. I don't bring my own decor or anything (scenes from "Best in Show" come to mind), but I always carry a "smudge stick" with me.

For those unfamiliar with the term, a smudge stick is a bundle of white sage which is believed (by Native Americans and neo-pagans like myself) to have the power to cleanse spaces, objects and people of any residual energy. Plus it smells good. It's like the Febreeze commercials where after spraying a room the homeowner walks in over and over again just to smell it and smile. Or when you really thoroughly clean your house and it just feels better to be there afterwards. Sage is like a bonus clean. Because I travel with Chloe we have to stay in smoking rooms. The downside is that the rooms always smell like smoke, but the upside is that it means I can burn sage without any repercussions. The sage serves 3 main purposes for me: 1) it overpowers the leftover stale cigarette smell, 2) it cleanses the room so I don't inadvertently absorb any of the previous guests' emotional baggage, and 3) it makes the space seem more homey and familiar to me.

I haven't moved a lot in my life (despite having lived in a few different states and countries) so leaving an empty apartment isn't a familiar feeling to me. I guess I thought it would be more surreal -- more like arriving at an empty apartment only backwards. But it just felt like I was leaving for a vacation and taking everything with me. It only hit me when I set the keys down inside and closed the door for the last time that I will probably never set foot in that apartment again. I spent four years there and I had little routines and patterns incorporated into my existence that I didn't even notice most of the time. But this past week I've noticed things like how there's a rhythm to how I lock and unlock the back door and that there are marks on the wall from where I hang my keys. And when I left I turned off the light but not the ceiling fan in the kitchen because (since I never use it) it just didn't occur to me that the lightswitch was there. And here I am still speaking in the present tense even though it's all over forever, like when someone dies and it takes a while for the reality to set in.

I wonder if after the shock wears off I'll start to grieve for that apartment the way I would a person, or the way I sometimes still do for my childhood home.

People have been asking me lately if I'm excited about moving. I am, yes, but I'm not feeling it yet. I don't think I'll feel it until the moving truck arrives next week. I'm moving into a fully furnished home which in the summers I share with my mother. So it's a little like moving back in with my mom, except that for most of the year she won't be there (and I'll be paying the bills). I'm bringing a lot of my own stuff, but my car is packed almost exactly like it was when I spent the summer there last year. The movers have everything else so the house won't seem any different until they arrive.

Like moving away from Toronto, moving to PEI feels right now like I'm going on vacation -- I just won't be leaving to go home at the end of the summer.