Moving Weekend

My calves ache. My shoulders are sore. I want just one more day off, for what good is a weekend if you spend it moving???

That's right. This weekend I left company housing and settled into my new home. Luckily, it's only a one-minute drive from the condo, so the two trips I had to make were nice and short. Friday was another glorious PTO and thank goodness, because the movers called and said they wanted to deliver first thing Friday morning instead of Saturday afternoon. This actually worked out a lot better because then I could spend Friday unpacking a little bit at the new place and packing up a bunch of stuff at the old place. I had everything moved out of the condo and quite a bit of stuff unpacked at the new place by Saturday afternoon.

Once my bedroom was set up and clothes were unpacked, I had to hop in the shower to get ready to volunteer at the "Big Spirit Music Festival". I don't normally volunteer for these types of events, but then again, I'm not usually living in a strange town by myself. I actually didn't think of this idea on my own, but my boss wanted to volunteer and asked me if I wanted to tag along. Those of you from Tolko would know that I am adept at performing CLMs, so I decided to say 'yes'. It actually turned out to be interesting and not all that tough. All I had to do was take peoples' tickets, so it was good. Plus, we got to listen to some good music. Theory of a Deadman and Collective Soul were two of the three performers. I can't remember the name of the first group...that should tell you something about the performance.

My first night in the house by myself went a-okay. At first, I thought I'd be nervous (I'm just like that, okay...), but I managed to not scare the bejeezus out of myself and slept throught he night (even though it was about 100 degrees in my room).

This morning I woke up, did some more unpacking, decided to hit up the driving range and then went for a quick shop at Superstore. The driving range was about 50/50...after the first half-bucket of balls, my swing came back and I was hitting some solid shots. Hopefully this translates into good things on the course come Tuesday's Ladies Night and my golf games on Saturday and Sunday next weekend.

Superstore was surprisingly un-busy which is extremely rare in Fort McMurray. Every day is crazy there and Sundays are usually TERRIBLE. Today, I got my stuff (including an oscillating cooling tower fan, a new dress and a t-shirt...oh SS how I've missed you), and walked right up to the check-out lady. She was as confused as I was about why it was so busy. The weather was amazing today, so that may have had something to do with it.

In other news, my new camera arrived yesterday! Yay! I purchased the Canon Rebel Xti from this nice fellow at Tolko who has decided to upgrade to the Canon 40D. So, it's not new (although you'd never know it), but it's new to me and it marks my entrance into the more sophisticated world of digital photography. I'm planning to take a course at the college some time soon so that I can put this fancy camera to some good use. You can all expect lots of pictures to be hitting the airwaves (e-waves?) in the near future. The original reason I started telling this story was to once again remind everyone about how difficult it can be living here. For the camera, I needed to pick up a Compac Flash memory card. First stop...SuperStore. Nadda. Second stop....Wal-Mart. Zilch. Third stop....Staples. S-O-L (well, except for a $130 8-gig beauty that holds like 8,000 images of the highest quality). Finally, on my fourth stop (The Source) I found exactly what I was looking for. You see people, this should have been easy. I should have walked into SuperStore, asked the person to sell me what I was looking for, and be done. Nope, not so easy here. The most difficult thing is trying to ask the young kids where you can find something. With such high turnover in this town, no one ever knows where anything is. And, because they don't want to admit they don't know where it is, they just tell you they don't have it. This is super frustrating when you know damn well the store has what you're looking for. That's today's Fort McMurray rant.

Whew, this has been a long post, so I think I'm going to finish setting up my new oscillating cooling tower fan (I love how fancy they can make a fan sound).

Hope the weather is as great where you are, as it is where I am.

Muah!

L