Sunday morning, February sky

Sunday morning, 8.30am. I have lost the ability to sleep in. I can't remember quite when I lost it - sometime over the last two years, so while the house sleeps on, I am up with my coffee and my online copy of The Observer.

It snowed again last night, so the snowplough is out, scraping up and down the road every twenty minutes. Probably what woke me up. Or maybe our neighbour, who gets up at six am on the weekends and clomps down the stairs in hob-nailed boots to go who knows where.

The sky is utterly, utterly blue and all the trees and the gardens are covered in snow, so the scene from the window is postcard perfect eastern north america this morning. On days like this, I always feel I should wind a long striped scarf around my neck, grab a book bag and go to some highly erudit post-graduate tutorial in a mock-Victorian college.

Given by Norman Mailer. Or Robin Williams perhaps!

I'm tired of the winter. The cold, the sliding and slipping on the path. Scrambling over frozen lumps of unmelted snow to get on the bus. The biting wind that makes every foray outdoors unendurable. And there's still another six weeks at least to go before it warms up. It stays bright until after six pm though, so it's becoming more bearable.

Himself is up in Halifax full time now and looking for a job. It makes me froth at the mouth watching him go through the process. He submits resumes and rarely hears a word. Canadians don't respond to applications period. Unless you get an interview. Sometimes they don't respond after that. I find it incomprehensibly rude. Lazy. Imperious.

And then they wonder why people pack up and head west.

And the wages are so unbelieveably crappy here. I am trying to feel my way to an understanding of how the economy works in Nova Scotia, but it baffles me. Wages on job websites are down on last year. But there's a shortage of workers in almost every sector. And people who are looking for work find it difficult to get a job. But employers are in to us whingeing about labour shortages morning noon and night.

That's not logically possible.

I must be missing something.

Anyways, what I do know is that Nova Scotians are feeling a sort of hard to shake unease at the situation - a rumble of thunder at the picnic (to paraphrase some author I can't remember who).

Speaking of authors, we went to the library yesterday. Himself, Queenie and Kitty, Himself's daughter who is living with us now. We got seven books between us. Which was a victory for the reader in the house!!

Kitty is starting junior high in Halifax tomorrow. We were at a dinner party last night and one of the other guests had gone to Queen Elizabeth High. 'What was it like?' I asked. 'I can't remember' was the answer. 'That bad?' I asked. 'That much pot!' was the answer.

Sigh.....

Being a grown up sucks sometimes. Particularly on a cold bright February day, when all there is to look forward to is another six weeks of winter, replete with responsibility for beings other than one's own.

There I said it. I was wondering whether I would or not.

But it could be worse. The sky could not be utterly utterly blue. I could be still roomies with psycho-Bruce. It could be raining and I could be in a tiny apartment in Dublin with nothing to look forward to but a day of worrying about work. Tomorrow all I will worry about is whether Kitty will be offered the hand of friendship on her first day in junior high in Halifax. And hope to christ there isn't a glowing joint in the hand. And what I will say if she isn't. And whether it will offer any comfort or it will be just the same crap* I heard when I was her age.

Being a grown up is very difficult when you think you're still twenty on the inside.

*crap as in everything is crap when you're sixteen, not crap as in actually crap!