This week is Christopher's birthday week! He turns 25 on Saturday. That's right, he's all of 9 months younger than me, which is apparently enough for his brother to refer to me as a "cougar." I like think that when I was born, the Fates conspired to make someone for me to tease, so he was born 9 months later. :)

I've been getting some comment spam on here, so I had to turn on verification. It's a bit of a pain, but it's easier than trying to find all the spam comments and delete them one by one. You've got to wonder if spam is effective at all. I've certainly never clicked on it intentionally, let alone bought something through it.

I have a growing tug-of-war with how I feel about this site. In the past, I've been very free with talking about all manner of things. Now, I don't talk about work. I don't like talking about things that 'belong' to other people in some way, so I don't talk about Chris or our relationship as much as I could, partly because his friends know about this site and partly because I feel like it should be his decision to have his life online, not mine. Weird. I'm also looking for work, and I think that's making me censor myself to some extent.

I'm also feeling lately that I am way more opinionated that I should be, and I need to learn to step back and stop talking, start listening and considering that a) not all of my pet peeves are Drastically Important, and b) most issues are more complex than they seem, and I don't have an in-depth knowledge of them.

Two of my favourite people:

Christopher shooting the dam in Gananoque:


Ada having lost the battle with sleep:


And he wonders whether or not he's good with children. You can just see her thinking, "Uh, mom? WTF?"

If you're curious, there are photos of our condo here: Condo Set. We took these photos a week or so ago, when we were taking measurements of the place. And yes, I have drawn up a floorplan and it's to scale.

We take possession of the condo on December 15th. Before then, we have to finalize the mortgage, get content insurance, and close the sale. That's the easy part. Between December 15th and January 1st, we have to:

- rip ugly-ass mirror off a huge part of the living room wall and hope the wall survives intact
- pick paint colours
- paint
- install new outlets, light switches
- install a new bathroom sink, counter, mirror, and cabinet, and now that I think of it, probably lights
- pack everything we own
- build a breakfast bar in the kitchen
- install proper bars in all of the closets instead of these irritating rail things on which you can only hang the hanger ONE WAY
- install a closet organizer in the bedroom
- have Chris's family up for a few days
- go to Ottawa for Chris's family Christmas
- go to Brockville for my family Christmas
- have my family up for a few days
- really thoroughly clean all the cupboards, carpets, etc.
- move
- start unpacking.... eek.

Chris can probably take those two weeks off. Hopefully. Me? My job situation is so up in the air right now, I don't even have assurances that I'll be employed then. I've got a temp position right now that is in week 10 of a 4-week assignment, and I have an interview coming up to keep the job. When is this interview? Well, it was supposed to be two weeks ago, and now... well, it's still not scheduled yet. Maybe it will actually happen before Christmas. Maybe it will happen before Christmas and I won't get it and then I'll be unemployed and even more stressed because we can't afford to do this on just Chris's income. Or maybe I'll get it, and then I'll have the week between Christmas and New Year's off. And a hell of a lot more money.



But tonight, Cat and I are making Rochers à la Noix de Coco, and all that stress will melt away, for just a moment.

So, for the past three weeks, with the exception of a brief period of a few hours, I have not felt depressed. I have felt excited, frustrated, stressed, happy, tired, etc., but I haven't felt that dark heavy useless feeling at all. And this in a period of almost constant grey skies and rain!

I think a lot of it has to do with my stress level and how I'm dealing with various things that I'm worrying about. I've gotten a bunch of things worked out in the last while — student loans, the condo, hanging out with friends more, etc. I've been trying to eat better and go out and do things more. I still have a lot of things to work out (my work situation, condo preparation, moving, etc.), but I feel rather positive about all of those things. Excited, even.

The condo stuff is quite a shock to the system though. Even though I haven't lived with my parents for the last six years, I haven't ever chosen to paint any of my many bedrooms, let alone a whole apartment. We're trying to choose paint colours right now, and we're going to be smart and have our friends from the Ontario College of Art & Design over and let them brainstorm for us. We have some basic ideas, but I haven't taken entire courses in colour theory, so I'll leave it to the experts. :) But then we have to think about replacing sinks, installing outlets and vents for a washer/dryer, replacing carpet, installing shelves and closet organizers... it's a lot of work, and I've never done any of it before. So, in the mean time, I've basically become addicted to Apartment Therapy and not martha and other design blogs. We're totally stealing the Cat Stairs idea! Kitty heaven!

Christopher and I bought a condo! It occurs to me that I haven't actually mentioned on this site that we were looking, but we've been searching for at least a couple of months now. It's been an interesting process. We've gotten to know the real estate market here a little better, so we know what kinds of prices are reasonable for this area, and we've gotten to see units in a few different buildings, which is satisfying in a purely voyeuristic way. I always like to see different floorplans and decorating. It's interesting to see what can be done.

Anyways, our ideal condo, the one we joked about daring to hope would come on the market and even then we just laughed because we knew we would never be able to afford it—it came on the market for a price we could afford two days ago. It was underpriced by at least 20 grand, if not more. We were the first people to view the unit and we signed an offer right away, knowing that if we didn't snap it up, another unit like this wouldn't come up for years. And by some stroke of luck, they took our original offer!

It's a large two bedroom in our favourite building downtown. It's right beside my favourite park here, and a just a short walk to both the subway and to Chinatown and Kensington Market. My work is only a 10 minute walk away. The building is really well managed and all of our utilities, including air conditioning and basic cable, are included in our condo fees. We have a storage area with room for a washer and dryer, two good-sized bedrooms, a huge living/dining room, a kitchen with room for a breakfast nook in it, and lots of closets.

It's funny, before I moved to Toronto, I took all of those things for granted. Whenever I go home, I marvel at how large my childhood bedroom was, and how I can't IMAGINE having that much space now. What would we do with it? The thought that we just bought a condo with more room than we know what to do with is quite staggering, given the size of all of the other units we've looked at. It's so rare to have a space like that in downtown Toronto, because space is at such a premium, and developers don't really build units that you can grow into. It's actually a large problem. In some areas, they build 7000 units, and only a few hundred of them are 2 bedrooms or more. They build entire neighbourhoods that are based on a transient population—the post-college pre-children crowd—and I can't predict that that will turn out well. No one will really care about the neighbourhood, because they're only there for a few years. No one's planning to spend decades there!

Anyways, this unit is more than enough space for us and it's in an area we're crazy about, so we plan on staying there for at least a decade. So exciting! Now we get to learn more grown-up things like how to paint and put down carpeting and install faucets and washers and such things! This whole fall has just been one massive "holy shit, I think I might be an adult already" crisis, what with being out of school and in a serious relationship and working full-time and having friends with babies and now we OWN A CONDO, excuse me?? It's not seeming quite so bizarre today, so either I'm getting used to it or I'm still in denial that we actually got it!

Someone random on Flickr posted this photo today, of me, Chris, and Agnes (the blurry ponytail) at the Political Party last night, a mayoral 'debate' put on by Spacing Magazine and Eye Weekly. Hosting a political debate in a bar full of hipsters turns out to be a very good thing. It wasn't really a debate, more of a showcase of the top two candidates, Jane Pitfield and David Miller. They each had 25 minutes of questions from a panel of three people, and were never on the stage at the same time, thus avoiding any fighting and allowing them to give some real answers to some great questions. I wasn't as put off by Jane Pitfield as I expected to be, and I was even more impressed by David Miller than I thought. The crowd was very slanted towards David Miller though, so where Jane Pitfield got booed when she started dodging questions or saying things the crowd found suspect, this didn't happen to David Miller due to the crowd's bias for him. It was a great event (totally packed!).

Points that I liked:
- Jane Pitfield has expanded the tree canopy in her riding by initiating a program where every household without a tree in their yard receives an opt-out form for the tree program. If they don't opt out, then a tree is planted in their front yard. This is such a great way to capitalize on laziness. If it were an opt-in program, I'm sure it wouldn't be half as successful.
- David Miller will not place tolls on the Gardiner or QEW highways, citing two main reasons: 1) The reason this works so spectacularly well in London is that they have a superior bus and subway system, which people can choose to take instead of their cars. We do not have such a system, so this would be penalizing people without a choice to take public transit, rather than inspiring people who do have a choice. 2) The way this question was posed presupposes that Miller has failed to raise other income for the TTC. It's true that the levels of provincial and federal funding for the TTC are vastly below what they were years ago (pre-Harris government), but they are much higher than before Miller stepped into office, so progress is being made, and so he doesn't feel the need to resort to tolls just yet.

Point I Disliked:
- Jane Pitfield wants to focus homeless funding on making temporary housing, ostentatiously so that people don't STAY homeless, and are transitioned into a better life. Great theory, but it ends up giving us a system that kicks needy people out of their subsidized housing before they're ready, because we only have funding for temporary housing. People aren't staying low-income just because we're housing them. There are a few more factors to it than that, and we need a strategy that takes them into consideration and works on alleviating those problems.

Take-Home Impressions:
- Pitfield says she loves Toronto but then talks at length about how people are scared to live here (umm... I'm certainly not!) and how crime is so bad (even though it's gone DOWN and was low to start with), and doesn't tell us why she loves Toronto. Of course there are problems to fix. But tell us why you're crazy about this city, what gets you excited about living here?
- Miller, on the other hand, speaks passionately about what makes Toronto a great place. He acknowledges that we can improve on all of these things — parks, diversity, opportunity — but revels in the fact that these things are characteristic of this place. That's why I'm voting for him, because not only has he done a lot in the last few years to work on improving this city, but he sees our strengths and speaks proudly about them. Pitfield's running on dissatisfaction, where Miller's running on pride and vision, and for me, vision wins hands down.

From The User Illusion, a book on consciousness:

"In the course of preparing an introductory chapter on Gödel for a forthcoming comprehensive edition of his works, I was struck by the great contrast," wrote Feferman, principal editor of Gödel's Collected Works, "between the deep platonist convictions Gödel held concerning the objective basis of mathematics and the special caution he exercised in revealing these convictions."

One may ask what this silence cost him. Gödel did not share the source of his insights with many people. He did not reveal directly what he believed about the world. He told others only what he could prove.

Gödel lived a very isolated life, trusted few people, and was admitted on several occasions to sanatoriums, for treatment of depression and overwork. He was reserved and suspicious—not least where doctors were concerned, despite being preoccupied by his own health. His depression increased, and in the 1970s it developed into paranoia and the classic syndrome of fear of poisoning. The situation became critical in 1977 when his wife was hospitalized and could no longer cook for him. He would not open the door to nurses, and on 14 January 1978 he died, in the fetal position. "Malnutrition and inanition" resulting from "a personality disturbance" was given as the cause of death."

Just one more reason to despise depression, and one more reason to take it seriously.