Moving is always a hassle, no wonder why I am loathe to move ever. That moving companies do there best to make the experience worse confounds me. If they made the experience more pleasant, people might look forward to moving. I can think of a number of things that would help like offering bonuses and things like that. If I were to have a moving company, I would a week after people have moved in send them a bouquet of flowers to let them know that they were appreciated and maybe some flyers of businesses in the area. Canada Post sent me a flyer with a list of things that I should do after I have moved, that was nice.
So now that I have been in the burbs of Big Smoke I have noticed a few things. The roads are generally better in the poorer city that I am beside than the richer city that I live. Funny eh? The pretentious froo froo city with wealthy people spends less on roads than the lower class city beside it. That said there are more bike lanes around and the streets are wider and the cars are more conscious of bicycle traffic than Smallville in Boonieland. There appears to be bicycle lanes, running lanes and sidewalks in some areas. But I have noticed that there is a danger in using the running lanes with Road bikes, the cars would prefer I used them but the surface is not level with the roadways at the curb and it has already caused one flat. The bike lanes are a courtesy provided by citizens that have never used them; there are road service points dotting their surfaces and the storm sewer drains are suspiciously anti road bike. What's more the asphalt beside the curb is broken badly in places. Still a slight improvement on Smallville. One other difference is the wind. It is always present and is usually blowing hard.
One similarity is my Fat Bike is also a new thing, mind you at a local bicycle shop, they told me that it is a hot seller and they can't keep them in stock. Still it is a new thing and people see it and inquire, readily. I mean people in Smallville talked to me about it, but they were more standoffish and asked after a while. Whereas people in the burbs ask right away. They are more interested. That could be said about people in the burbs in general: they are more interested. People will ask more questions if they think you are open to it. They will ask you stuff even if you are alone. In Smallville there is a bubble that people seem to not want to pierce but in the burbs it is not so much.
Just last week as I was pounding out an entry on my iPad, a man sitting near me stooped over and told me that he had never seen someone type as persistently on an iPad before. He never thought that it could be used as a method of production. I told him that I was blogging and he told me that he used his laptop as his writing tool as an author. We talked for half an hour about how the publishing industry has changed so much in the past ten years. He told me that years ago he submitted a novel and it was returned with a note very nice, but we only publish a half a dozen novels every year and you have not been selected as part of them. He then went on to tell me that he has published three books, in e-book format and self published too. He said that the entire process was tough and expensive but something he was committed to.
www.michaeltadman.com
I met him where I am now at Tim Hortons. There are a lot of them everywhere in Canada. The people are friendly, but a little absent minded. The population of the employees is different than in Smallville. There are some elderly employees, but mostly it is staffed by younger people. Younger people are a little more distracted. But a few of the staff have noticed that I have been coming here frequently and have commented on my bike. They are more likely to make comments about the bike around winter storms. Not that there is much winter weather here as there was in Smallville. We have in total about 15cm of snow on the ground. Smallville has almost ten times that. Here in the burbs people pay attention to the windchill temperature more than the actual temperature, but then I have to admit, the wind is a real hazard around here.
The biggest adaptation I have had to make is that I am living with a family now. It is something I always wanted and something I had given up on really. I like kids a lot, and my friend's children mean the world to me, and I am told me to them. They are the single biggest reasons why I changed locations. There have been a few bits of adjustment though. The space is fine, if a little dark and there is not much privacy. My privacy wall is a book shelf, and not one with a back, a two sided tic tac toe style bookshelf. The kids though are good they make lots of noise going down that stairs and they talk about coming to get me before they go down the stairs so I have lots of warning. My friend does not. There is some furniture that they have in my section that I care not for, mostly because I use it to hold my computer and the smooth glass surface is the worst surface for a wireless optical mouse. Another problem is that the wireless Internet has difficulty penetrating to the basement and frequently my access drops below two bars out of five. Often it just fails entirely. And then there is cellphone reception: it sucks. In the house in the first place it is bad. One to two bars out of five. The house appears to have shielding that prevents cellphone microwaves from penetrating and sometimes it is necessary to leave the house entirely to make a call. In the basement it often tells me there is no service available. That said, the kids are great. Even when they jump on me, their feet unerringly homing in on my crotch.
There are other difficulties. I have been sick twice in one month. One was a flu that lasted about ten days and most recently an ear infection and fever with a cough. The cough lingered from the other illness, so who knows. The family has a dog and following one of the rules that I was given when I moved in: when ever possible, but at least once a day do something that allows the family to move more smoothly, I take him for a walk. During the week, during the winter, with the kids and the other stuff that crops up, the dog would normally get three brief walks called: morning squirt, evening crap and night squirt. All these are rushed affairs which is just what a dog hates. But if I have time, and I usually do, I take him for a long walk in the afternoon that removes the need for evening crap. Usually he works in two or three craps and a dozen squirts into that walk and when he gets home he races around the house until he settles down, about a minute or so. This earns my major goodwill and makes the evening go better. Anything else helps a bit too. But from what I learned years ago with my friend, someone has to witness any cleaning act or it is assumed not done … really! Mostly because everything is so clean that they can't tell the difference between clean and dirty, so they will assume it needs cleaning if they don't know it was done.
There are only about two other things I want to say. The first project I embarked on was project girlfriend. I am actively looking on three sites for a girlfriend, the three sites I was on in Smallville, but had no luck on because there was no one who would appeal to me within 75km. It is different here there is a lot of appeal but then there is another problem, I don't know what they are looking for, the women. I met one woman on PoF, she contacted me and we hit it off. She does not meet people and she is not ready for a relationship because she has a young child and she just left an abusive relationship. I get that but we chat anyways. She enlightened me that my approach to advertise myself as looking for a stable life partner, was not what women on the site were looking for. She told me that men bragged to her, because she told them she would never meet them, that most women on the site used it for casual sex. Something I am okay with, but can't really do because I am poor at communication. It is frustrating. OkCupid I have had less luck with. The theoretical algorithms for matching daters seem to be on track, but either the women I contact are judgmental or my attempts to initiate conversation fall flat. I can't really tell. The last site Ashley Madison is a paid site and I only have one last token to make contact, but the women appear to be judgmental and disinclined. Not sure if it is my physique or if it is the Disney Syndrome. Disney syndrome is the fact that Disney princesses are of all sorts, black, brown or white, hair colours blue through red, yellow, brown and black, but all Princes have Brown, Black or Blonde hair, with a heavy weight on the darker colours — tall, dark and handsome. As a ginger, I find that discouraging. I have found that women in the past are only interested in Gingers if the already had a ginger in their life, and we are not exactly common. I can't change that, so I will work on the rest. Perhaps I will lose weight in this new location. And of course when I get that special mix of horny and depressed I am that much closer to professional help, which might be a bad thing. Okay IS a bad thing.
I got a job. I start on Monday. It is at a furniture store as a sales associate. For those that know me and are interested: www.structube.com . I had an interview last Sunday and I knew I had the job after about five minutes. The Manager of the store asked me where I lived and then asked how long I was living there. I told him I just moved. He asked where from. Smallville. He gave me the strangest look. He asked me if I grew up there. I did. He said that he lived there for five years. The next ten minutes were peppered about his times there. He lived there in the early nineties and said he like the natural beauty of the place but disliked the people. Well he did not say that, but he said that the place was not a good fit. I knew he was gay before he mentioned his partner and I knew the conflict that he had in Smallville. I did not name it Smallville simply for its size but for its small mindedness. I will see what that is like. It means a new start and a foothold in my new place.
My friend suggested that I would be more likely to meet someone when I was employed, but with only four employees, I might have to get a part job to meet someone.
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