Quiet Moments of Settling In...

Well, crew, we've been here just over two weeks now.  Most of the boxes are unpacked, the artwork is hung (no...not by the chimney with care), we have hot water, heat (geothermal, baby!), electricity, Internet and TV.  It's just like a real home.

We've painted our first room (2nd coat is going on today) in anticipation of the guest bed arriving on Tuesday.  We've also planned to attack the upstairs bath, at least with some paint and trim, so we can stop squinting at the sea foam green walls that make all that nasty 70's cabinetry etc stand out like sore thumbs.  (Isn't that the oddest cliche?)  We haven't gotten crazy with paint colours so far...the guest room is a nice friendly camel colour and the bathroom is going to be a rich cream.  (Trust me...it's a strategic colour choice to try and minimize the things we don't like until we can change them...for those of you who don't know, bathroom remodels are darned expensive.)  We're toying with the idea of painting the living room a nice claret colour...to the men out there, that means red.

Ron, as always, is up bright and early and managed to catch the glory of a PEI morning the other day. 

The post in the second picture is where Heathcliffe frequently likes to sit and yell at the blue jays that eat at the bird feeder on the tree.  (He thinks it's his personal seed stash, I think.)  Ron's worried that he might have moved in to one of the walls, but we haven't been able to prove it yet.

On Thanksgiving we went up Island a bit and wandered around one of the provincial parks (Cabot Beach Provincial Park).  It was a blustery day filled with cloud and intermittent sun.  There are plenty of seemingly remote places, where you can really feel the pulse of the earth.

The bottom picture is of a little island that I believe is called Hog Island.  I'm not sure where the good folk of PEI got the names for some of these places, but much like Anne of Green Gables, I don't find them very romantic...immensely practical (in most cases at least - not sure about the island above), but for the most part people here obviously don't seem to be taken with wanton flights of imagination.  (Unlike certain people writing this blog...who will remain nameless.)

Another oddity of the east coast is how they describe non-east coasters.  Ron and I are frequently asked if we are "from away".  It's a quirky way to describe out-of-towners, that is mostly charming and sometimes exclusionary depending on the intonation. 

We've hit a pretty big milestone in that we both have our PEI drivers' licenses and our car is sporting PEI "Canada's Green Province" plates.  The irony is that the image on the plate is that of a large red cliff...I think they're referring to their environmental strides...again ironic as 90% of the Island heats with oil.  The province and big business are trying hard to change over to geothermal heat and they have a pretty good recycling program.

I had my first job interview yesterday, at a local credit union, we'll see how that goes.  They gave me a test, which rather threw me off.  I think it was more a subjective than anything, except for a couple of math questions.  Updates to come, but things are slowing down so there is less to say (despite the fact that this is the most I've probably written on the blog.)