Work is going very well. They are discovering that I am more useful than they expected, and therefore project managers are starting to fight over my time. Yes, my projects are more limited in scope than before, but I have no regrets about leaving what I now see was a hack job of a family run business. There is far more to employee satisfaction that simply throwing them more money when times get tough.

I drove to Canmore for my friends wedding earlier this month. I camped by myself in Jasper the first night and then drove down the ice fields parkway the morning of the wedding. I spent a good part of the wedding with an old friend of hers, someone who I didn't particularly like very much back in the day. He didn't recognize me at first, neither did her sister, which I took as compliments. I still don't like the guy much - he is arrogant and pompous and now kind of fat, which made me smug because I am forty pounds less than I was seven years ago, and he is a retired professional athelete. I only judge his weight because he was the judgmental one back then. After the wedding I went back to my tent which was set up in the municipal campground. Pretty sketchy, but I survived and stayed dry despite thunderstorms that passed over during the night. I drove the whole eight and a half hours home the next day, which is the most that I've ever driven alone.

We went out canoeing last weekend. I haven't been in a canoe since Outdoor School, which is a School Distict 44 camp located in Brackendale. We slipped out onto a glassy lake, the shore smouldering with yellow and red trees. Wooden oar into the water, beads of water spinning across the surface before breaking back into lake. Quiet and beauty and solitude. The north gives and takes in unexpected ways.

Last night we had a belated thanksgiving dinner, eight of us around the table. People from such different backgrounds - Nairobi, Victoria, Burns Lake, Kamloops, Red Deer. How we have been led to meet, and how we share a meal and conversation, are small feats of happenstance. How much I have learned about the world by moving to a small northern city.

I sold my entry level road bike and got the cyclocross bike that I'd been eyeing up for months. My hesitation payed off though - it came down by thirty percent, making my net cost laughable for the quality of the upgrade. I took it for a rainy ride downtown yesterday, and even with gritty water streaming down my face and legs I couldn't stop feeling happy. When a gravel truck moved into the oncoming lane to pass wide around me, my heart swelled with love and thanks, and that's when I knew that the bike was a good choice because it allows me to find positives in negatives.

The rest of my time is if filled with the usual. Trimmed the hedge, raked over the garden, household chores and cooking, a couple batches of soap. Lots of reading. Sewing.