So four years later, I find myself engaged.
Hard to believe we have even been together for that long, but it is true.

More later.

How much is actually passed through genetics and how much not. I am a spitting image of my mother at my age, but at the same time, I am not her. There are parts about her, I absoutely love, like her kindness to the community, but other parts, like cluelessness about something I spoke to her about one day ago that drive me crazy.

Perhaps a pre-disposition to being clueless myself at 50+ years old, but I just cannot see that happening, at least not at the moment. It makes me wonder why other people are so violently opposed to becoming their parents seem to be convinced that is exactly what they will be. Why does the boy with smoker parents think he too will become a smoker although he is so violent opposed to the very thought?

Post spoke to me not only in the life choice stage - although there are some choices of late, that I could debate with intensity with the writer could prove to be incorrect- but also for the fact of being missing.

I fade easily - surprisingly perhaps for an out-going person, but I find myself sliding into behind the scenes. I see myself with my job, taking a step back, instead of the one forward to be the first at the front of the line anymore. I see myself fading in the mirror and morphing slowly into something else.

I spent a lot of time with myself lately, and I don’t know that I am all over happy with who I am, although somedays I am, and am proud. Fake it until you make it is my alternative motto, but I don’t know if anyone realizes, even me, how much of it is is fake anymore.

My camera is still. My creative mind is still. My life is an endless convert of listening to the sounds of GT4 firing, cooking supper and surviving a 9-4:30pm day. Somewhere in there, I have (temporarily) misplaced my soul.

It hurts. Not having anyone to talk to face to face hurts, although I stopped looking at faces about two months ago - no one has noticed that I am not looking into people’s eyes anymore, or my camera is still or my creative mind seems still as well.

Did you lose your soul too, or did leaving take an irreplacable chunk with it? Leaving the only home I ever did took a chunk, and now I’m not sure where I fit anymore, and I am struggling to find out because temporary is stamped on me.

Maybe it merits a conversation, although I am still not sure what goes bump in the night I am ready to bring out to the sunlight, the prying eyes, or even my mind during the day when things are not quite the same. Somehow typing for this length of time ultimately seems more safe as my mouse debates against the Save or Publish button.

Don’t think that no one else understands your cryptic words, but they make all too much sense in the depth of the night, and the idiots around the water coolers talking about last nights’ American Idol, they are everywhere.

Especially late night - after midnight - that chasm between night and the new day.

I’m in the process of transferring over my files from my computer, circa 2001, to Doug’s computer, as we have just today purchased him a new one that will be ready in approx 5 days. In a way, it’s again the end of an era, and I find myself looking at pictures, and tonight my attention has landed on 2004.

D and I officially started in 2004, but we were not the only ones who did…. or re-started, for both of us. I don’t know how we have weathered until now, as we are both fiery Saggitarians that are stubborn to a fault, but we’ve found our way through. Not everyone has been so lucky, when I flip through my pictures of then-smiling faces, and now remembering how others crashed and burned, or are crashing and burning as we speak.

Trying to figure out in my mind the possible facades and repairing the people I thought I knew and what they turned out to be is so difficult. I think in essence - D and I have always been very straight with each other in everything that we do, and unfortunately this is not a quality everyone has or chooses to adopt.

Here’s my glory list from summer 2004:
1. bought and wrote off my first car in a space of 3 months
2. started a relationship with the man i now live with, and hopefully will spend the rest of my life with
3. spent a glorious with one of my best friends
4. worked out a resort
5. took a 1-night road trip to Quebec
6. my uncle and now aunt got married
7. started university

Hard to believe that was all 4 years ago now - it feels like yesterday.

And to all others still trying to figure out these tricky things we like to call relationships, there’s only one rule, don’t be a dink, don’t throw away amazing individuals or fail to see the potential. I almost did, and thank god, I screwed my head on better and really listened - to what D was saying and not saying in his own quiet way.

A lack at not wanting to release a bunch of negativity into cyberspace, but really can’t see better places to do it without alienating everyone I know. Got biofeedback tested this week and learned I am sensitive to a great many food objects but more outside things that you can shake a stick at.

Not feeling well at all this week, has kept me home for most of it.

spent the most of the day cleaning my house, with some inference but mostly alone, listening to music and doing it how i do best, in spurts and blurts.

i have been retreating more and more so into myself and into my own head, and the ideas there and passion are staggering. i wish sometimes that i have more skills in my more areas to get all the creative notions out. there is so much potential and so much yet left undone.

one of my friends told me i’m intense right now. that might be true. when you spend 5 hrs by yourself in a car for the majority of the work week, it gets you a lot of time to think. i lose parts of the road sometimes lost in my thought. auto-pilot driving.

the dots aren’t all connecting for me right now, and i think i may be learning more than i ever thought possible. i am beginning to see what changes have happened over the last couple of months, and now have a chance to step back and say, “aha!”

one things i have figured out - my best friend, lover and boyfriend rolled into one - we get along just fine as the two of us, although we are still working out some of the kinks of living together…. nothing huge. it has us both more focused, calm and happier than ever before. we’re content in our little house.

i don’t know how i could really say my life is stuck in neutral anymore, but sometimes i feel like it is. i exercise, eat right, get enough sleep and i feel like i have enough energy to take on the world. i don’t do it, feel like a slug and my self-esteem goes for a swoop down the toliet.

reflecting on the post from another pudding fight-er, on loving yourself before you can love anymore else, and i’m not sure that’s completely true. i think it’s more of realistically accepting your own short comings and finding someone who can tolerate the little innate quirks that make you, well, you.

it morphs over time into more than that, not that we want the person we love to change, but we wish they would stop sniffing in the morning, always leaving the toilet seat up, or wish they would have some enthusiasm about going to see your family.

i think i’ve discovered the long of the short of it is, you need to have tolerance, and you also need to know what your “must haves” are. another PF lady told me this week it was “pretty boys”, whereas my category innately falls to a “manly man”. it’s all in your rose coloured glasses.

that being said, and after wasting a year of my own time trying to find myself again and wondering if the person i believed to possibly be my soulmate was coming back, self-protection became a large part of who i was, and who i am.

not every battle can be won, pure and simple. and sometimes he plays tony hawk and you read your book in your separate corners. that’s real life.

I’m moved in, for the most part. A few of my clothes are still at Doug’s parents, but I plan on getting them tomorrow. Doug is not moved as of yet, but some of the stuff we’re not sure where it is going to go yet. My scrapbooking and desk stuff sits around me in a large cardboard pile.

It doesn’t feel like home yet - I am tiptoeing around people that seem to be here all the time, and trying to find my own groove and routine. I think that will take a while.

It feels good to open boxes of stuff that I have not seen in four years, and things I had almost forgotten I had. Or things I thought I had, like silverware, which I really didn’t have at all.

We are still missing probably a lot of the basics, but for now, it’s enough.

Technically, owner or part-owner of a house now. Still doesn’t seem real, seems like I am painting someone else’s house and helping someone else out again.

Working hard - painting rooms, I love the names of paint colours - tiramaisu in the powder room, blue like the sky on a summer’s day in the laundry room, laurel mist in the bedroom, dolphin fin in the bathroom, and french vanilla in the living room and kitchen.

The tulips brighten it up - so do shiny new steel appliances. there are small setbacks, and new developments like the 92 year man and 78 year old woman next door and them not owning a car.

exhausted, but happy.

Pretend you’re on a roller coaster and that you have no idea where it’s going to end up, or who you’re going to be when you get there. Okay — you can stop pretending. That’s exactly what life will be like for a while. Remember, your seat cushion doubles as a flotation device.

Don’t bother packing a thing. When you end up where you’re going, you’ll feel like a brand-new person — which calls for a brand-new wardrobe