I’ve been very lazy about blogging the past few days, but that’s because I’ve been busy! Not busy doing anything spectacularly important, mind you. Just busy. Wasting time, I guess. I’ve been a bit antisocial, too, and I think it’s because I’m overwhelmed with my own stuff and while I completely appreciate that my friends come to me with their problems, I’m not doing a great job with handling them lately. So I do the best that I can and hope that they understand that I’m not trying to be a cold-hearted kind of person, but instead that I need to focus on straightening my life out first.

I’ve made a list of things that I need to do for immigration. The scary thing is that the list fits on one Post-It. I write big, too, so this means that it’s coming right down to the wire. I’ll be mailing it out hopefully by the end of the week. Scary? Yes. Terrifying. But I’m so ready for it all to be over already so I can move on with my life. The packet of information is already crazy thick, so I can’t wait to see just how thick it is when it’s done. Not to mention I’ll be waiting with my fingers crossed until the day that I get that envelope with the approval in it. Enough about that, though. I’ve already had my one allotted panic attack for the day regarding that!

I’ve spent the past three days at the beach. Not today, but the three days before that. Lots of sun, a bit of a burn, and lots of exercise. Swimming makes me happy. I prefer the ocean over lakes and to be honest, I prefer pools and wave pools over lakes too, but swimming is swimming and I’ll take it wherever I can get it! My shoulders and neck are a bit sore where they were burned but I have no regrets. I haven’t been out in the sun so much in over three years, so I’m well past due.

Last night Matt and I went with Jane and her boyfriend Rob to the casino for a thing with Matt’s coworkers. Jane and Rob are really close friends with Matt’s boss (they’re the reason he found out about the job!) so it was nice having them there. Another of Matt’s coworkers and his band were playing while we were there, and they were awesome! Absolutely fantastic band. It was nice to get out, have a night out, have some drinks and good music and just laugh. It felt so carefree. We gambled a tiny bit - when I say a tiny bit I mean that we used $10 in the slot machines and that was it. It was fun but we knew we didn’t want to spend too much. After the casino we decided that we really wanted some food (mind you, at this point I’d had a couple Smirnoff Ices and a Cosmopolitan, so I was along for the ride no matter where we were going!) so we stopped at a little pizza shop and got some take-out. Jane and I sat on the curb with our feet in the street and tried to figure out where everything was in relation to where we were standing (She definitely knew much more than I did about that!) while we waited for the food, and some crazy guy with no shoes came up asking for a light. After that, I managed to trip in a small hole in the sidewalk and skin my knee. Oh, the things you do when you’re a bit drunk. It was overall a great night though, honestly. I’d do it again in a heartbeat!

I’m debating whether to upload this short video that I have to youtube or not. It’s a guy at the casino that had obviously had a few drinks, and was apparently dancing with his daughter. Unfortunately he stopped shortly after I got the camera out, but I got some good footage! If I do upload it, you can bet I’ll be posting it here. It was one of the highlights of the night!

I have pink post-its lined up along the top shelf of my desk. A few of them I don’t need right now - a number I wrote for Matt, a shopping list that I actually already bought things from… I should get rid of those! But then there’s my friend Adam’s phone number, a list of materials for a shadow resist gear set for my priest (Yes, yes, nerdiness galore), a list of things to do to help my sister-in-law open up her site for her business. Then there’s two very important ones: what to do for the rest of my immigration forms. Those two little sticky notes tie my stomach in knots every time I see them. I need to get my immigration stuff done very soon, but it’s the kind of thing you wish you could put off forever.

I’ve managed to get little piles in my room of things that I’m in the middle of working on. A pile of forms I need to scan and email for my prize from the notworthit.ca contest. A PHP/MySQL book… well, actually three of them. A pile of magazines I need to go through. My immigration pile. A pile of basic GED books and GED math for finding out what I’ll need to know for my tutoring sessions. A pile of photo albums I want to scan.

I should get to cleaning and catching up on some of these projects. It’s a nice day, maybe I can convince Matt to go out and enjoy the sun in a bit!

I’m honestly quite tired of lazy days, but I don’t get much else these days. I’ll be filling out my immigration paperwork within the next couple weeks and mailing that out, which is terrifying! I’ll be going in for volunteer training on Monday which is less scary. Other than that, I have absolutely nothing to do with my time!

Today I changed a few of my 101 things list. I was able to move rearrange the bedroom from the “to do” list to the “done” list, which is cool. I need to do a few of those other things on my own though. Maybe sometime in the next few weeks I’ll get them done! Another thing I changed is that I added something. I’ve wanted to do this for quite a while, so regardless of how silly it is, I added that I want to own either this ring or this ring. I’ve come so close to buying the mesh heart ring so many times that I couldn’t begin to count them, but always backed down. But I decided that I deserve something nice, and once I’m able to own that ring, then I will deserve it. Notice I didn’t say that I have to BUY it. Matt could buy it for me, or a family member, but I’ll most likely be buying it myself, which will probably make me feel proud!

Other than that… I’m attempting to eat healthier these days because I’m frustrated again with my weight. However, when am I not? I need to get back into the gym. I’ve been wanting to go with Katie, but she has been sick since we went last week, poor thing, so I think I just need to get myself in there and do it myself. I can’t rely on anyone but myself! I just feel so worthless these days. The depression is hitting me pretty hard lately and not much makes it better. I think it’s cabin fever. I spent Canada Day doing laundry, and I never go out, and I don’t have a tan. But that’s news for another time.

I really really failed. After so many days of doing 365 shots, I forgot yesterday. But I have a reason, and wonder if I can’t just pick up from today and keep going since technically this year has an extra day anyway. What do you think? I think I’ll do it, why not, right? Ugh. Still makes me feel like a bit of a failure though. On to the reason…

I intended to take the shot after I had my blood work done - a photo of my little band-aid on my arm saying that I finally had my immigration medical and there weren’t many steps left for me to do. Except I didn’t have all of it. As it turns out, the physical is done one place, and the place where they’re going to do the other tests (blood test, urine test, chest x-ray) is the hospital, and they’re only open from 8:30 - 2. Matt’s going to have to take a morning off to take me in for those. I suppose he could take me in early in the morning, have some lunch with me if it takes too long, and then drop me off at the bus station and go over the bridge to work. I just feel bad that I have to inconvenience him for it. There’s no way I’m going alone, though. No way at all.

The physical went well, though. It was good to have a doctor NOT mention my weight. Usually they do, and say “Oh, well you know you’re obese” and give you a hard time while you try to tell them that you have tried to lose weight and that it’s just going slower than you’d like. Not this guy, he didn’t say a thing! He was really friendly and we were cracking jokes back and forth. Like when he listened to my heart, he said “Sounds good!” and I looked at Matt and said “Hey, I have a heart!” The doctor responded with “Oh, and here I’d thought you’d given it to this young man!” Cracked me up, I tell you.

Oh, and I fasted yesterday, because I thought I had to, and nope. Even if the blood test had to be done, it’s a non-fasting blood test. They’re apparently testing for TB and… er… something else that I can’t think of. Oh, well. I know I don’t have any infectious diseases and since they don’t care about things that aren’t going to put the Canadian public at risk, I’m good to go. Plus he said he’d get ahold of me if anything was seriously wrong. It’s very weird that they don’t send the results TO me, though. They courier them over to the physical doctor guy, and he couriers them over to immigration in Ottawa,

I’m very hungry right now, so I think I’m going to have some toast and if I can find the stuff, maybe a cup of tea. Watching shows where they drink a lot of tea has gotten to me! Maybe some orange juice instead though, who knows. And I might boil an egg - a boiled egg sounds good! I’m craving such weird things lately. And no, before you wonder, I’m not pregnant. Though just about everyone else is!

So much to talk about that it’s hard to know where to begin, so I guess the beginning would be a good start. So let’s see…

Woke up around 10:30 or so and confirmed my appointment for tomorrow. Scared out of my mind for the blood work because, let’s face it, who wants giant needles in their arm? Oh, well, though. A bit later, Katie (Matt’s brother’s fiancee, and a good friend of mine) called me to let me know that she’d be over to pick me up in a little while. I got dressed, emailed with my mom, and headed downstairs to wait.

Katie and I headed back to her place, where we sat around for a bit, mopped her kitchen floor, and chatted while playing with her daughter (my niece), Lannah. We went looking for Matt’s cousin to see if she’d watch Lannah while we went to the gym, but she wasn’t home. However, we saw a much more disturbing sight on the way to her place. We pulled onto a small side road and saw a boy (around 13 or so) on the ground with three boys on top of him, kicking and punching him while he flailed around. We locked our doors and rolled up our windows (I don’t care if they were 13, we weren’t taking any chances, as they were obviously not friendly to begin with) and as we were pulling into the parking lot we saw one of the boys’ faces - it turns out it was Matt’s cousin’s son. The son of the woman we were going to go find. I believe Katie’s going to talk to his mother later, and since we had no way of getting ahold of the police or anything and since the boys fled the scene, we couldn’t really do anything. I can honestly say it was scary though. I can’t imagine what young boys would have to fight that much about, really.

Anyway, Katie found a sitter for Lannah around 3:30ish and we headed out to the gym. I had my four photos taken for my medical tomorrow while Katie ran to the bank, and then we headed up and she had her orientation for the gym while I wandered around with them. Then we did a bit of cardio warm-up on the bike, the weight circuit, and then 5 minutes on the treadmill. We decided to stop there so we’re not too sore for the next couple days, and we’re going to go back Friday. I think having her around will really help my motivation, and I hope I can do the same for her!

After that, we decided to go swimming (even though the sun and heat and humidity had all but disappeared by this point) so she took me back to my apartment so I could put on my swimsuit and grab a towel, and we headed out to the lake. We swam for about a half hour, in ice cold water, talking about how we’d waited a year to do this again. Regardless of how cold it was, it felt fantastic and I think it was a great way to relax my muscles down after a nice workout.

After this, I came home and made BLTs with Matt, played some EQ2, and am sitting here just relaxing. Tomorrow, I’m going to clean up the apartment during the day, and then head out to the doctor for my medical, and then the hospital for my X-rays and blood work. All in all, it was a great day. Summer’s officially here!