i think that "LOST" might not have been the best choice of television programs to watch while i pass the time in exile from my home in toronto, trapped in my suite by nearly uninterrupted rainfall in calgary and the lack of a car to get out of the 'hood of northeastern calgary. i think that i'm feeling an altogether unwelcome and probably unnecessary isolation from my old life here. maybe i can explain it a little better by showing you what i'm working with.

i took this photo of super-hans before we took the flight out to calgary. taking after his human adopted father, hans likes to don a cape and zip around his home pretending to investigate strange goings-on, save female felines in distress, and rewarding himself with ham-related food treats. he is such a happy cat, in his own cantankerous fashion. but in their new home, here in the basement of a 60's style bungalow, i don't think my cats are nearly as content as they were in the 24th story apartment in toronto.

the people from whom jim and i rented this suite are very very nice people. they are a young couple who, ironically enough, moved to alberta from ontario, bought the house, and are renting two-thirds of it to ease their financial burden. actually, person per square foot, i probably have the lion share of living space in this house, having the whole basement to myself every other week while jim works back home in toronto. but still, although i eagerly agreed to take this suite because the landlords accepted my two cats as tenants, the fact is that i live in a basement like a kid in high-school which is kind of humiliating, really, for a man of my age, and moreover, with it come some sacrifices.

first of all, the suite is essentially unfurnished, which was a bit of a compromise, considering i'll be here for at least three months. thankfully, the landlords had a spare queen-sized mattress that they allowed me to borrow for my stay. jim has a separate living area from which the cats are barred by two sets of doors, with a couple of comfy couches for him to sleep on, but for a couple of nights, i was back to sleeping on a nest of clothes and blankets on a cold hard floor! it bears mentioning that i thought that my days of sleeping on cold hard floors were over a couple of years ago, but... some things never change, no matter how you try! (i'm laughing at myself here, not trying to seem too pathetic!!!)

our kitchen is amply equipped with a portable, two-burner electric stove top thingie, a "classic" refrigerator, and a convection-microwave kind of oven that i'm more than a little frightened of plugging in. the washer and dryer that we have in the kitchen is super convenient, except that one wash takes an hour and a half, and the drying takes even longer. i've got a drying rack that i would prefer to use, but with the constant precipitation and accompanying humidity, it's virtually impossible to air dry anything down here.

in the plus column, my cats have their own entire room for the litter box. they have utter privacy and there is virtually no bother of litterbox smell in the rest of the suite to bother jim or myself. that having been said, on my part of the suite, there are three small basement windows. i've covered up the one in my bedroom because the single pane glass allows all of the heat to transfer out of the bedroom and all of the cold to seep into the room. bad enough that it's about 10 degrees on average here day and night, but being underground, we hardly benefit from the few moments when the heater does kick in to warm the upstairs rooms. so the sealed windows mean virtually no sunbeams or air circulation and the air purifier that i had to buy my third day here has been running non-stop to absorb the smell of cat-fear and cat dander that my translocated travelling partners have been shedding.

when i volunteered to move back to alberta for this assignment, i didn't anticipate the possibility that i would have such a hard time finding a comfortable place to live that would accommodate my two cats, or that i would be making quite so many sacrifices. i know in a cerebral way that i could be much much worse off and that the vast majority of people on this planet live with much much greater challenges to happiness than i have. ultimately, i'm comfortable and have managed to work out the biggest problems i have living here in the past couple of weeks, but i wonder how many of my co-workers would be accepting of the same sacrifices?

so, like someone who's plane has crashed on a magical, tropical island in the south pacific, on a place where all of your needs can be dealt with, and even a handful of crucial desires, i have been given an opportunity to break from a kind of life that was familiar and predictable, a change of perspective that allows me to re-evaluate the way my life was working and to think about alternatives while i work out the challenges in this alternative mode here and now. already, i have learned something very important about myself that ... well... i can't really commit to my blog because it's altogether too personal and private. i have this adventure in calgary to thank for reminding me of something that i had forgotten about myself. i've only been here for about a month, and i still have three more to go. i wonder how many more epiphanies i will experience while i am out here alone?

i expect next week, the rain will break and the normal dry alberta climate will kick back in when i can start to adventure out of my basement-island with my crappy new bike and adventure in this great big alberta city of calgary. i look forward to the adventures that are forthcoming, and now that i've finished whining about how i'm living, i can focus on the adventures that i planned to have this summer, being back in the western half of the country. gosh, i just can't wait!!!

- g