I’ve been in Edmonton for a month now as of today. I’m definitely settled in, though there’s plenty of things I miss from home. I can’t really claim to have seen the city and formed an opinion on it, because I haven’t been anywhere that takes more than 30 minutes to walk to. But I’m happy about that! It’s really nice not having to deal with public transit. Also, walking gives me time to play video games.

        I started writing parts of this two weeks ago, but got kinda sidetracked. I’ll try to run quickly through a few big events…

        On May 10th, I got a tour of the “Linguistics department”, which is about one and a half floors of a building on the far side of campus. I learned that we have a lounge with a fridge and some other appliances, and that the department sells shirts that say “If you can read this, you must be a linguist” in IPA. Which is the best thing ever. I also got introduced to a lot of people. The whole process took… about two and a half hours. I got home around 7pm and was completely exhausted.

        I haven’t had an incredibly varied diet, except when I get lazy and waste money buying food on campus. Mostly it’s been pasta, rice, cereal, bread + peanut butter, and a couple of frozen pizzas when I got lazy. It’s strange being transplanted into someone else’s kitchen, where you know the things you want are somewhere, but you have no idea where. At any rate, I should really get around to buying cold cuts and other sandwich materials, plus meat and vegetables and such to add to rice and pasta…

        There’s a few niggling things about the furniture in my room. The desk and chair aren’t really home office quality. Which would be fine for lots of people, but I can’t keep going to bed sore because I was on my computer for more than an hour. But I’m not sure to what degree I can do something about that. I suppose I should talk to the home owners about it, but I don’t know what the etiquette on that is.

        Speaking of which, for the few weeks I only ever saw Mike, the husband. Last weekend, when he came back from Calgary on Sunday, he brought his wife back with him. They arrived around 9pm, and Cindy proceeded to spend three hours cleaning, decorating, baking, and more. It was really nice meeting her - she gave the distinct impression that they treat this place much like they treat their bed and breakfast near Ottawa. She said she’d clean my bathroom for me, fix the headboard on my bed, buy a slow cooker, and a bunch of other stuff. I mean, I’d totally survive if she didn’t do any of those things! But she said she’d take care of it all, which is super nice.

        My shower has apparently been leaking into the basement - turns out water was getting through some of the tiles and rotted out a part of the wall. So someone’s coming in to fix that at some point. Until then, I’ve been showering in the basement, which is fine. The other exciting not-living-at-home-anymore event was deciding to turn off the mini-fridge that came with my room. I uh… learned a bit too late not to unplug the power from a fridge and leave it closed afterwards. Apparently everyone knows that except me - I never asked why my mom does that with the spare fridge at our house… Had to clean it out, got water all over, but it’s good now.

        This got long, so I’ll post the rest in a few days.