(no subject)
I feel I've neglected dear LJ in the wake of my Facebook addiction.
I'm living in Peterborough with Kris and working at this group home of adults who have intellectual disabilities and are also deaf/hard of hearing/non-verbal. My sign language is coming along. At this point I'm not really able to converse with fully-functioning deaf people but can get by with the residents, whose language skills are generally not that great. The admin end of this organization is pretty disorganized and has sent me on several wild goose chases, but I like the actual job.
Peterborough (population: 77,000 or so) is kind of a funny city. It has Trent U and a pretty big college (Sir Sandford Fleming, two branches of it for some reason), a big Dept. of Natural Resources office, seemingly a lot of group homes and seniors' housing, and nary a decent grocery store. Or mall, really. It's close enough to Toronto (an hour and a half or so) that it's assumed that for "real" shopping, carousing, medical care, etc., everyone can just go to Toronto. Hence, these things are scarce in the city, with the possible exception of some carousing.
The drivers here are miserable, and sadly this is a much more driver-friendly city than we pedestrians would prefer. They really are terrible. I feel like everyone says the drivers where they live suck, but my most common complaint about drivers anywhere is that they're impatient to the point of not paying attention to what's going on around them. Generally I figure that "if they would just slow down!" they'd actually be OK at it, but not this group. Kris' advisor (a fellow named Finis, who delightfully tells people that his name is pronounced "like Linus, but with an 'F'") thinks that this is because the city is populated mostly by students and the elderly, "for whom making a left turn is kind of on the list of things to do for the day". A typical Peterborough driver will pause at a 4-way stop when nothing else is coming, wait, hover for up to 20 seconds, then bomb through like a bat out of Hell just as a wary pedestrian (who has likely been keeping an eye on this shady-looking car) steps onto the street.
Everyone here has dogs and/or bikes except yours truly and her significant other, who have an apartment that's not nearly large enough for... well, either.
Crack seems quite popular in Peterborough. Everyone who has spent more than a couple of years here will speak of losing a friend or two or a few to crack. One guy at my work also works with an AIDS organization here which runs a needle exchange program and the number of needles they exchanged was multiplied by 10 "the year crack came to Peterborough". He reports, quite apocalyptically, that crystal meth is on its way.
We have two and a half friends here. The two are another couple, the female portion of which is in Kris' program, and the half is this guy who's also in The Program whom we both like reasonably well but who is bound and determined to suffer academic burnout by springtime at the rate he's going. We both feel we'd be pretty good friends with him if he ever did anything except schoolwork.
I am looking into masters degree programs in dispute resolution (the not-international kind). My parents are of course incensed that I'm not in any of them at the moment but I don't mind. Mom seems excited that I'm coming home for Christmas, though, so hopefully I'll get to avoid the wrath of Dad and another one of his "your life is ticking away and your judgment, which used to be good, has seemingly eroded WHY AREN'T YOU IN SCHOOL?!??!?!?! I wish you had student loan debt so maybe you wouldn't have wasted so much time" speeches.
Current addictions other than Facebook: "0% Interest" by Jason Mraz, Margaret Atwood, and those websites where mothers-to-be seek guidance on what to name their babies. I am by no means pregnant, but rather trying to do a service to some poor child whose name otherwise would have been Myckenzyi Kaytlynn or Stardust Fantasia or Mildred.
New Year's Resolutions: resume donating blood, take a sign language course, start volunteering at the New Canadians' Centre once work schedule is all set up.
How are you?