The continuing process of settling in... We voice our regrets, the things we miss. The Wallace and Gromit movie is opening "everywhere", says the tv. Mmm. Not here. The librarian is out of town, so the library is closed. I miss coffee that is made by someone else, and a store that sells Mars bars at midnight when I'm craving. I miss my friend Jane, and bookstores. Email is good, but getting together to eat licorice and talk all afternoon would be better. Ordering books on the net is fun, but you can't browse as easily. I miss my mum and dad.

The sea is frozen now, and everyone's buzzing around on snowmobiles. The programs I'm helping with are going well, school is good for the kids, Miguel likes his job. The snow is fun, it drifts around alarmingly when the wind blows. One of the neighbours said that with us being on the edge of town, when there's a really big blow there will be 15 foot drifts in the road.

Some things save my sanity: Macleans magazine in the mail, really good cable, having brought the breadmaker, the friendliness and incredible sense of humour of everyone who lives here, sunrises like Monet paintings, the quiet of this snow desert, Miguel's support during my growing pains in my new occupation, phone calls and letters from friends, the internet.

Also, recently, a big book of Kingsley Amis' letters, and the revelation that he has shares my objections to Henry James... "I find the trouble is that he can't tell a story, and can't gather his observations, some of which I don't mind, round any central idea. These enormous wodges of undramatised family-background, she-was-a-woman-who, he-had-first-been-attracted-to-his-present-profession-when-travelling-to balls confound me and make me not want to have any more. I find he gives me more information about what he is telling me about than I care to have..." Yup, that's what I think too. Plus he uses the word "vague" too much, which may be telling in itself. I can back this up, if anyone cares to play:
Here...

we find this classic passage:

"She heard no knock, but at the time the darkness began vaguely to grow grey she started up from her pillow as abruptly as if she had received a summons. It seemed to her for an instant that he was standing there—a vague, hovering figure in the vagueness of the room. She stared a moment; she saw his white face—his kind eyes; then she saw there was nothing. She was not afraid; she was only sure. She quitted the place and in her certainty passed through dark corridors and down a flight of oaken steps that shone in the vague light of a hall-window."

Yeah, yeah, I know. English degree worth all that, etc... (but seriously, 'the vagueness of the room'? sheesh.)