OOPS...

You know how some people get into a new relationship and forget everyone and everything else for three months? Okay, I wish that was my excuse for abandoning the blog since late September. How thrilling to be swept up in a romance with a guy who can communicate beyond the not-so-witty "How U Doing? U R sexy" online message and whose posted photo isn't ten years old.

Oh, sorry. Bitterness leaking through. Obviously no passionate relationship here. Not much of anything, really. I have been overtaken by work: a new setting filled with chaos that I have yet to get a handle on. (My current coping skill is a new laugh, a non-vocalized heaving sound. Don't like it, don't know where it came from, don't know how to stop. At least it's a laugh, not a scream.)

Three months ago, I was trying to build a relationship with a guy in Toronto whom I'd been emailing since February and seen for a few days in August in Ottawa. That's kaput. His decision in mid-November to trying dating guys who actually lived in the same province made sense to me. Neither of us was piling up the frequent flyer points on Air Canada and absence did not make the heart grow fonder. I just think a phone call would have been more respectful than an email announcement. Call me old-fashioned...

I have been juggling two abodes: my house in the boonies and a condo in Vancouver's West End. It is wonderful feeling like an urban dweller, taking SkyTrain to work, walking to the grocery store, hiking over the Burrard Street Bridge for Sunday dinners in Kitsilano. And, yes, I do appreciate retreating to my house on occasion to enjoy a siren- and motorcycle-free existence. (It hasn't exactly been blissful this weekend with the incessant whirring of chainsaws, but I'm hoping my neighbors' firewood stocks have been replenished. Is there a competition I don't know about? Is there such a thing as too much kindling?)

Juggling two homes and failing to have my lottery numbers come through (yet), I cannot continue my urban-rural existence indefinitely. It would be nice to save up for something like, oh, new socks, but it is what it is. I'll list my house again in the spring and hope that, with the NEW IMPROVED view of the ocean and mountains, a bidding war will ensue. (Yes, I am the hapless lottery player, too.)

So 2010 ends much as it began: single, struggling financially, but still hopeful.