Back in one piece

Nothing like 4 days away to rejuvinate you. I am not even tired! Eventhough I hardly slept all weekend, and was in transit all day yesterday. Fortunately I had a short day today and teaching ended at 11:25. Now I have marking to do but that is low stress.

So I went and visited Manchester. I wasnt actually in town but a smaller suburb. I saw the bad parts too, through a car window of course, but next to "the projects" in Toronto it still looked picturesque.

Life is so damn expensive in England though! 108 CAD was 45 pounds, which I spent all in one place practically, buying photographic chemicals, so I will finally process the B&W from Italy from last summer. I went to Sainsburrys, and bought a few little things, doing mental calculations not only with Bulgaria but with Canada and Korea as well. Can't help it when you are a world traveler. My pay here in Bulgaria really wouldnt go too far anywhere else and this makes me sad. I like it here, but if I want to put anything away for a rainy day, it will have to be for rainy days in Bulgaria, as it wouldnt amount to much elsewhere. Maybe a rainy hour at best in England.

I met my "friend" and through talking and talking discovered a lot about him, and rediscovered a few things about myself. **I like that! You get to know yourself all over again when you get to know someone new. Things surface, burried so deep that it takes fresh eyes to draw them out, and not just any fresh eyes, but preceptives ones digging through the shell to get to your true inner core. Mine happens to be a very soft inner core (too soft soemtimes), so sometimes I feel an extra hard shell is necessary. Only select few can crack that open. I learned the difference between letting someone into your life, your heart and your soul. If I decide to give all three to a man, then it means thats it! Look no further.

Something else I learned about myself was that when I do crack open the shell, it acts like a clam. It wants to shut right back again, and its an even greater effort to keep it from springing back, than it was to open it in the first place. Fighting a knee-jerk reaction takes a great deal of strength- its natural after all! But I am working on it. And as the wise saying goes; If it doesnt kill you, it will only make you stronger. I havent had to practice any of this in a awful long time and the pitfalls have become covered with the moss of time, as tends to happen with my memory. I have to be extra alert or else I will end up neck deep in a hole I dug myself years ago!