Chocolat

Dear Roux, (That is what my gypsy will hereby be referred to as... however, he is not as hot as Johnny Depp!)

You know, you kind of suck. I don't want to be too hasty and throw the baby out with the bathwater but I really hate the way you don't communicate anything very clearly. The way you string me along and make me feel so good and then make a comment that just about breaks my heart.

I know, I know, I invested way too much from the beginning. I know you can't change a man and you will probably always have a good case of wanderlust but you are 35 for goodness' sake. Eventually you are going to have to settle down, and I don't mean that it has to be with me, but seriously?

You go to my workplace and tell them how great our birthday date was, and "romantic". You walk me from my car to the restaurant, you give me hugs and we talk about you buying land, and spend SEVEN HOURS TOGETHER TALKING ABOUT NOTHING... and then I get the "IF I am still here this winter..." and the "I'm thinking about going on the road again..." and the "I'm pretty busy... like for the next couple of weeks"...(!!!)

Seriously, man... I want to spend time with you. We don't have to go to dinner. I am happy to watch you work your horses or tinker in the engine of your truck. I don't know what the hell you're doing or you're thinking and I know now I should have tacked you down because if this is just a friendship (and I seriously hope this is not how you behave with ALL of your friends!!) and you never intended for it to be anything more, I could stop fretting. I could stop worrying about getting a midnight visit to say goodbye because you're taking off. I could stop laying in bed awake going "What does this MEAN?! Are you TRYING to break my heart?!".

Stupid, stupid man. You're stupid. I'm excellent, and I'm wonderful. I give and give and give, but you haven't given me a chance to do that yet. You keep me around but hold me at arm's length. It's incredibly infuriating. You're making me absolutely crazy. You made me crazy before we started to get involved and you're making me crazy now. My mother was right (of course!) when she warned me at the beginning of this, as I insisted that you were ready to settle down, that you can't change a man. You'll probably never want to live in a real house and do domestic things. You'll always have a yert or an igloo or the back of some fire truck in your brain.

I don't want to be premature, so I am going to emulate a character from one of my favourite movies. You can call me Vianne from now on... and you, of course, are Roux. And right now is the part where (mentally) you came and said goodbye in the night... and in a little while if I don't fret about it much, you'll come back down the river in your boat, and I will stay put even though the wanderlust tugs at me, too, you know.

Stupid man.

Vianne



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In other wonderful news, I have lost 7lbs on my new Self Improvement Plan. And I am getting sick AGAIN. Wretched sore throat, sinuses filling up again, NO energy whatsoever. It just figures, doesn't it?

I'm in that...

I'm in that state of mind where you know you want something but you don't know what it is and you go around looking at things you could potentially have and keep going "meh"...

Except I know what I want and I am trying very hard not to want it because I have been spending every second of my time since G and I started "seeing each other" digging my heels in in an attempt not to be "that girl". I find myself lately wanting to spend COPIOUS amounts of time with him as often as possible (much like last Monday's SEVEN HOUR marathon), but I made a promise to myself that this time, HE would ask me out.

Several times over the last week, I have told myself that I don't care what I promised and there is nothing wrong with expressing my desire to be with him, and that we are adults and adults go for what they want, and it's silly to think that I need to withhold expressing my opinions and desires in order to see if the relationship is one sided or not. Of course it's not one-sided. If it were one-sided, when we got kicked out of the restaurant last Monday, G would not have gotten in my car and sat with me for a while longer. If it were one-sided, G would not stop by the restaurant and he would not have walked me from the parking lot to the restaurant yesterday morning.

Sometimes he says things to me, telling me where he is going or what he is doing as though he wants me to invite myself along. For example, last night he said he was going to temperance vale to check on the horses and work on his truck - which had absolutely nothing to do with what we were talking about. I would gladly sit and watch him tinker in his truck's engine for hours and talk to him because that is what I like best, just being with him, talking to him, but I don't want to invite myself along. I have done a lot of inviting myself along and I am trying to stop. Oh I don't even know what direction I am going in and it's frustrating.

Unfortunately, it looks like the tone of these entries will remain about G since Shay has officially decided I am not allowed to talk about it anymore because it's all I ever talk about. I can't help it that I have been single for five years and all of this is new and very exciting to me.

In other news, Bronwyn and I have started a self improvement plan in which we get our acts together and become hot mamas - literally. I am working her out to get fit and in the show ring and then I am planning to breed her to a friesian stallion. I am working myself out to get fit and in shape financially and emotionally to have a baby... Bronwyn's breeding date has a timeline, mine does not. Either way, I've decided that since I AM a hot blooded female, it'd be a good idea, if I plan to have babies anytime soon, to do what I'm going to do now since it won't be easy after a baby.

Shay took some "Before" pictures of us. I lost 2lbs last week but I do not expect a loss this week as I have been all over the charts.





I have been told, on more than one occasion, that I am "glowing" in these pictures!

I want you all to myself...

So my birthday has come and gone - it was Sunday and was mostly uneventful and just pretty much sad. Saturday, G and I decided to go to dinner, but Sunday morning, he came into the Inn because he had forgotten that it was Sunday and he had to go to Mass. He is a practicing Catholic, which I am not, but I understand the concept of being religious and faithful to that religion and I do not want to be "that girl". I will admit I was disappointed and very nearly cried, but I held it in check until I got into a row with one of the other waitresses and then I let the tears loose. I actually hid in a corner of the kitchen where no one could see me to cry because I didn't want anyone to think I was crying because of G or because of the other waitress. L summed it up the best when she said that "birthdays are a big letdown" - you build up excitement for them and when they arrive, you completely expect a big show of fireworks or something amazing and wonderful but they usually pass as good or average and then you are disappointed.

The girls in the kitchen made me a potato pancake and a homemade card with Sharpies and put a candle in the pancake and sang me happy birthday and it got slightly better. It got even better when G stopped by the Inn while we were all sitting on the back stoop and was feeling bad and Susan offered to work Monday night for me so he could take me out then instead (she already offered to work Sunday night for me and I would have gone back to working that night except with the crying and the being sad, I would not have been in good shape for it, especially since I was to work with the waitress I got in the row with). Then he walked me to my car and gave me a hug (probably because I was so bedraggled looking).

Monday, my boss showed up with two little personal sized gourmet cakes and told me that he and I had to eat them and "do something special". Everyone in the kitchen more or less decided that I needed to "find out what is going on" and find out where I stood with G because as of then, we were just friends having supper together - had hugged twice but there was some flirting going on and such. I really thought, after being blown off for church, that I was thinking more of the relationship than he was, but I tried not to be too pessimistic.

So I joined him to do chores after work, which is really fun and possibly one of my favourite parts about work - driving around the site after everyone has gone when the sun is starting to go down, and putting all the chickens away in their coops and feeding the horses and basically putting all the animals "to bed". He showed me a new bunch of piglets that no one was supposed to see because they don't want the mama to get upset, and then as we were getting ready to leave - we were discussing how beautiful the site is and how nice it is after all the guests have left... He said "Well, there is this one place that I think is the most beautiful spot..." And I started trying to guess - and he said "Well, maybe I will just take you there."

We pulled up to one of the houses and he got out, so I followed, and he showed me around to the back where you could see up the river and down the river for about a mile - across the river, there is roadway but there just happened to be no one on it... it was completely perfectly quiet except for some geese coming up the river, the water was still, the sun was low and the light was completely perfect. We sat down on the back stoop all cozy and wonderful and it was almost exactly like a movie.

Except I didn't get a kiss. I wasn't too upset since it was a complete perfect, private and wonderful moment even without the kiss, but I can completely see us going back to that spot again - I might even drag him there myself if I have to.

We went up to our regular spot for dinner and tucked into a corner booth where we usually just sit out at a table in the open. The conversation was great - I mean, it's always great, but it was flirty and friendly and really open and I felt like he was showing me a part of him that I hadn't gotten to see yet. There was some mild playful touching (not necessarily in a romantic way) - we are definitely becoming more and more comfortable with one another to say and do what comes into our heads at any given time. We stayed in the restaurant so long that they asked us to leave so they could close up... and then we just moved to sit in my van and talk for another hour and a half and eat the cakes that Susan had sent (the girls packed a candle and matches in there - he said it was a "romantic touch" - I blushed!).

After that, he helped me put transmission fluid in the van and when I accidentally locked us out, he climbed in the back hatch to unlock the doors without hesitation. Before I left, I was coming back out of the store and he was going to throw away a piece of paper towel, and he just reached out his arm while I was on the way by and scooped me into another hug. I am so in like, it's serious scary.

In all - he way more than made up for Sunday on Monday. I don't think he would have been very good company Sunday if I had insisted - particularly because some stuff has been going on at work for him and he really needed to go to church to sort his brain out.

And I never put my neck on the line to ask what was going on - but I get the impression from the conversation that he realizes this is headed in a romantic direction. He is older than I by quite a bit and he is to the point in his life where he is "playing for keeps" and I would like to be at that point either - obviously I don't know enough about him right now to say I'd want to marry him - but he is someone I would be interested in spending long term with - and he wants to build a good friendship base and see if that is what he is interested in, too. So far, our record for being able to talk to one another for hours on end is pretty darn good.

GOOD MORNING G!

So there has been some drama at work... making me crazy. Fortunately, M and I spoke to our boss today and everything has been smoothed down before it had a chance to get fired up.

On Thursday, G stopped by the restaurant and chatted with everyone while we were out on a smoke break (I don't smoke but I take breaks as often as I can!) and M tacked him down to coming back later for some pie. Since we were not going to be busy, M and I let the new girl, R, do all the public tables (we only did like 24 people all day) because she wasn't getting paid on Friday and could probably use the money, and we needed to set up for a wedding that happened last night. We worked our little butts off all morning and then decided to go see a new show that the entertainers were putting on at the theatre at 2:30 - conveniently, that is right about when G showed up so instead of pie, he came with us to the show. It was quite nice, actually. :)

So when we came back, almost exactly a half hour later, we were informed by the hostess that there were people in the kitchen that weren't happy, and the baker hostile-ly asked me "where the HELL were you fellers?" - even though we had cleared our leaving with R and the hostess and they were practically pushing us out the back door. There were even rumblings that our boss' boss would be informed of our activities...

The thing is - we signed out a half an hour early so as not to get paid for the time we were missing, and our boss let us do this last year several times. Overall, it became an enormous mess but was quickly calmed when M talked to our boss and our boss insisted that we were fine and it was no big deal.

And I loved you first...

So things have been moving excruciatingly slowly with G. I think it's alright, though, because the speed that he is regulating things at is probably exactly the speed I need to go because I get anxious and overexcited and blow things all to hell, and that's never good. He did inform me he doesn't like aggressive girls, but he was talking in the context of an ex-interest, so I don't think he meant it directly to me, and when I told him I hoped I wasn't being too pushy, he didn't say anything, so I am assuming I am okay. I've called him a couple of times and instigated two "dates" - one was a big bunch of people hanging out at L's, and the other was a one-on-one dinner the night before last (Monday).

It was a nice change to have him face-to-face without anyone else around, really, and not worrying about tourists sneaking up on us and hearing us talking about non period appropriate things. I really like talking to him and we spent three hours (until they started mopping the floor around us) just talking, etc. Though I had insisted while he was gone to the restroom that the bills be separate, he took my bill when he came back and insisted on paying it (but let me tip the waitress).

We stood in the parking lot and talked in the freezing cold for another twenty minutes, and then he cleaned my van's headlights and told me to drive carefully and slow down a little bit and patted me on the shoulder - but I am pretty much convinced it was not a "friendly" pat - more of a "this is all I get because you already got in your car without hugging me first". Anyways, I am not going to stress too much about that bit... try not to anyways.

We talked about all the stuff you're not supposed to talk about on first dates - like our exes and our situations in life - financially, mentally, etc. It's pretty obvious that neither of us are really in a position to get into a serious relationship right now (I live with my parents and he is more or less homeless - I am in a financial bind and he is HOMELESS), but I think we can enjoy one another's company and cross those bridges when (IF) we get there. It really felt like we were laying out all the informations so the other could see what we were REALLY like and be able to make the decision to carry on or not. Lots of "this is how I am in a relationship", "my personality is like this", etc. It felt natural and right, anyways.

I've decided to just enjoy this and let it come as it would and carry on. I have nothing to lose, really - he is not the type that would let a failed attempt at a relationship interfere with our friendship.