So what else is there to do in Stratford-upon-Avon once you've seen a play, fed the swans, and had fish and chips?

( ...drive supercars? )

Suddenly my Impreza isn't nearly fast enough. ^^

The UK is awesome so far. London is quite busy and the general population seem to be amazingly high-strung and focused on moving through the streets as quickly as possible. I thought Toronto was bad!

Many cool things so far and only the first full day in! I'm on an hour of the most expensive internet I've ever bought -- £5/hr -- so I'll be quick!

- the driers in the toilets (there are signs saying 'toilets' with arrows pointing all over the place .. I love it!) at Heathrow blasted the water off my hands along with my band-aid

- there are separate signals at some intersections for those on horseback, complete with a little walk and don't walk lights in the shape of a person on horseback

- tonight i drank vodka from glass made of ice while wearing a throw-over parka and mittens pinned to the side while standing in bar also made of ice

Back on July 1st! :)

I've just been given notice the tenant in my condo will be moving out for September 1st.

Anyone out there in Lj-land looking for a 2nd floor 1-bedroom apartment a few blocks east of the downtown core at Richmond and Jarvis? Rent would include all-you-can-eat utilities (power, heat/AC, water) but would exclude telecom services such as TV, phone, and internet. En-suite laundry is included, there's a dishwasher in the kitchen for your dishes and big tub in the bathroom for you and 1-2 other people--really! Up on the roof is a large patio with a BBQ. The building includes a small gym and workout area, and a party room available for, uh, parties. Parking is not included. If you needed parking you'd have to find someone who's renting a spot in the garage or become intimately familiar with the surrounding area's parking regulations.

Contact me for more details if you're interested or know anyone who is. :)

This coming Monday afternoon I'm off to the UK until July 1st! My dad's collected so may travel miles through his company trips he's earned a few companion tickets, so he's arranged for me and my mom to meet him in London during the last leg of a business trip. I'm super excited about being able to go, and with work being the way it has been lately, the timing is perfect.

What makes the timing not so perfect is jafra isn't going to be able to come with me. He and I haven't been apart for this long in, well, years. I'm going to miss him, especially after the past few fun weeks we've been having. Luv -- we go to Cuba later to make up for it? Or some other awesome place together!? :)

The day after I get back Jaf and I will be packing up and heading to AC. I'll be on UK time for the beginning of the con -- that'll make for an easy, early morning departure, but the first and second nights or so will be interesting. By the time midnight roles around it'll be 5AM for me! I predict delightful sleep deprivation-fuelled insanity. It'll be fun! Two weeks of holidays start in about 2 days. ^^

'Speed of Sound' was one of the first singles from Coldplay's X&Y a couple of summers ago. It's a great track, but as I usually find with a lot of bands, the songs I really, really like are stuck on the album somewhere at the back and get no radio time what so ever. And that's good because nothing kills a track faster for me than playing it day in and day out on the radio. I couldn't listen to Yellow for years as a result!

Below is one of those somewhere in the back of the album songs I love. It follows 'Speed of Sound' so whenever I hear that track on the radio a part of me wishes they'd keep the CD playing so I can hear the one I really want to listen to.

It's a simple track, a simple message. We're not alone. We don't have to be -- even when it seems more difficult to be together. It's our choice to make.

( A Message... )

I've been getting some more lingering stuff taken care of in the past little while:

Filled my updated glasses prescription from ages ago -- new frames for work and home plus I splurged and (finally) got a pair of prescription sunglasses for driving. They're polarized and huge and I love 'em after just one sunny morning drive into work. Multi-hour road trips during the middle of the day, bring 'em on!!

Got the battery replaced on my Macbook after a few months of gradually worse and worse battery life. About 40 minutes was the average run time, but with a shiny new battery on Apple's dime it's back up to over 4 hours. They only other thing I'll have to watch out for is a potential issue with the graphics system, but so far I've had no problems with it. I guess they just don't make 'em like they used to. My old Macs were all bullet, tank, and puppy-proof -- but I think it's just not possible to kill a Plus or an LC575.

New haircut yesterday, sushi yesterday, hiking in the Spencer Gorge this past Sunday, Alice in Wonderland the day before -- All fantastic, all good. Still lots to look forward to, too. :)

Ok, Lady GaGa won me over. So has Franz Ferdinand. ...the hell?

O2 sensor, finally, fixed! I cheated tho. After almost an hour of wrestling under the car with dirt and oil dripping into my face and bashing my hands off everything imaginable trying to loosen the old sensor, I packed up and drove the car over to Scarborough to get one of the many auto shops to change it for me. $30 and fifteen minutes later, job done. Deal.

The ECU is re-learning, but already I feel throttle response is much better, and the lumpy idle is all Subaru smooth again. As a bonus, the mechanic told me to bring the car back and he'd fix the rust spot on my rear fender for $200. Again, deal. I'll take it in at the end of June. The other shops I'd priced out back in the fall were all over $500. Even if it rusts out again in two years -- well, that's about as long as I'm planning on keeping the car for. :)

Next up for the Impreza: suspension and exhaust. I'm going to be lifting up the coil-overs by 1.5" (giving me a 0.5" drop from factory standard) and getting a new, quieter axle-back exhaust. That will smooth out the ride and give the car some much needed discretion when it comes to noise.

When jafra and I watch TV I'll usually turn on the TV and stereo myself before sitting down on the couch. What I'll always forget to turn on is the Xbox (it's our media centre) .. and what dawned on me last night is all the components I turn on manually before I sit down are all the components that have remote controls that turn them on. The only thing I consistently forget to turn on manually is the one component that cannot be turned on via a remote, the Xbox. So I have to get up again to turn that on.

The absurdity of it all cracked me up, and as I explained it to Jaf he laughed too, but as he put it: "It's impressive you manage to constantly fuck that up -- a rat or pig would have gotten it right a few times now just by chance."

I <3 my wohofubuchip.

Lots of stuff to look forward to in the next little while! Here's just a smattering:

- going to see Star Trek with jafra tonight and having a picnic in the park (weather permitting) with him tomorrow afternoon
- oxygen sensor on the Impreza slated for a Saturday fixin'
- news glasses soon, new laptop battery soon, new desk and monitor soon
- AC is coming up in a few weeks, awesome!
- Feral! is coming up in a few months, even more awesome!!

Got some more good stuff rattling around in my head. Things continue to be okay, better, and great .. usually in that order, too! :) Just have to remember my little rules of thumb: Look where you want to go, push the throttle forward, and just keep swimming.

Oh! And by the end of the summer I want to have my M2. Motorbike motorbike motorbike...

My new oxygen sensor arrived at the house earlier this week, and I swung by my parent's place last night to pick up my jacks and stands to change it at some point on the weekend. I'm fully expecting the old sensor to be completely fused to the exhaust. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. :)

I've also found the 2" drop on the suspension the car's got now is accomplished through Megan Racing coil-overs. I tracked down the specs online -- it's a fully adjustable kit where I can set the ride height and damper rate, along with all the other tasty suspension geometry. Slick! The only problem is the passenger side is clunking like a mofo, the entire front-end creeks on speed bumps, and the ride quality is shit. I'm guessing the damper rates are cranked up crazy firm to compensate for the huge suspension drop, but whatever is setup on the car, I don't like it anymore.

Before I'd just assume rip the crap suspension out and re-install the factory suspension sitting in my basement. But with the ability to adjust what's on there now though, I'm thinking of dropping it off at a shop for them to re-adjust the ride height and damper rate to something a little more reasonable and less bone-shattering, and at the same time have them fix whatever it is making all the noises.

The Subaru suspension for the RS seems to be a hit from the reviews I've read, so I guess the question now is, swap a potentially ten year old suspension back onto the car, or track down a good performance shop to have them re-adjust and fix my coil-overs? I'm leaning to fix the coil-overs .. with a subtle 0.5-1" drop and softer damper rate. Thoughts? :D

Right! Back to our regularly scheduled programme:

I got my OBD-II scanner last week. Plugged it in, pulled the code, and sure enough, the post-catalytic O2 sensor readings are out of range. All the signs were there looking back: lumpy idle, sluggish throttle response, sooty exhaust, oh, and an average of 10-12MPG. Yuck.

Subaru sells a new one for $262. That's slightly painful, but with the prospect of making all that money back in the form of doubled fuel economy in a little over a month, suddenly it's not looking too terrible.

Still, I'm a cheap-ass, so, after investigating the after-market world it is possible to get a sensor for anywhere between $115-$174. Sweet!

The only catch is I have to find out the month and year my car was made. That's easy enough. Then I have to take a trip under the car to find out the style of connector and the number of wire the current sensor uses because that's how the after-market website differentiates between the various O2 sensors listed for the Impreza. Fine. For potentially saving $150+tax I'll get my pants dirty. :)

Once the sensor is changed, the next item for attention is my rapidly deteriorating exhaust. Both hangers are broken. The entire thing is now being suspended by a bungee cord, and I've already burned through one of them, literally. Thanks to the race suspension on the car, every single bump and dip on the road translates to squeaks and clunks as the muffler and pipes smash off the body. Awesome.

I'll go after-market on the new exhaust, but it will have to be something a little more refined than what's on there now. I love the tone of exhaust, but it's way too loud. The novelty has worn off, so I'm on the look out -- er, listen out I guess -- for something that'll make the same noise, just, turned down.

I went through this same process with the Rx-7. It had two straight-thru pipes in place of the 4 mufflers Mazda put on it from the factory. Now that was loud. It didn't just sometimes set off car alarms in parking garages like the Impreza does now, it always set off car alarms. I tolerated it for a few months before getting a quieter system put on.

With my front lip destroyed, and the fart-can's days numbered, that leaves the race suspension as the last remaining bit of bolt-on go-fast kit that's still working. Oh, wait, it's not. ;) The passenger-side strut knocks quite a bit, and the strut mounts themselves sound like they're almost done. The factory suspension is in the basement. Maybe it's time to return to stock.

But I still love my car. I do! Vroom!! ^^

I'm on a bit of a car kick for posts. I do have a life outside the car -- and I'll get to that soon enough -- but I've been using the car as an exercise in relearning how to manage myself so I don't become overwhelmed and lost in details, a bi-product of something that's been slowly going wrong with me for the past couple of years.

I don't say this with any degree of presumption or entitlement, but loss has never been easy for me. I know there are any number of people who have dealt with loss on a monumentally grander scale than me, so I know I speak only from my experience, and my experience has been: If it matters to me, it will be taken from me, and there's nothing I can do about it.

Depressing.

And that's just what happened. Starting around this time two years ago, I started slipping into a dark, sad place because I just couldn't deal with anymore loss. It was a mix of things. Some obvious, like the death of my grandmother, or others, more subtle, like the natural progression of friends and co-workers moving on to other things in other places.

The more I felt like things were slipping away from me, the more they slipped. I kept trying to break out of my destructive, self-destroying thoughts, but they would feed back into themselves, grow, flourish. I beat myself down mentally, believing what made sense to me, and that was it wasn't worth me being happy. There would always be something to come along and smash my fragile state of mind. Always feeling there was someone out there to make me feel like I'm not good enough, always feeling there was something telling me how I should be acting verses how I wanted to act, always feeling there was someone out there lying to me, to hurt me, to get something from me. And all the while I grew more isolated, insecure, paranoid -- so incredibly weak. So afraid of getting hurt yet feeling absolutely powerless to stop it.

The result was missteps and mistakes. Panic-driven attempts to fix a problem on the inside by changing things on the outside, trying to make myself in to what I guessed other people wanted, anything to get the building pressure I felt from everything off my shoulders.

I did things I'm not proud of. I allowed things to happen when I didn't want them to. Trust extended to the wrong people at the expense of the right people. I don't like to say I regret elements of my past. They happened the way they did and nothing can change that. But I do look back upon them as mistakes, times when I didn't believe enough in myself to trust I was worth it, when I placed importance on the wrong things.

So that was then.

I write all of the above not to offer an excuse but an explanation. That's what's been up with me. And now I want to change because I'm so tired of who I've been for too long. I'm so tired of being someone I know I'm not.

A few weeks ago I saw the dead-end fast approaching and enough was enough. Change was no longer an option, it was a necessity. And I'm nervous, to the point of feeling like I second-guess myself even more than before because I don't want to fall into old habits of thinking or acting. I've been what feels like successful so far, rough spots here and there, but that's to be expected. I'm not sure if I'll ever know if things are 'back to normal' because I don't know what normal is anymore. Different is the new normal, that's all I know.

It's a long post. It's kinda vague at the same time. The details are important maybe in a historical sense, but they are something I'd like to leave in the past. Some will be easier than others. That's my challenge. That's always been my challenge.

There's a fragile side to me right now, the part that's rebuilding for lack of a better word. It's in conflict with the part of myself saying it's stupid to even bother typing it all out, that it'll get skimmed over, dismissed as introspective noise, or that it really has no business being said at all. And that all might be true. Or it might not. What I do know is I started typing this as a post about an oxygen sensor for my car, but all this came out instead. So maybe it's not about something I figured people might want to read, more something I needed to write.

But I feel good. I feel...lighter. Not only is it okay to believe in myself, to trust myself, it's requirement. It's something I must do. I haven't for so long.

Spent a few hours yesterday cleaning all the winter crap out of my car. The car was spotless on the inside when I picked it up in October, winter came soon after, so this was the first time I'd been able to detail the interior myself. I still maintain clean cars drive better and go faster :)

And as with all the places I spend time in, there are stuffed animals in my car:

( Pics are under the cut...along with back-stories! Yay! )

Ok!

My lil'Scooby has fresh oil and coolant, a clean air and oil filter, and shinny new rad cap. All the other under-hood fluids have been topped up, all the tires are properly inflated, all the hinges are lubricated, and none of my CV boots, axles, wheel bearings, or any other greased component are showing any signs of leaking. Good! :)

Next will be cleaning up the interior from the winter -- I don't clean the interior ever during the winter because there's no point -- and my persistent Check Engine light. Anyone out there with an OBD-II reader?

Car, remember our deal. No breakie yet!

Dear Impreza,

If you continue to operate without serious problems until approximately mid-May, I promise to fix your Check Engine light, and to have your clutch linkage and front suspension looked at.

As a show of good faith I will bring you in for an oil and filter change this week, and completely vacuum and clean your interior this weekend.

Thank you for your continued support of getting my ass to work each day.

-pup

P.S. I know your exhaust is loud and in the process of blowing its glass-pack out while only being supported by a deluxe bungee cord from Canadian Tire. If you could wait until June to have it fall off and/or become insufferably obnoxious it would be appreciated. :)

Figures that on a day like today, beautiful, sunny, warm .. basically, spring! .. it figures tomorrow they are calling for mixed snow and rain, with possible accumulations of 5-10cm. It's winter's last little 'fuck you' to us all. Ah well. This happens every year. No surprises :)

Yesterday I finally sat down and figured out my taxes for 2008. Between two companies, self-employment income and rental income, and GST, it wasn't the prettiest return in the world. Having it all done and over with is a big load off my mind. Turns out I saved more than enough from working as a contractor to cover the year. Bonus cash for me. And I never, ever have to do any of this ever again. Sweet deal.

Today I was up just before 9AM, wide awake, so I thought I'd burn off some of the day's energy outside cleaning up the wreckage of winter from the front and back yards. Yard work is fun! All the leftover leaves from the fall got raked up. Anything that looked smashed and dead got cut back. Anything that was still standing and looked like it hadn't dried out just got tidied up. At the end of the day, everything is looking just that little bit more kept, and the gardens are full of little green leaves and buds poking up out of the dirt. Life! We'll see if it's still around after my 'gardening' adventure .. or the snow coming this week.

After it all came the best part -- sitting on the deck in the sun with a beer and some music in the background. Again, sweet deal.

Happy spring! And ignore the snow..

I was on Lawrence Ave just west of Victoria Park where the major 3-lane road starts to head down into the Don Valley east of my place. I've got all my windows down because it's another clear and crisp evening.

Stopped in the centre lane at the lights is me. To the left of me, a recent BMW M3 (you know, the one with the fuck-off V8 in it?) -- to the right, an Infiniti G35 coupe. And then we have my car, the Impreza RS with the growly muffler that sets off car alarms in some parking garages.

The light goes green and we all set off. The V8 in the M3 put out a suggestive and discrete rumble that was instantly drowned out by the G35's unmistakable V6. I still can't believe that noise comes from an engine. I loved how it mixed and reverberated around with the sounds from the M3 and my car as the three of us continued down the road. I love the sound of cars, all the different sounds they can make, being able to pick out a model and an engine just by the sound of it driving by. Yesterday was a little slice of sensory bliss.

Lj says it's been nineteen weeks since I last posted.

It's a strange measure of time. Not quite half a year, but still longer than a few months. It all feels meaningless to me -- events from the end of 2008 feel like they happened ages ago, yet I have memories fresh in my mind that are years old.

Today is March 17th, St. Patrick's Day. Last year, I came home from work like any other day. It was overcast, nothing too warm or too cold. I can see myself walking past the packed Irish pub at Church and Richmond, wondering if this one day of business makes up for all the other days when the place is mostly empty.

In my house I am alone, a little bored and restless. I make brownies and chat online. Later that night I download remixes of Coldplay's Talk while Top Gear re-runs on TV.

During the middle of the night I'm aware something is wrong, something is terrifying. I can't figure out if I'm awake or still sleeping. I feel there is another presence in the room with me, somewhere. My heart is racing with fear as I curl up around Sketch under my blankets and wait for myself to either wake up or fall asleep -- all the while promising myself it's all in my head.

In the morning I wake to the sound of the front door unlocking. jafra is home after a night at work.

For the the longest time I'd marvel at all that would changed between this time and that time, how my once familiar life would stare back at me like a stranger. Now -- now I feel as if for the first time in a long time, I can see all that's stayed the same even amongst all that's changed, and it's good, it's just there. I'm not needing to see what's different but also not missing what used to to be the same.

Today was a day just like the ones before. I wondered if it was worth the wait to get into the crowded bards as I walked to my car. It was overcast as I drove home, had the windows down, nothing too warm or too cold. I watched TV as I ate. Listened to music while I dug through my paperwork.

Tonight I'll curl up with Bolt under the covers. Tomorrow I'll wake to the sound of the front door unlocking. And maybe between now and then I'll forget I'm still sleeping. Or wonder if I'm still awake.

I've been avoiding posting this. The more people who know the more real it becomes in my head. When it was just jafra and I who knew what was going on it was like we could undo things ourselves and no one would be the wiser.

As some may already know, Jaf and I are no longer together. Getting to this point hasn't been easy, and crossing it has been the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life.

I don't know what to do or to say. My insides collapse when I think about it. I know I'll adjust in time. But it hurts right now.

Jaf was someone to talk to at 4 in the morning when I was all messed up in school, someone who made me feel safe -- someone who saved my life one night.

He'll always be someone I care about and someone I love. I miss him. I miss the idea of us.