Recently, I hear this tale which really makes me hope even more that I don't ever have any trauma inflicted on me in Cold Lake.

One of Sean's work friends was cooking one day and went to grab something out of the fridge, tripped, and stabbed himself in the leg. He lost his shit, and pulled the knife out. Turns out he severed his femoral artery so blood started blasting out all over the place. His wife came running in, and presumably having just completed first aid training from Black Hawk Down, reached into this guy's flesh wound and pinched off the artery.

But wait! It gets crazier!

They call 911. The firemen show up first, bust down the door and do some basic first aid crap - pretty much hanging out waiting for the ambulance, who deign to show up fifteen minutes later.

You probably aren't familiar with Cold Lake, but you can pretty much get from one place to ANY OTHER PLACE in less. The EMTs come in, take one look at the guy, and say "we can't do anything."

Dude is unconscious by this point, but the wife isn't; she's just hanging out pinching arteries.

So the firemen are all "WTF?" and put a tourniquet (First Aid 101) on the guy.
They load the newly tourniquet'd dude onto a stretcher, wheel him out of there, and get to the ambulance.

But uh-oh, the incompetent EMT staff can't even lift him into the ambulance.

The firemen (who by the way aren't the TOWN'S firemen, they're the MILITARY fire department) say "holy shit, fuck y'all", load this guy into the firetruck, and drive him to the hospital themselves.

They get to the hospital, call in the surgeon. He walks into the room and also says, "I can't do anything about this."

So the military airlifts this guy to Edmonton and FOUR HOURS LATER, he gets medical treatment.

Too bad everyone seems to have skipped Tourniquet Day in their St. John's Ambulance course, because no one ever loosened the guy's tourniquet and the nerve damage is irreparable.

He said he doesn't intend on suing unless he loses his job, which is a possibility, because his leg doesn't have any fucking nerves anymore.

Eeeek! Get me out of here!

Despite my initial aversion to being back in La Lac Froid, it's inexplicably grown on me. I think there's a part of me that longs to settle down and live in a house where I can paint the walls any color I like. I want to know the business of everyone I walk past in the street and have coffee while cattily discussing neighbors. Cold Lake is, unfortunately, on the cusp between small town quaint and big city bullshit. There's a disproportionate amount of graffiti and crime, and so many run down buildings and bankrupted businesses. I could go smaller, really, to the ultimate in quaint. I'm happy in my comfortable relationship with a man who has simple tastes and the most endearing kind of small-town mentality- the man considers Red Lobster the height of sophistication and fancy, and I think it's adorable. I have my two dogs and my sister about to give birth to my new niece. I'm pretty content.

Or so I say until I need a new pair of shoes and the nearest Payless is three hours away.

My social skills lacking (paticularly IRL, LOLOL!), I really wish I could think of a way to ask someone to hang out, without it sounding like a weird come-on.

For example, I had a client today. My age, also 'not the norm', funny and seemed really cool. Being that I have all of like, one friend here, I thought "hey, it would be cool to hang out!" Sadly, everything I could think of to say ("want to grab a drink sometime?", "Since neither of us really know anyone, do you want to hang out?") sounded like a pick-up line in my brain and I couldn't figure out any way to ask without a disclaimer like, "not that I'm gay or anything". Maybe this says something about me, I don't know.

I'm not good at...people.

Puppy-training is a go. Thank God, her cognitive abilities seem to lean more toward the border collie side, and not the dalmatian side, because it's going swimmingly. She's already learned to cry to get taken outside, and only had two accidents since she came home yesterday (one of which was entirely our fault for ignoring her clear signs, the other a poop which appeared as if from nowhere). Last night was a nightmare though, with whimpering and digging at the bed, but still I'm pretty happy with how it's going so far. I'm a proud puppy mama.

The job hunt isn't going as well. I'm city folk - I don't need a license, because I could always take the bus except, uh oh, Cold Lake hasn't discovered mass transit yet, save for a brief experiment with a handi-bus (that's a good story - evidently the bus cost $3 and there were no bus stops to speak of. It was like a secret club to know where the bus actually stopped.). So now that I'm back here, I'm fuuuucked unless I find something very close to my house, which is on the air force base so employment options are fairly limited to the Canex, the daycare or the gym. None of these are driving me wild with desire. Sean assures me that I can go ahead and devote to puppy-training for a while, so that's pretty choice.

Minus 35 is not a temperature conducive to fun puppy training. The poor thing can't even go for a walk without her little feet freezing off.

2008.

What a fucking shitshow of a year.

I know most people wait until the New Year's hangover subsides before lamenting the tragedies of the last year and making empty promises for the next, but what can I say? I don't have a lot going on and I'm a real go-getter.

I have been growing more and more depressed. I only get about four hours of sleep a night before I'm wide awake. My appetite is all over the map. I'll just not eat until someone reminds me that I'm hungry. After the complete fucking meltdown of my relationship with Shai, it's given me a chance to breathe and think about things that I found really easy to ignore while I was with him, struggling to make it all go well.

2008 was a big fat crap year. I was engaged and did the most despicable thing I could do by leaving him while he was in Afghanistan. I should be drawn and quartered, but trust me- my own conscience and complete remorse is enough. I don't know how honestly I'm being with myself when I tell myself why I did what I did. A huge part was him being there. I was in the midst of a full mental breakdown, with a psychologist at my house every other day and hallucinations and panic attacks. I couldn't hack it. I thought I could, but I just couldn't. In hindsight, our relationship was otherwise good, or consistently getting better, anyway.

It's not that I want him back, it's just he was the best I've ever had.

Then there was Shai, the biggest regret of my fucking life. Twice. I'm not that stupid and I let myself act like I was. I should have learned my goddamn lesson the first time around, but you just...hope, sometimes.

Fuck. Never again.

My relationship with my family has shifted enormously. I try to ignore it, but Christmas drives home the point of being an orphan-by-parental-choice. I haven't heard from my father and my mother asked if I would be coming over to her house for Christmas. Via text message. The day after her housewarming party which neither my sister nor myself were invited.

I don't want to, it doesn't feel like Christmas.

I have no passion left. I have no motivation. I miss my cat, and I hate that that son of a bitch has him. I hate the decisions I've made. I hate where I've wound up, in this suffocating town that's always cold and everyone is cruel and petty. I miss the invisibility I had in the city. I'm lonely. I'm seriously so fucking lonely, I feel like I could scream. It makes me panic. I feel like I have lost all control over my own life.

I am trying to cling to my last vestiges of hope that next year will be better, because it's the only thing that's keeping me from blowing my brains out right now.