Back from Montreal!

So I'm back~

And we've got a lease for an apartment in Montreal. We put in the deposit, and are pretty much guaranteed to get it (apparently the landlady really likes us). We need to send over a few bits of information though, because we forgot to bring some documents. Wah.

Kalli was saying she helped us out by thinking about us getting a nice apartment the whole time. XD Woooo, voodoo powerz.

But it's a nice place. It's within walking distance of my college, a grocery store, pharmacy, hell... plenty of malls and restaurants too. It has a laundry room (mine right now does not. :O) It's on a low floor, which I really wanted -- I preferred having no one living below me so I could DDR to my heart's content. XD It's probably doubly as big as our current apartment.

Possible negatives are: may not be completely done renovating when we move in. Haven't actually seen if the showers don't friggin' go cold in like, 5-10 minutes or something (this also happens in current apartment, depriving me of long hot showers! RAWR!) Haven't actually seen the laundry room either, it was needing repairs at the time.

Annnnd I have no idea where I might be able to park my car. In fact I may have to sell it, which makes me sad. :/ But it's also caused me more headache than convenience because I don't drive it often, and I'll possibly drive even LESS while in Montreal.

I don't really want to sell it. So I hope there'll be a place I can park it. ;___;

Anyway, that's the big news. We're moving to Montreal on August 1st! I could bitch about my money worries (our rent is going to be $400 more, I'm friggin' NERVOUS about being able to pay it!) but instead I will talk about the other awesomesauce things we did in Montreal.

Food

Nomnom~ There are great restaurants in Montreal. In fact, since I've moved up to Quebec I've been really treated by amazing restaurants. Quebec City has MORE than its fair share. Montreal has the same!!

We ate at a couple of places. I don't even remember their names, which is sad, but... like. They were good. :D And I'd recognize 'em if I saw them again.

One was an Indian restaurant. Man, I'm drooling just remembering the chicken tikka masala I ate. SO GOOD. *drool* And we had naan bread and this house dish of coconut curry shrimp, and and... oh, this dessert I can't even remember the name of. Jon's looked like eggs over easy but tasted kinda pungent/sweet. o.o Mine looked like a pair of brown balls. XD But they tasted good! had pistachio stuff in them. It was great tasting new kinds of food, and I SO want to go back there.

The other was a Japanese restaurant (Miso, I think it's called). We went all out and ordered a huge sushi combination, and man, it was really, really goooood. The sushi chefs were pretty hardcore with the wasabi in spots, but mmmmm. SUSHI! I love my raw fish. We also had some great miso soup (I'm always amused at how Japanese restaurants in Quebec often have their miso soup served with spoons, instead of drinking out of the bowl like most restaurants of the sort I know). And oh, they had a pretty good tempura ice cream, not the best I've had, but good!

The other meals, we just went and ate at less expensive places. Had sammiches or Chinese food or Mexican and stuff. Actually, the hotel we stayed at actually has a *kitchen* in it. XD Jon got some um... shoot. What were those sticks. Yakitori? Anyway, he put them in the oven and we ate them while watching TV. In our hotel room. Man, that's just like us to be lazy in a hotel room in ways we can be lazy at home. XD (Though I lie. We don't have cable at home!)

TV

Speaking of TV, it's totally one of our indulgences while we stay at a hotel. Seriously, over here where I live there's SHIT for local channels. Either I can't understand them or they're all fuzzy and crap. And we don't have cable, so no TV to watch. ^^; That's fine, since while I'm sitting at home I have way too much to do anyway! Like. All this arrpee. Man. I have to really cut down in 6 months. Not gonna be able to keep up. :/

But anyway. We watched a crapload of the Space channel, which I swear shows EVERY kind of Star Trek regularly right now. Except wait... um. Not DS9 and not the original series. It also shows what has become my "new" (not really newly aired though) TV series: Alias.

WTF, I haven't liked a TV show in AGES. But it's totally a no-brainer for me. Sydney, the main character, is this sekrit agent type person who goes undercover by donning these awesome disguises and acting the part. Like. All sorts of different wigs and costumes. If you consider how my characters tend to be when they're sneaky types, I almost ALWAYS go the way of disguise/acting rather than just plain stealth. So I had this total "o shit, I would TOTALLY play a chara like Sydney" revelation.

Jon likes it too. In fact, he (just a few hours ago) brought back the first season of Alias on DVD for us to watch. Muwahahah.

We also saw some Stargate SG-1, though I didn't really like it quite as much (even with Richard Dean Anderson in it. It just isn't as interesting to me. :O) It's probably because it's too close to modern times, or something. I'm such a sci-fi nut when it comes to TV shows. :P

Of the Star Treks we watched, I'm always amazed at how much Star Trek: The Next Generation totally rocks the socks out of the other ones. It just had such a talented cast, especially Patrick Stewart as Picard (of course!) and Brent Spiner as Data (my second favorite). I mean, sure there's pseudoscience, and shitty romances now and then, and "let's pretend the ship is really rocking! Look at us pretend!" and hundreds of alien species that all amount to humans with funky ridges on their heads, but... those guys (and gals) could really act. The crew just felt so diverse and interesting. And I loved "villains" like Q. Just awesome. Q *rules*.

Voyager, I don't dislike. I love B'Elanna (sp?) and of course Janeway and... hey, can't go wrong with a Vulcan! (Tuvok) Even Seven of Nine with all her T&A ended up a really interesting character. It's just not nearly as good as TNG though. :D

And then there's the runt, Enterprise. Enterprise sticks in my head simply because the gal that played Hoshi (the communication's officer) is a gal I used to go to high school with. o.O Now Hoshi doesn't get tons of screentime, but it's still boggling to see one of my HS classmates on national TV. Just whoa! I always thought she'd go into theater, though. ^^;

Anyway, Enterprise really suffered a lot from poor screenwriting, I think. The actors are not all that bad, but the stories just don't interest much. Again, maybe it's a case of "too close to the present"... so it's harder to suspend disbelief, I guess. I think, though, that in that series my favorite character is T'Pol. WOO female Vulcans. It's a good change of pace after we already have Spock and Tuvok.

Bah, this was a dorky ramble, but the point is... ALIAS. I like it. :D I am a Sydney fangirl, and I hopped on the bandwagon several years too late. XD

Shopping

I didn't do all that much shopping, actually. There's WAY too many malls and stores in downtown Montreal, though. I nearly killed my feet walking through all of them (they're all connected from below ground level, so you can actually get lost wandering underground from mall to mall! Crazy!) but there was so much to see. :O

I bought some clothes on sale, a grey tunic top that I really like but wrinkles easily (wah), and a dark um.. magenta? Whatever that color is, but anyway, it's a knit tank top thingy. I also got these awesome knee high socks that look like blue scales.

But my favorite purchase of all totally has to be Etrian Odyssey 2: Heroes of Lagaard. YAY! I found a copy of it at one of the game stores in the mall(s)! I jumped on buying it right away, and now I am train, train, traaaining my characters. Knowing me, I'll take forever to progress 'cause I'll keep making too many characters (I already have 12. Sigh, and I was TRYING to cut down. ^^ But I wanted to make at least one of each class, and there's 11 classes. The 12th is another Protector 'cause I like Protectors a LOT, and always want them leading my groups.)

I'll write more about Etrian Odyssey 2, later, 'cause I'm totally sleepy, but the game RULES~! Of course it does, it's Etrian Odyssey, tbh.

Money

Hrm... it's starting to hit me that I'm actually going to be MOVING to Montreal, in a month and couple weeks. Wow. I thought it'd never happen. But now we have to make sure to take some time out of every week to start cleaning up and packing up.

I'm still kind of in denial about this whole move thing actually working out. As mentioned above, it's mostly because of money issues. I'm deathly afraid I won't be able to afford living there. :/ I'm very soon going to cut off money from my parents, which means... yeah, full independence! But full independence with loans I've yet to even secure. I haven't even gone to the freaking bank yet. D: And yet we signed the lease. So I'm feeling insecure, really insecure.

Thing is, we do have money saved, for at least 3 months. Jon's going to find work once we move. And it's not like my credit's crappy, or that I have ANY income to speak of, so the chances of me getting a good student loan are high (especially if we end up having my father-in-law cosign, because he's taken out a lot of loans when he was still in the farming business). But right now there's still so much uncertainty that I'm afraid I'll move there and then be fucked up a creek with no money in 3 months. *sigh*

I could get further help with financial aid, too, to pay for my tuition. BUT, I can't really apply for that until I'm accepted to college. AND I haven't actually applied for that either, 'cause I was waiting for my residency and certainty that I'd have a place to stay in Montreal.

So again, my survival depends on things that I can't be sure will work out. It makes me really jittery. I just wish I could at least get the loan sooner than later, so I can have SOME money when I tell my parents "sorry, but I can't accept your help any more"? I wish I was less insecure about it, but I'm just not used to the idea of NOT having money when I need it. It just boggles my mind. I've never once been short on money my entire LIFE, I've just adjusted my lifestyle downward. But what happens if I can't even pay for my website, much less my rent? I think... I dunno. I might as well not live. :P

I guess it's not as bad as I'm thinking. But I'm going to continue to feel scared about it until I've got a loan coming in, I'm accepted at my college, I've got my financial aid and Jon has a job. Yeah. x.x Even better if I also can have my health card and start going to therapy again. I hope that this is the last month I'm going to wait on that, and that I'll find a therapist I can get along with. I hope. :/

Okay... sleepies for now. I might have missed some things to post about, but I'll possibly cover those later, dunno!