Tag: Anna-Maria Lemaistre

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Drayton Valley

DroolAfter the show in Calgary on Tuesday I headed up to Drayton Valley for a quick visit with the cutest nephew in the whole world, Ryker. I’ve also said hello to my sister Jackie and her husband Glen, but oh man that baby is so cute—it’s all I can do to prevent myself from eating him up.

The next morning when he woke up, he even wanted to be held by me instead of his mom which apparently is EXTREMELY rare (it just goes to show how smart the kid is).

I also saw Anna’s new play in Edmonton yesterday; I’m sorry to say it was kind of brutal (I guess that’s community theatre for you), but I have no regrets.

I’ll be heading back to Lethbridge later today.

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Her Move

This past weekend Anna-Maria moved from Vancouver to Edmonton. Break-ups are hard but I think it been particularly trying because of the fact that all this time after the break-up my plan was to move to Vancouver and I guess potentially to wait and see what would happen with our relationship. Maybe that’s why she moved? I don’t know. She said that finding an acting job in Vancouver was too hard. Frankly she needs to try harder.

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Sleepless in Lethbridge

I’m fighting it.

Throughout my life I’ve had a tendency to fall deeply in love. In the first grade I fell head over heels for a classmate named Melanie Meyers. She moved away and I never saw her again until the summer of 1988 (3 years later). It took me until half way through that school year to finally get over her. At that age 3 years was over a third of my life — crazy eh? I used to pray to God every night that Melanie would love me. Of course I don’t really pray anymore, but things haven’t changed much as I aged.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to feel sorry for myself and I don’t feel like the Lone Ranger here. I know that most people go through the same pains of a breakup that I’m going through, but after all of the heartbreaks I’ve been through, it just never seems to get any easier. This time I am trying something new. I’m trying very hard to “make the break-up work”. I know she wants to live her own life and where I normally would spend all my energy at forcing something that was not meant to work, this time I’m focusing all my attention at NOT trying to win her back. I find that for me, it’s an extremely hard thing to do.

I want to give her things. I want to call her every day. I want to fly to Vancouver and see her. I’m trying hard not to do these things.

I don’t want to date anyone for a while — or at least keep my dates to 1 or 2 per person and then move on; nothing serious for a bit.

After I broke up with my previous girlfriend, I started to date Anna-Maria almost immediately afterwards. This helped me get through the break-up but it built a weak foundation for our new relationship. I was too depressed to properly “woo” Anna-Maria and hence the great memories of our courtship are largely composed of my wallowing for the last girl. I feel horrible for doing that to Anna-Maria and I don’t want to do that to whomever I date next. I have to hand it to Anna for keeping me around through those early days.

I need to get my life in order. I need to work on becoming a better person. To that end I’m going to try and disconnect for a few days (baby steps here). I believe I spend way too much time on the computer and I blame that part of myself for neglecting Anna-Maria. So I’m just going to unplug it for 48 hours. It might not seem like much, but believe me it’ll be a good goal for me.

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48 Days Later

I’m home, but my bags aren’t. I guess even though they said they would be shipped all the way to Calgary I was still supposed to pick them up in Vancouver. I even specifically asked in Vancouver if my bags were taken care of; I was assured that they were.

I visited Anna-Maria while I was in Vancouver. I know I’ve had some hard feelings about the breakup and I may have implied in previous posts that her decision was impulsive but I still have to respect her decision and I know she’s a wonderful girl who will go far and be great at whatever she decides to do. All you single guys out there looking for a lovely and talented girl, if I were you I’d totally try for Anna. She’s totally marriageable material, if one could only convince her to settle down.

I loved spending the few hours with her and I loved hearing what she’s up to. I’d brag a little bit about her but she’s not crazy about me sharing too many details about her life so suffice it to say that she’s got a really cool acting job coming up in the next couple months. I’m so glad that our friendship is still quite stable despite everything.

The flight home was pretty uneventful. Air Canada was running late as per usual and of course, as I mentioned, my bags did not show up in Calgary. They tell me that they will send them to my house in Lethbridge tomorrow. In the meantime – I guess I have no clean clothes.

Wow, thinking back over the trip just blows my mind. I can’t believe it went so fast. The house has gotten a little dusty and the lawn looks like a Malaysian jungle, but other than that it’s so nice to be home.

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Malaysia – Day 16

Today I had a good long chat with Anna-Maria. That was nice, but it put me a little behind schedule. (My own fault).

On the way to work I was approached by a woman who wanted to know where I was from. This was the second time in two days that someone approached me and I didn’t have a good feeling about. Not that I was afraid of her, but just that I felt she wanted something from me. Not to mention the fact that I was going to be late for work. She couldn’t seem to read that I was in a hurry and close by her was a man who also tried to stop me to ask for the time. They seemed to be working together. I didn’t have time for them whether or not they were just being friendly. I gave him the time and kept walking. I am suspicious that the guy was the same guy I ran into yesterday but I never got a good enough look at him. All I can say is that it was weird, and not weird like hey some stranger on the bus wants to chat you up because you look like a foreigner, but weird like, spidey senses on alert — these people are up to no good.

Anyway weird people on the street aside, I had a great evening. At the end of the day Jon took me to Channel V, Malaysia’s version of Much Music or MTV, to get the specifications for a new project GXM Studio is doing for them. I got to meet Jeff Selamutu, director of programming and production at Channel V, and take notes at the meeting.

Later we went for dinner and had a great time talking about everything from how Jeff got into the business to how new artists enter the music industry, to what direction music television is going. I liked Jeff because he’s a really fun guy that likes to call it like he sees it. He reminded me a lot of the directors and producers that I met recently in Vancouver. They have a kind of fun yet ambitious personality that I find magnetic. He told me to keep in contact and that if I have time during the week he’ll show me around the studio.

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Malaysia – Day 9

I checked out the cost to go to Iran from here, but when I checked the dates I realized that I made a gross miscalculation with regard to how long it is until I leave Malaysia. It looks like I won’t have time to do any extra travelling after all unless I finish up the work-study early or have my flight plans changed. I’ll have to look into these respective possibilities.

I shaved off my beard today. I was holding onto the hope that Anna-Maria might come and visit me here and well… though she’s a big fan of my facial hair, she’s not going to see me here.

On my commute to work I’ve been listening to the audio version of the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. It’s by Malcolm Gladwell, and it’s about how we make decisions — both good and bad — and why some people so much better at making decisions than others. My friend Jason recommended it to me along with another of his books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, which is about change and more specifically it shares a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does.

So far Blink has been an eye opening experience; when I’m done I will certainly pick up The Tipping Point. In almost every chapter—if not every chapter—I find myself at the edge of my seat hanging on every word. I particularly liked the insight on improvisational acting (he believes in Keith Johnstone’s techniques), the story behind a massive war games held by the United States in 2002 (which in reality was a failure), and the decision for the Coco-cola Bottling Company to switch to New Coke in the 80’s (read about New Coke at Snopes). I’m only on Chapter 6 of Blink but I love everything about this book.

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My iPod Photo

For Christmas this year, Anna-Maria bought me an iPod! It’s a 40 gig iPod Photo! Which is awesome for a number of reasons but mostly because it shows that she must really think I’m pretty great to be worthy of such a cool present.

So I’ve been learning all about iPods and here are a few of the things that I’ve learned:

iPod’s notes section is considerably lacking as it only allows short notes. There is a text to iPod note converter that takes long text and breaks them into smaller ones, meanwhile linking them altogether via hyperlinks.

Part of learning about iPod is also learning about iTunes. The auto-update feature asked if I wanted to upgrade to the newest version of iTunes. Luckily I did some research before I clicked. What I found out is that iTunes 4.7.1 scans the user’s music collection and any unlocked music it identifies as being purchased from iTunes, it puts a new fairplay DRM lock back on those tracks. I haven’t purchased any music from Apple (so far I’ve just been ripping my CD collection) but I’m planning on it and when I do, I don’t want to be restricted as to what I can do with music that I’ve legally purchased. I’m thinking twice about the new version — and maybe I’ll skip buying music online at all… for now.

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Anna’s Moving

On Wednesday morning Anna-Maria finished packing up her stuff and moved to Vancouver.

Seems pretty sudden? It was. It just started to really hit me today how serious this situation is. While it was happening I think I was suffering from a major case of denial. It’s going to be okay though, we’ll see each other soon enough.

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Family Photos

Last weekend Anna-Maria and I went to Medicine Hat to have our pictures taken with my family. After we spent some time at Gainsboro we decided to take some of our own shots at Strathcona park. Here is a one that my brother Gary got of Anna and me. (We all wore matching outfits).

Jeff Milner and Anna-Maria

More pictures at The Milner Blog.

Update: I guess he took the photos down because now that he isn’t in Canada he’s not getting internet / free hosting at Telus. Try browsing some Flickr photos of the same day, instead.

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Living La Vida Loca

Anna-Maria went to Banff again this weekend. I went to Devin Wallace’s bachelor party and played 16 player network Halo until 3 in the morning. Since none of them drink they weren’t getting any worse as the night progressed, but I can’t complain because I did pretty good anyway.

Yesterday I went kayaking down the Milk River. I also discovered that I can drive my Jeep for about at least 100km on the highway after the fuel light is on. I thought for sure I would run out of gas; I didn’t though.

So this brings me to Sunday. So far today I’ve watched a couple episodes of the Sopranos (season five is very good by the way) and I also did a couple of photoshop tutorials. Now I’m thinking about mowing the lawn. Yes, when Anna goes away, I live the crazy life.