Employment.

Good news! After much agonizing, telephoning, visiting and, worst of all, patient waiting, I finally have a job. I start tomorrow at the Eilean Dubh, a small restaurant right up the hill in the village. Fun fact: apparently Eilean Dubh means "Black Isle" in Gaelic, and when you pronounce it, the 'b' is mostly silent. Anne, the restaurant owner, is very nice and said that her restaurant focuses on treating customers like old friends. All of the food is freshly made and all the supplies come straight from local distributors, which is really neat. I will be working in the kitchen as well as the front room so, in theory, I'll understand how the whole restaurant works by the end of July.

On another note, we went to dinner tonight at Michael and Maureen's and Michael said something that really started me thinking. He was talking about his mother, my great-aunt Betty, who is a very talented author. Michael said that his mother didn't write books to satisfy a demand from others. Instead, she wrote to learn for herself. By researching, writing, and rewriting, she's able to really learn about things that she's interested in and also is able to develop opinions and really work things through for herself. Then Michael asked, rhetorically, what each of us would write about, if we were to do something like this. So I thought. And you know what? I really don't know. But I will figure it out.

And now for something completely different. Whenever I learn a new word, I always want to work it in with whatever I'm writing. However, I've learned a word that likely will never apply to anything I want to write, so I will put it here:

Exophagy (n) — the practice, amongst cannibals, of not eating one’s relatives or members of one’s tribes.

Cannibals have it right. Survival is important, but family is more important.