Handy Woman To-Be

I arrived on Vancouver Island on Tuesday afternoon and my first order of business was to get myself over to Camosun College. After several confusing emails back and forth and an application sent a month ago without response, I wanted to find out whether I had been admitted to their Trades Exploration Program for women. Josh, who had been acting as my fall-in-Victoria employment agent was unimpressed with my late-summer change of plans. Though he had already lined up a patchwork of farm jobs for me, I instructed him to hold off as I might now be going to school. It felt a bit like I was biting the hand that was feeding me, but hey, I didn't find out about this program until August and I couldn't pass up the opportunity: 11 weeks of training in welding, plumbing, carpentry, electric, automotive, a forklift licence (hello!) and tuition/equipment covered by the BC government. No obvious agricultural application, it's true, but I have yet to visit a farm that doesn't have some sort of homemade building structure. Plus, what city girl doesn't want to have the skills to unplug a distressed friend's toilet?

Wednesday afternoon Josh and I set off for Camosun by bicycle. This was my first chance to practise my three-day-a-week ride to school should I get in to the program. If Josh was still frustrated with the ambiguity my school application had thrown into my fall schedule, then he is a Saint for doing that ride with me. Let's just say that my bike legs were a little out of shape and Vancouver Island has hills that make Ontario look like the prairies. This amounted to a slow, sweaty, grumpy me and a trip that took one hour instead of 30 minutes - one way.

There are two pieces of good news to end this story.
1. I got in to the program! It starts the first week of October which gives me one month to comply with Josh's original employment schedule for me. How's that for compromise?
2. On the ride home, we saw a box of free stuff at the end of a driveway. Too afraid that if I stopped moving my legs they would never start again and I'd be stranded 15km from home, I opted to pass up the potential goodies and push on. Josh on the other hand, who was switching between coasting and riding on his easiest gear so as to stay at my slow pace, stopped. "I'll catch up to you". What he found in that box was a confirmation that I have made the right decision: