There is now so much more light in this apartment. Four intensive bulbs blindingly illuminate the living room in four distinct pools of light. The living room ceiling is neatly and tidily white, freed of its previous blue blotches. In the kitchen, under-the-cabinet lighting clears away the previous shadows. The dark green trim in the bedroom is now white.

Other things have changed too. There are more shelves in one of the kitchen cupboards. The loose step on the front porch isn't anymore. The entryway has been largely repainted. When the paint was still wet, it looked like firey crimson.

I spent most of the weekend hiding in the one room unaffected by all the changes happening around me, landlady-initiated. The painters were lovely, but they were repainting the hallways from lemony-yellow to yellowy-beige, and how could I go anywhere most of the time, when they were working in the ateries connecting the rooms together? I couldn't work in the living room - my one access point to the internet - with the living room ceiling being painted.

On Saturday night, pittenweem took me in from the chaos and comforted me with Toronto-spotting in a fluffy movie (The Prince and Me). Last night with theengineer involves similarly fluffy fare; we're now most of the way through the first series of Marmalade Boy. I ate a Mitzi's and Arabesque, high-quality comfort food both. It was that kind of a weekend.

The worst of the weekend was the ongoing worry that C.'s passport had been well and truly lost in the process of being express-mailed. The package hadn't checked in with the website since Thursday evening, when it was spotted en route to the Toronto depot, having already made it across the ocean. The office wasn't open over the weekend; C. reports that the service now reports that it spent the weekend going through customs. I hope it turns up soon.