Just before I turned thirty, I moved up north to go back to school. The company I had been working for closed down and I thought I'd take the opportunity to change my vocation. I'd been doing office work for years but felt such a connection to animals that I wanted to get the training and find something in that field instead. Initially my brother and I continued with our entertainment newspaper, still going to some events and working on the entertainment listings. It soon became apparent that my course for Veterinary Assistant was far too demanding to continue doing the newspaper.

This was originally a four year course now crammed into two years. It also entailed doing shifts on kennel duty as well as stable duty. It had been so long since I had done anything like school work that I found myself up most of the night trying to keep up with the homework. I had such a hard time grasping it all. The instructors were not teachers even though they worked in the field and knew their stuff. They just didn't know how to explain it to anyone else. The courses were all over the place. By that I mean, instead of coordinating the topics they were covering in each subject, they were all doing different things. For example, if we were studying bones, you'd think we'd be doing that all at the same time in Anatomy, Biology, Physiology etc. Had it been done that way maybe I might have been able to put the pieces together to make sense out of it. That's just how my brain functions. It has to be logical, it has to be in order, it has to make sense, there has to be a chain of events. Scattered bits and pieces of information just don't sink in. Even after gets A's in some of my courses I did get a few F's and was forced to leave the program and start over next fall. I decided to take all my electives in second semester and passed with flying colours and was prepared to reapply.

That's when I had my first big car accident. Prior to that I'd only had little bumps and dings. I had to go down to Toronto to do a report on a play for my Drama class. Coming back the roads were icy and my big boat of a car ended up wrapped around a telephone pole. Good thing I hit the pole or else I would have gone down a huge embankment. Good thing my car was such a tank or my injuries could have been much worse. I ended up having extensive physiotherapy, chiropractic and various other treatments and assessments for a solid eight months until my insurance cut me off. All that became a full-time job and I was unable to go back to college in the fall.

What does this have to do with music, you ask? I was so upset that some of my tapes and CD's had gone flying out the window as my car was on a slant and I had to climb up to get out of it. A special tow truck had to come out the following day. I retrieved what I could while it was up on the flatbed. Once my car was taken to the wrecking yard, the vultures picked it apart and took the rest of my music, some of which was given to us by artists that we had interviewed for the newspaper. I felt so violated by the fact that they went through my stuff and these irreplaceable pieces of my life, pieces that I had relished and listened to over and over were now gone forever. I didn't even care about the car. They could take whatever parts they wanted from that. I also realized that a lot of it was very dark music as I was in a very dark place in my life at the time. I felt I needed to move on...not just to more positive music but also a more positive life. It took a bit more time but I managed to get up the courage and get out of a very bad situation so I packed up and ran. It took just as long to heal emotionally as it did to get out. Thanks to my Mom and my music I came out of it a much stronger person.