I arrived at my new home last week with only a suitcase of clothes and a laptop bag stuffed with all the electronics gear it could hold: two laptops and an iPad, complete with cables and accessories. It's a new province, in a new house, with a new girl. She's not new, but she is new to living with me.

The first week has been subtly unsettling. Not quite jarring like working out of a Starbucks in Morocco. The new workplace is ostensibly comfortable: a specific room for an office, a nice big chair, a desk, and a river of wifi. What else could I want?

It's not that everything is in the wrong place. All the places I know — right or wrong — are back in the old city. Here I have no places at all. I don't know where to put my coffee. Scratch that, I don't even know where the coffee maker is. I can't decide if my pad goes on the left or the right of the laptop. There's no pen holder on the desk to be out of place. It's not that everything is wrong, it's that the things that are generally wrong aren't even here to be wrong.

I have to find totally new things to be wrong.

My old habits aren't just slightly off, they're nonexistent. The morning walk to the subway is gone. The grandé americano isn't worth driving for. The office building is in the wrong province. There are no glumly stoic subway faces between me and my first scan of my inbox. Oh, the inbox! It used to have almost seven thousand emails waiting at work. I've pruned it to less than ten.

There are no guitars to pick up in a spare moment. There are no drums. A gigantic back catalog of TV seasons are on a transport trailer somewhere in Eastern Canada. Every childhood memento, every carefully curated reminiscence is bouncing in the back of a truck, with a tiny orange tag the size of a fingernail to identify it from all the other boxes.

So I have to find new things to be habitual about here. I have been walking, but it's in circles, always coming back around to the house. In the city I could kid myself that every outing wasn't a big circle because of the stop in the middle: to shop, to eat, to drink, something. There's a destination, and it's not where you started. In the new place I need to drive to get anywhere fun. The drive is only 5-10 minutes, but it means getting in the car. So I walk in big circles.

I tell myself I'll get out more when the weather's better, but who am I kidding? This latitude is a playground for people who like sweaters, and the longitude is engineered for fog and drizzle. Whatever habits I make, they must involve sweaters and waterproof shoes.

So it's taking me a little while to get started. It would be nice if the new habits are interesting. Good habits. Engineered habits. Ones that are as comforting and homey as the ones I left behind in that old city.