loglog

The weather is still good (two weeks of sunny weather and it seems to stay nice the coming week as well! Maybe this summer won't be that bad after all...) so I also redid the front balcony on the second floor. I hung the balustrade in mid-air, because there was no room for it in the garden (the porch balustrade was still there) and now the whole thing looks like a deconstructionism art installation. Passing contractors stop their trucks to gaze up.

After 5 balconies I'm getting quite good at this, but if a client would ask me to do it for her I'm not sure I would. It is dirty and stressful work and after applying the polyester I've so many little fibreglass pieces in my skin that it itches for a couple of days.

We had a guest over for supper and I decided to make something I read about the day before on some weblog.

Smoked fish made on a gas grill.

Put a board of cedar that has been soaked in water on your really hot grill. Let it burn a while until it has developed a lot of smoke and then put some salmon (or other fish) on the board. Let cook for 10 minutes with the lid closed and you have a delicious smoked salmon.

At least, that is the plan. It's always a gamble to use recipes you find on the Internet. And certainly to try them out on a guest.

But it turned out pretty good; certainly something I'll do again. The guest liked it too.

[I won't mention the big glass bowl of grilled vegetables that I dropped. I had to throw it all out because there might have been shards of glass in it. I still had some veggies left, but they were still raw so we ate them quite some time after we had finished the fish.]

Our house currently resembles the ruins of an ancient Greek temple. I removed the columns that support the front balcony and now they are standing at odd angles in the garden, supported by buckets. Several people already stopped their car to see what had happened. Disaster tourism we call that in Dutch (but we weren't featured in the "Journal de Montréal"... yet.)

I removed the balustrade around the porch so I can demolish it. The porch is all rotten and before the main beams have to be totally replaced I had to go in and do something about it. I will replace the porch with polyester and fibreglass so it can survive a few decades without maintenance, just as I did in the back. My plan was to do this in the early summer but the weather never agreed with me. But now it seems to stay sunny for a few days so I have to use this opportunity. Even though I don't feel like it.

We got up very early today to start Alison's driving education. Early in the morning the parking lots of the malls are still deserted and provide safe grounds for teaching inexperienced drivers the basic working of a manual car.

We practise using the clutch, braking and changing gears. And, by necessity, making turns, because the parking lot is not that big. Alison really liked that particular part of the curriculum, especially when she drove a bit too fast and the tires started to squeal.

It wasn't as stressful to be taught by me as she thought beforehand, so that was good. I wasn't totally at ease but nevertheless managed to keep my underpants clean.

Today was my third day that I helped building a house. I volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, an international charity that builds houses and then sells them to poor people who normally can't afford to buy a house. They get a very nice interest free mortgage, so instead of paying rent they slowly pay of their house, and this hopefully reverses the downward spiral of accumulating more and more debt.

The Montréal chapter of Habitat for Humanity just started so there is only one building location. Last year they've built one house and now another one is built next to it. It's a small contribution but you have to start somewhere.

This weekend I assist making a form to pour concrete in, that will become the stairs into the basement. With all the rain of the past weeks that proved a challenge since the soil is saturated with water and not very stable. The house is built on one of the lower parts of the island of Montreal so there is no rock underneath the house but clay. Backbreaking hard digging, but fun to do things I've never done before. It might come in handy one day.

Working with volunteers is quite a challenge. Especially when they sometimes have no experience with construction or for that matter with physical labour in general. The general contractor who oversees everything is glad when there aren't that many volunteers so he can make sure that there aren't too many errors made, that have to be corrected later. Today there are too many people and a lot of "watching other people work" is taking place. Since I'm one of the people that work I don't mind too much, but I can understand that spending your weekend not doing very much can be quite frustrating. I think Habitat needs to organize things a bit better, otherwise a lot of volunteers will not come back.

Not everything is done by volunteers: a lot of the harder things are done by paid professionals. Like the plumbing, framing, foundation, electricity, the roof and the windows and doors. That way the structural integrity of the house is secured.

Warning: if you go on the road during the next year please be aware that you might share the road with Alison.

She is going to try to get a driver's license, and has just passed her theoretical test and now she is the proud owner of a learner's permit.

(For readers outside Québec/Canada: in order to get your driver's license you first have to drive with a learner's permit. That allows you to drive a car but under certain conditions: amongst others you're not allowed to drive during the night and you always have to be accompanied by an experienced driver. This period lasts at least a year after which you can do a Practical Driving Test to get your 'real' driver's license. In European countries you have to do all your driving lessons in an adapted car with a qualified driving instructor and can only drive your own car (with or without passengers) after you passed a very difficult practical driving test. I had to take it three times before I passed after taking more than 50 hour-long lessons costing 30 dollars each. Ouch!)

So now I have to teach her to drive. My plan is to start with a few test runs on a big empty parking lot early in the morning where I can teach her to the basics of steering, braking and shifting. After she has mastered that I'd suggest her to take a couple of lessons with a real instructor, in a car that is equipped with double brake- and gas pedals. When she is more or less comfortable in normal traffic we can continue her driver's education in our car.
I'm not looking forward to that day since I'm sure I will be terrified. But I'll try to be brave and behave like a man. And not shout at her. And be relaxed. And breathe through my stomach. And give her concise instructions. And be patient. And.. watch out!

Anybody has other suggestions to make this as painless as possible? And are there readers that drive manual cars and want to take Alison for a ride in our car after said lessons? I'm sure she will be much more comfortable with someone other than me sitting next to her. And I will probably too.

Some cats bring their owners presents. Dead birds, mice and other small animals are favourites.

Poupoune is not a cat, but nevertheless she brought me a present. She had found it in our pantry and left it in front of the door of our bedroom in which I was still sleeping.

Now I was wondering if she was commenting on my eating habits? And if so, was it a reproach ("You shouldn't eat this crap") or a recommendation ("Look boss, you should be having this for lunch.")

I chose the latter and had it for lunch! And so should you when your pet brings you a present.

Being downtown and being an Apple "fanboi" I decided to attend the grand opening of the first Canadian Apple Flagship Store. Well, it involved just standing in line and chatting with people for an hour, so survival didn't prove that hard.

The store looks clean, empty-ish and boring, just like the other Apple stores i visited. There was an abundance of staff present who cheered and hi-fived us when we entered the store. Kind of cheesy and very loud.

It's nice I don't have to go to Laval anymore if I want something. But I have all the Apple gear I want (read: can afford) so I won't be visiting that often. But I scored a nice T-shirt and that was well worth the wait. I actually like it and I'm not going to sell it on eBay.

For a couple of weeks now I'm busy cleaning the house. I started with the basement, which had accumulated a lot of stuff since Alison moved here and even more when I moved in with her. But then I moved up to my office that basically hadn't been cleaned up in five years. Yes, I know, I'm a slob.

Anyway I threw away many things and brought a couple of car loads of basement crap to the EcoCentre and stuff that was still useful to Le Chaînon.

I also sold three old computers and cables, drives, etc. on Craigslist and Kijiji for a couple of dollars. A Mac I bought 6 years ago for $6000 made me a whopping $40. I hope the new owner will get some use out of it.

It was easy though to part from it since I never used it anymore. I brought it over from the Netherlands to work on a project that required Mac OS 9, but that project is now finished so the computer could go.

But now I'm nearing the finish line and the decisions are getting tougher. What to do with a box full of love letters of past girlfriends? This dates from way back when, when people wrote postcards and real letters instead of e-mail. I only have a couple of postcards from Alison, but I received a ton of e-mails from her. Don't worry, I'll keep those, actually I keep all my e-mail.

But I digress. What to do? On one hand it is extremely unlikely I will read them all again, but on the other hand doing so will be a blast from the past, and will certainly bring back—sweet and bittersweet—memories just like photos from that era. Why can I keep the photos and not the letters? What would you do?

I also' found' a box of letters from my father. I glanced through them and found a poem in French he wrote for me. Reading it made me almost cry. It was written when both he and I were in bad break-ups. Here it is, verbatim.

Tu es mon fils aîmé,
du très bon marque Mark.
Moi : seulement ton père,
plutôt ton frère aîné,
qui t'ai fait tant d'misères.
Mais comme au ciel un arc
se lève (fin d'orage)
je te donne en gage
mes intentions ("sous sage")
de rendre heureuse ta mère,
Marguerite ma chère femme,
de nous deux belle flamme.
Tu m'aideras? "Si, si !"
Merci ! Ton faible père,
qui pour finir la chasse
t'embrasse.

Karel.

Rotterdam, ce 25 juillet 1988

That box stays.

Poupoune chasing the ball.

With my new camera I can actually take action shots, with the old one I was always at least 3 seconds too late.

[Long time no post, but I'll try to fill in some gaps over the coming days]